Dicky Barrett (trader) - Negotiator

Negotiator

In September 1839 Barrett sailed from Queen Charlotte Sound to Port Nicholson aboard the Tory with representatives of the New Zealand Company to help negotiate the purchase of land there. The party remained there for about 10 days, ultimately securing the signatures of 16 Maori on a deed (written in English) for the purchase of an estimated 64,000ha in the Wellington area. The Waitangi Tribunal noted in its 2003 report on the Port Nicholson land purchases that Barrett – who it describes as having "marked incompetence as an interpreter" – was unable to translate the deed into Maori and "quite incapable of conveying its meaning ... to the assembled Maori".

Barrett was later described by a contemporary as speaking "whaler Maori, a jargon that bears much the same relation to the real language of the Maori as the pigeon English of the Chinese does to our mother tongue".

In November 1839 Barrett arrived in Taranaki on the Tory to negotiate the purchase of land from his wife's iwi, remaining there while Wakefield continued north to Kaipara. On February 15, 1840 he translated Deeds of Sale and obtained 72 signatures to formalise the purchase of a vast area of Taranaki, extending from Mokau to Cape Egmont and inland to the upper reaches of the Whanganui River. Payment was made with guns, blankets and other chattels.

J. Houston, writing in Maori Life in Old Taranaki (1965), observed: "Many of the true owners were absent, while others had not returned from slavery to the Waikatos in the north. Thus the 72 chiefs of Ngamotu cheerfully sold lands in which they themselves had no interest, as well as lands wherein they held only a part interest along with several others."

The Maori were not aided in their understanding of the deal by Barrett's translation skills. In the Land Commission hearings at Wellington in 1843, when asked to translate a lengthy land sale deed into Maori to demonstrate his abilities, he "turned a 1600-word document, written in English, into 115 meaningless Maori ones".