New Zealand Company - Further Settlements

Further Settlements

The New Zealand Company also established a settlement at Wanganui in 1840 – chiefly as a spillover settlement, the site of the rural land promised to Wellington purchasers – and also became indirectly involved in the settlement of New Plymouth in 1841, through its links with the Plymouth Company, which merged with the New Zealand Company the same year. The company also sent surveyors down the east coast of the South Island to consider further sites, where they made contact at Akaroa with the fledgling French colony established there under the auspices of Jean-François Langlois's Nanto-Bordelaise Company.

In July 1843 the New Zealand Company issued a prospectus for the sale of 120,550 acres (48,000 hectares), divided between town, suburban and rural lots at a new settlement called New Edinburgh. The location of the settlement still remained undetermined. An office was established in Edinburgh to attract Scottish emigrants. A 400,000 acre (160,000 hectare) block was selected around the harbour at Otago in January 1844. The company worked with the Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland on the sale of, and ballot for, land and the first body of settlers sailed for what became the settlement of Dunedin in late November 1847.

A month later Gibbon Wakefield began actively promoting a plan he had proposed in 1843: a Church of England settlement. New Zealand Company directors initially hoped to site the settlement in the Wairarapa region in the lower North Island. When local Maori refused to sell, however, its surveyor inspected Port Cooper (Lyttelton Harbour) on the east coast of the South Island and chose this as the location. Land was bought from 40 members of the Ngai Tahu iwi in June 1848. The colonising efforts were taken up by the Canterbury Association, Gibbon Wakefield's new project, and the New Zealand Company became a silent partner in the settlement process, providing little more than the initial purchase funds. The first of the body of 1512 Canterbury settlers sailed on 8 September 1850 for their new home.

• For more information on New Zealand Company involvement in New Plymouth, see History of New Plymouth
• For more information on New Zealand Company involvement in Christchurch, see Canterbury Association