Barnet Burns - Possible Return Visit To New Zealand

Possible Return Visit To New Zealand

There is circumstantial evidence for Barnet Burns making a return trip to New Zealand between February 1839 and October 1840.

Barnet Burns had expressed a desire to return to New Zealand and had applied to join the expedition of the New Zealand Company on its ship Tory which sailed from London on 4 May 1839. His wife in France, Anne (née Boval) understood that in 1840 Barnet Burns had travelled as an interpreter for an English expedition to New Zealand. Several English newspapers reported on a visit by Barnet Burns in about 1841. and it appears that he worked with the Wesleyan missionaries The census undertaken in Britain in June 1841 lists Barnet Burns' occupation as mariner which suggests that he had recently sailed. Barnet Burns' son, Hori Waiti, claims to remember his father escaping. Given the short period that Burns initially spent in New Zealand, Hori Waiti would only remember his father if Burns had made a return trip.

Finally, Arthur Thomson mentions that One unemployed tattooed Pakeha Maori visited England, and acted the part of a New Zealand savage in several provincial theatres. Here he married an Englishwoman who accompanied him to New Zealand, but she eloped with a Yankee sailor, because the tattooed actor's old Maori wife met him and obtained an influence over him the white woman could not combat. There are several similarities between this Pākehā Māori and Barnet Burns to suggest that they might be the same person.