Cargill: 17 children and a colony

Press, 23 June 1984, Page 20

Cargill: 17 children and a colony

And Captain of Their Souls: Cargill and the Otago Colonists. By Tom Brooking. Otago Heritage Books, 1984. 167 pp. $29.95. (Reviewed by Mervyn Palmer) When Captain William Cargill of the seventy-fourth Highland Regiment became interested in the scheme of a Scottish politician, George Rennie, for the foundation of a colonial settlement somewhere in the South Island of New Zealand, he was already well on in middle life. He had a fund of experience in several widely separated parts of the world. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars soldiering suffered a decline. Cargill resigned his commission and sought to establish his family fortune, first as a wine merchant and later as a banker. His success in establishing a family was more marked than was his achievement in founding its fortune. By 1838, Mrs Cargill had given birth to 17 children, but her husband was dissatisfied and restless. The midnineteenth century ideal of a substantial capital base to uphold the family man of means was as far away as ever.

In presenting us with “an interpretative essay on the life and times of William Cargill” (as his book is sub-titled), Tom Brooking has done a service certainly to Otago’s historical records and probably to the descendants of William Cargill. This is principally achieved through wellplanned research which has laid bare the wide, surprisingly tempestuous and truly relevant domestic background of early Victorian Britain against which a tiny event like the founding of Otago took place. Cargill turns out to be no great historical figure and no dynamic leader. This Victorian gentleman who looks as though he might have played a superb Wagnerian Wotan, caused only the slightest ripples in the colonial parliament which he attended between 1856 and 1858, in spite of the fact that his plans and actions as Superintendent of Otago stirred the village of Dunedin to considerable heights of parochial

agitation. Against the legend which grew later, of the two stalwart founding fathers, Cargill and Burns, leading the faithful and dutiful free Presbyterians to the promised land, Brooking draws a portrait of Cargill which is a good deal more down-to-earth and which is neither so heroic nor so mean as the more extreme image-makers would have had us accept. Captain Cargill through the eyes of this interpreter, turns out to be a man with whom most of us can identify. For him, the ideals of the Otago Settlement burned less vividly than they did for Rev. Thomas Burns. For Cargill, the ideals were tempered by the realities imposed by a family of 12 surviving children and there is little doubt that Cargill felt keenly the motivation of many Victorian men of good family who were forced to struggle hard to preserve their name through the display of substance. Cargill’s personal struggle reflects the travail of the first decade in the Otago Settlement. The ideal of the well-balanced colonial settlement uncontaminated by influences deemed to be undesirable in the minds of the narrower leadership, was frustrated by

the assorted realities of climate, political manoeuvring, and severe economic strains in those early days. We need to remember that when the first discoveries of gold started to alter the directions of the Otago Settlement, Captain Cargill was already dead. The great merit of Tom Brooking’s study is that’ it gives to the place of William Cargill and to the early Otago settlers, a proper sense of proportion in the wider panorama of New Zealand history and against the greater Victorian backdrop. Cargill was human, with all the hopes, drives, weaknesses and frustrations that most of us share. Brooking fastens upon this essential humanity and handles it with insight and sensitivity. The result is a book which will appeal to the general reader at the same time that it remains faithful to the sources from which it has been drawn. The author demonstrates a rare ability to penetrate the feelings of people in history at different stages in their lives so that he is never overanxious to present them as being consistent at 50 years of age with the standards and ideals upheld by them when they were 25 years younger. Writing about the voyages of the “John Wickliffe” and the “Philip Laing,” Brooking comments upon the difficulty we commonly experience when we try to find out how the ordinary man and woman, of little or no literary talent, fared travelling steerage. He reveals the caution he applies to existing records when he observes that James Adam’s account of the voyage arose from recollections made “. . . through the romantic haze of middle-age.” An economical text which is, nevertheless, stylish, is well supported by a wide selection of photographs, useful tables and helpful maps. One particularly appealing aspect of the illustrations is the employment of numerous cartoons from contemporary newspapers, notably those by James Brown which seem to convey across more than a century the essence of a personality and the appropriate witty summarisation of an event.