PETITION of the NEW ZEALAND COMPANY to the HOUSE OF COMMONS. [Presented by Joseph Somes, Esq., M.P., April 16, 1845.]

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 193, 15 November 1845, Page 147

PETITION of the NEW ZEALAND COMPANY to the HOUSE OF COMMONS. [Presented by Joseph Somes, Esq., M.P., April 16, 1845.]

To the honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in Parliament assembled. The Petition of the New Zealand Company, incorporated by royal letters patent, under the Great Seal of the said United Kingdom, showeth — 1. That we come before your honourable house to ask redress for wrongs done to ourselves and others while prosecuting the undertaking for which we are incorporated : " the settlement and improvement of the colony of New Zealand and its dependencies." 2. The undertaking first suggested itself to us in the year 1837. We embarked in it from a belief that the work of colonisation was consonant to the constitution and ancient policy of this kingdom, beneficial in itself, and honourable to its promoters; that the islands of New Zealand were especially fitted for its successful prosecution by their geographical position, their climate and soil, and the variety and value of their natural products; and that it would be possible not only to unite the interests of the aboriginal inhabitants with those of European colonists, but to render sucb an union productive of reciprocal advantages to both races ; and to effect the whole plan without burden to the parent State. 3. The means by which we proposed to realize these objects were the disposal of waste lands upon the system approved by the committee of your honourable house which sat in 1836; the appropriation of a large proportion of the proceeds of land-sales to emigration and other public objects; the introduction of moral and industrious colonists in lieu of the lawless influx of runaways and others, which had been for some time going on ; an absolute exclusion of convicts ; and the local interspersion of the two races, in order to their gradual amalgamation as one people. The plan to be administered by a body of selected individuals, invested with the necessary powers, responsible for the due performance of their trust, and unbiassed by the possession of any pecuniary interest therein. For effecting this plan, it appeared to us that the simplest and most beneficial course was both to assert at once the sovereignty of the Crown over the entire country — on the best of all grounds, the right of discovery — and its title to all the unoccupied portions of the soil ; but, as it had been deemed expedient by the Government to recognize New Zealand as a sovereign and independent state, the course we definitively proposed was that of obtaining, on behalf of the Crown, both the proprietorship and the sovereignty by treaty and cessation. 4. From the outset, the exclusion of pecuniary speculation formed an essential principle of onr plan, as embodied both in the proposals submitted to Lord Melbourne in 1837, and in the bill brought into your honourable house by Mr. Francis Baring in 1838. r "he formation of a joint-stock association was originally prescribed by the Colonial Minister, Lord Glenelg, as a condition of our obtaining a proprietary charter; was at first rejected by us as inconsistent with the principle above mentioned ; and was eventually adopted only in consequence of the failure of Mr. Baring's bill. From the outset, also, it was our desire to act always under the auspices of her Majesty's Government, and in concert with it; We made many unsuccessful endeavours to attain this advantage; and it was only after repeated repulses by successive Ministers — when numerous intending colonists were urgent for our assistance to enable them to emigrate, and a foreign power was about to despatch a rival expedition — that we resolved to depend on our own resources and the co-operation of our countrymen, and to proceed at length, unaided by the Government, to carry our plan into execution. As New Zealand had been declared by her Majesty's Government to be a sovereign and independent country, we shaped our proceedings in accordance with that declaration, both in acquiring lands for the purposes of colorisation in the only equitable way which was then customary or practicable, and in making provision for the maintenance of order in our intended settlements. Accordingly, wo sent out our agent and exploring expedition in May, ]839, and the first emigrants to our settlements in the September following. 5. On the departure of our exploring expedition, the late Captain Hobson was despatched to re-acquire for the Crown the sovereignty which had before been repudiated ; and, as has since been declared in the Chamber of Deputies, the effect of our proceedings was to prevent the establishment of a French penal settlement in the Middle Island, or, in other words, to save New Zealand from the fate of Tahiti. Complete success attended the first efforts of our agent. Under our instructions he directed his course to Cook's Straits as the most advantageous position, and the one in which he was least likely to interfere with others or be interfered with by them ; he conciliated the goodwill of the natives, whom he found comparatively few and unacquainted with Europeans; gave them presents on a liberal scale ; and, after much negotiation and open discussions with them, effected agreements for the cession of considerable tracts of land on both sides of the Straits, by means of written instruments, the practical effect of which they undoubtedly understood and regarded as satisfactory. In addition to the presents, a special covenant, till then unknown, was by our desire introduced into every agreement, reserving for the natives a portion equal to a tenth of all lands that we might appropriate to our settlers. These reserves we desired to be selected in exactly the same way with the possessions of the colonists, and to be intermingled among theirs, with a

view to their progressive increase in value and the development of common interests and feelings, on the importance of which we laid much stress, and which we enjoined to be cultivated with all possible assiduity.

6. The particulars of these cessions, the site, extent, title-deeds, and even the journal of our agent, recording his proceedings from day to day therein, were all made public. With full opportunity of knowing these particulars, the Secretary of State, Lord John Russell, recognizing our usefulness, entered into an agreement with us in November, 1840, requiring the surrender of every pretension of right as derived from the chiefs and tribes of New Zealand, and compensating us by a Crown grant of land bearing a certain proportion to the- sums which we had expended in the various operations of colonisation. And, on condition of our enlarging our capital from one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand pounds, his lordship confirmed that agreement by a royal charter of incorporation in the succeeding February. In reliance on these act?, we engaged in colonising operations, under the inspection of the Emigration Commissioners, with increased activity; and in June, 1841, and August, 1842, we further entered into special contracts with Lord John Russell and his successor Lord Stanley respectively, for the purchase, direct from the Crown, of fifty thousand and a hundred thousand acres of Crown lands, at the standard price of twenty shillings an acre, to be afterwards expended by us on emigration and colonial public works.

In pursuance of the agreement and special contracts, the accountant appointed to investigate our claim pronounced in our favour awards for seven hundred and sixty-two thousand five hundred and ninety-three (762,593) acres of land. But to the present time, though nearly four years have elapsed, we have been unable to obtain from her Majesty's Representative in New Zealand the grant of a single acre. As this breach of contract constitutes the most important of the injuries for which we now seek redress, we beg the indulgence of your honourable house for stating the particulars in some detail.

7. The conditions of the agreement of November, 1 840, were, that an estimate of our previous outlay, under certain enumerated heads, should be prepared by a Government accountant ; that " when " so prepared, we should be secured by a Crown grant, under the public seal, in four times as many acres of land as the ' pounds sterling we should be found to have expended in the manner and for the purposes stated ; that these lands should be taken "in that part of the colony at which our settlement had been formed, and to which we had laid claim in virtue of contracts made with the natives and others ;" that they should " comprise all tracts to which any persons had derived title through us ;" and that we did therein " forego and disclaim" [not assign and transfer to the Crown] "all title or pretence of title to any lands purchased or acquired by us other than the lands so to be granted," and held mediately or immediately from the Crown. The intention obviously was, that the power of conferring titles to land should be acknowledged to reside undividedly in the Crown, in contradistinction to the natives ; that, our equitable rights being respected, we should be secured by titles from the Crown in possession of the settlement which we had established, and the lands we had already sold to others; and that, in determining the extent of land so to be secured to us, the amount of our previous expenditure on public objects should be admitted as payment thereof. The heads of expenditure to be so admitted were defined as being "in the purchase of lands in New Zealand, from the native chiefs and others ; in the taking up, chartering, and despatching ships for the conveyance of emigrants thither ; in the maintenance of such emigrants before and during the outward voyage; in the purchase and transmission of stores for the-pub-lic use of the settlers collectively on their arrival ; in surveys ; in the erection of buildings, or the execution of other works dedicated exclusively to the public service of the settlement ; and in other heads of expenditure or absolute liabilities unavoidably required or reasonably incurred for the before-mentioned purposes."

8. On the 2d December, 1840, we received information, which had been expressly withheld until our acceptance of this agreement should be formally notified, of " the general principles by which the Crown proposed to be guided in its measures " Lnot towards us, but] " for the government and colonisation of New Zealand ;" and, as a part of these, it was then officially mentioned for the first time, in the Under-Se-cretary of State's letter of that date, that " with regard to all lands in the colony acquired under any other title than that of grants made in the name and on the behalf of her Majesty, it was proposed that the titles of the claimants should be subjected to the investigation of a commission to be constituted for that purpose."

On our proving the first portion of our expenditure. Lord John Russell, on the 20th May, 1841, addressed the Governor of the colony, Captain Hobson, to the following effect : —

" The result of his (Mr. Pennington's) investigation you will perceive to be, that, under such arrangement, the Company are entitled to receive five hundred and thirty-one thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine acres of land, at present, and that they may hereafter be entitled to a further portion of between four and five hundred thousand acres. You will therefore make the necessary assignments of land to the agents of the Company, in pursuance of the terras of the agreement."

9. But in January, 1841, prior to receiving information of that agreement, in ignorance both of its existence and ot the charter erecting New Zealand into a separate colony, and in obedience to an enactment of the Legislature of New South

Wales, under whose jurisdiction New Zealand was still supposed to be, our agent had forwarded to Sir George Gipps, in Sydney, a statement of the claims of the Company to the lands ceded to them by the natives. Those claims, and all arising out of them, were considered to be merged in the agreement with the Secretary of State. But Governor Hobson, reviving the claim, refused to issue the grant as ordered by Lord John Russell, unless we established our title by that process of investigation by the Commissioner of Claims, from which we conceived it to be specifically exempted. On our appealing, in October, 1842, to Lord Stanley, who had succeeded Lord John Russell as Colonial Minister, his lordship adopted the views of Governor Hobson; assigning in substance, as a reason, that the agreement was based on an understanding that we had purchased and surrendered to the Crown a much larger quantity of land than that which was to he granted to us ; and that unless that understanding was fulfilled, the agreement itself, so far as related to the grant, could not be carried into effect.

As this interpretation has been condemned both by Lord John Russell, who, with ourselves, was a party to the original agreement, and by the committee of your honourable house, which last session investigated the affairs of New Zealand, it is unnecessary to recapitulate the arguments by which it was either supported or rebutted. But it is proper to observe, that, however the question regarding our purchase from the natives might stand, the lands which formed the subject of the special contracts of June, 1841, and August, 1842, were quite unconnected with that purchase, and quite unaffected, therefore, by any question relating to it. This land we had as much right to demand, as the purchaser of a single acre in any part of any of the colonies, or in London. Yet, in referring our claims to the investigation of the Commissioner of Claims in New Zealand, no part was excepted, no reservation made, whether those claims were founded on the transaction with the natives, or on these direct contracts with the Crown in England.

In January, 1843, therefore, finding it impossible to remove the impression received by Lord Stanley, and being apprised, by command of his lordship, that he desired a discontinuance of our correspondence, we deemed it a matter of justice to the public, as we could obtain no Crown title for our lands, to suspend our landsales ; and, as those sales were our sole source of income, we were obliged to discontinue all colonising operations.

10. But the effects of this misunderstanding were so ruinous to those who had purchased our lands, as well as to ourselves, that in the succeeding May, with a view to its removal, we consented to waive our entire absolute claims, and to accept in lieu a second agreement, the basis of which was, that we should receive forthwith a conditional grant of the lands selected by our agents, conveying to us a primd facie title, and whatever interest the Crown might have ; and leaving to others, whether natives or Europeans, the burden of subsequently dispossessing us by proving any prior claim which they might be able to adduce in opposition to ours. The appointment of Captain Fitzßoy to be Governor of the colony afforded, as we thought, a pledge for the punctual and honourable fulfillment of this stipulation.

Our hopes became faint on our discovering, six months after (in February, 1844), that Lord Stanley had not communicated to us, together with his assent to the second agreement, a private correspondence with Captain Fitzßoy on the subject of the manner in which the agreement was to be interpreted. But notwithstanding this, so important were the interests at stake, that we once more made an attempt to enter into new negotiations. For some time Lord Stanley listened favourably, and contemplated the idea of affording us the assistance of Government in meeting the embarrassments occasioned by the non- settlement of our land-claims ; but when we ventured to point out that the conditions on which the assistance was proposed to be offered would in fact be injurious, by throwing a doubt upon our title, his lordship suddenly broke off the negotiation, and once more intimated to us that he must decline our correspondence until he should have received further reports from Governor Fitzßoy. Thus repulsed from the Colonial Office, we appealed to your honourable house in April, 1844. Your committee investigated the case, and reported strongly in our favour. But the lateness of the period prevented any active steps from being taken in accordance with their report before the close of the session.

11. We feel justified in asserting that no instructions whatever on the subject of the agreement above mentioned ought to have been given by the Secretary of State to the Governor, without being simultaneously communicated to us ; and that the instructions actually so given were altogether inconsistent with our public arrangement. They were thus inconsistent, in making what we were to obtain, contingent, not on rights already established by proof of expenditure, but on titles to be established by proof of validity of purchase ; in denying that the Government was either indebted to us in any quantity of land, or bound to make compensation to us for out expenditure incurred, proved, and the land awarded to us in accordance with our agreement of November, 1840; and still more in the generally adverse tone which ran through the whole instructions, while we were allowed to remain in the belief that all had been agreed upon in an amicable spirit, for the express purpose of terminating a long and angry controversy. The correctness of this view of the question is confirmed by the effects of the instructions thus given, of which intelligence has been received in the interval since laht session. During

nine months' residence in the colony, not only had Governor Fitzßoy made us no grant in accordance with the agreement of May, 1843, but whatever steps he had taken for the settlement of our titles, had proceeded solely on the principle which that agreement was intended to supersede. When our agent had been induced by him to make additional payments to the natives, in order to obtain possession of the land in the immediate neighbourhood of Wellington, no measures were taken to give him that possession. And when the Commissioner of Land Claims made an award in our favour in another part of the island, New Plymouth, the Governor, without having heard the witnesses, or investigated the case, set aside the Commissioner's decision, and refused to ratify the reward, until we should have submitted to further payments. 12. In this interval have also been made publip Lord Stanley's two despatches of the 13th of August and 30th of .November last, explaining the course which his lordship has thought fit to pursue with respect to the report of the committee of last session. That committee was selected with the knowledge and consent of the Colonial Department, and, if variety of political sentiment may be alluded to without indecorum, contained, we believe, a large majority of general supporters of the present Government. We had every right to hope that the report of such a committee would carry weight with those who were parties to its appointment, and that its decision would be regarded as conclusive, at least with respect to those matters of disputed claims which had been especially referred to its arbitration. In spite of our previous experience, we could not help encouraging some expectation of this kind, when Lord Stanley, in answer to our application, informed us that he deemed it most becoming to communicate to Parliament, in the first place, the instructions which he had issued to the Governor of New Zealand, in consequence of tbe report of the committee. Our disappointment has been great, when, on reading those instructions, we have found that no effect has been produced in his lordship's mind by the ample inquiries and sound views of the committee ; that he treats the tribunal which had decided against him as a fresh antagonist, with whom he may renew an exhausted controversy ; that he does not scruple to depreciate its authority by describing not quite fairly the mode in which its decisions have been carried ; that the whole tenor of his instructions is to exhort the Governor to disregard tbe recommendations of the report as mischievous and unsound, and to teach him how to avoid the difficulties which the decisions of the committee are represented as adding to his position. With respect to our own claims, Lord Stanley expresses a fixed determination to persevere in the denial of the right which the committee has deliberately recognized ; grounding that determination on the sufficiency of the unfulfilled agreement of May, 1843. 1 3. The opposition, of which that determination is but the latest instance, appears to ourselves to be attributable mainly to the influence over the Colonial Department exercised by the societies concerned in missions and the aborigines; and to have originated, on the part of those societies, in an opinion that the intercourse of Europeans with the native inhabitants of British settlements ought to be discouraged as calamitous to the latter, and the intervention of British authority be limited to upholding the rights of native proprietorship and sovereignty. 14. That opinion is altogether inconsistent with the social condition of the aborigines of New Zealand as it existed at the time when our enterprise was set on foot ; with the highest and most lasting amelioration of the aborigines ; and with the principles which have heretofore been acted on by all civilized states, for the advantage, not of themselves alone, but of the uncivilized nations with whom they have come in contact. Whatever the disposition or natural capacity of the New Zealanders, it is unquestionable that, far from understanding the functions of civil government, they had hardly the rudest conceptions of justice or of order. Until recently taught by interested Europeans, they had no idea of individual property in land, of selling it, or of its exchangeable value. What ideas they did possess upon the subject had been imparted to them by persons whose object it was to obtain their lands under the forms of purchase. Of their actual ignorance, and the extent to which advantage had been taken of it, under that system which, for want of a better term, we must beg to designate by the figurative but too well-known epithet of land-sharking, some idea may be formed from the fact, that claims for 10,000 up to 40,000 or 50,000 acres each have been not unfrequent; that Captain Hobson, in one of his earliest despatches, mentions tracts of country, in some cases of 500 square miles, as claimed by single individuals; and that one claim, advanced on behalf of some speculators in $e\v South Wales, is described by the Governor, Sir George Gipps, as comprising nearly half the Middle Island, purchased at the rate one penny for 400 acres. To invest such tribes as those of New Zealand with tbe attributes of sovereignty was inconsistent with truth; and, by perpetuating their existing customs, was in fact to continue an anarchy, which had, in the memory of living men, depopulated vast portions of the iblanda. To recognize in the savage a property in land, without seme restraint as to its alienation, or 6ome strong impelling motive for its retention and improvement, was to inflict an injury under the semblance of an advantage; to excite a craving for vicious indulgence; to render industry distasttful, and to hold out a lure to the despoiled To abandon to little more than 100,000 aborigines a country capable of maintaining twenty

or thirty millions of inhabitants, and to endeavour to exclude Europeans, was not only to impose a restriction unsanctioned by the laws upon the enterprise and activity of the nation, but it was also to run counter to the manifest indications of Providence ; to establish, if successful, that system of isolation under which the native races of North America are withering away; but more certainly it was to attempt an impossibility; to shut out, perhaps, the reputable and the good, but to leave the door open to the lawless and abandoned ; and in the meanwhile to infuse a spirit of antagonism into the two races, and in a manner to invite the approaches of foreign powers, less scrupulous or more enlightened on the subject of colonisation. 15. With regard, also, to one society which possesses great power in New Zealand, the Church Missionary Society, we cannot believe that their views on these subjects have been altogether unbiassed by the interest which their local missionaries had in upholding the system of direct purchases from the aborigines. We find by the evidence of official documents, that of thirty- five missionaries employed by the Church Society in 1838, twenty- three have preferred claims on account of such purchases, the aggregate of which, including 3,900 acres for Church missionary families, and 11,600 for the Church Society itself, amounts to at least 196,840 acres.

16. But, whatever the origin of the views in question, or of the influence of the missionary societies in the Colonial Department, the practical result has been that, from the beginning, New Zealand has been regarded and measures relating to it have been conducted by the Government with reference to the interests, not of this Kingdom, but of the native aborigines as seen through the missionary medium. Hence the repudiation of a territory which for upwards of thirty years had been definitely included (in the same way as Van Diemen's Land) in the successive commissions of the Governors of New South Wales; the reluctance to re-acquire that territory, notwithstanding its acknowledged paramount political importance, which was avowed in the instructions originally issued to Captain Hobson ; and that series of acts, which, as being of necessity illusive, was in our opinion unworthy of this country. Of this character we conceive to have been the recognition of a flag called " national ;" of ships' registers to be recorded and granted by native chiefs ; of a document purporting to be a " declaration of independence;" and of a proposed "congress;" together with other measures enumerated in the memorandum transmitted by the Colonial Department to the Foreign Office on the 18th of March, 1840; as well as the transaction termed the " Treaty of Waitangi," which may be regarded as the natural sequel and climax of this series of fictitious proceedings, and of which the hollow and injurious nature is forcibly represented in the report of your committee of last session.

17. To the same false basis of the intervention of British authority in New Zealand we ascribe that character of indirectness which attended the Government in its first measures with regard to land, and involved it in embarrassments, from which it has not succeeded in freeing itself to this day. We allude to the expedients by which, while professing to uphold native rights, it denied to private individuals the lands they had acquired under the exercise of those rights ; while excluding the Crown from the proprietorship of unoccupied waste lands, it sought to supply the defect by taking possession of private purchases ; and now, while still declaring those lands to be the private property of the natives, it endeavours to obtain them by the imposition of a land-tax.

18. To the same origin we trace that spirit of hostility which evinced itself at the very commencement of our undertaking ; which, though suspended apparently for a time by the agreement of 1840 and charter of incorporation, has broken out at every opportunity ; has heaped upon us aspersions of the most insulting nature, amounting to rapacity, fraud, and implied falsehood ; imparted to the official correspondence that undignified and acrimonious character of which complaint has been so justly made ; and led to reiterated acts of aggression and misrepresentation in England and in the colony ; the most dangerous tendency of which, much as they impeded our efforts and depressed the energies of the colonists, was to lower our settlers in the eyes of the natives, and to give the impression that they might be injured with impunity. [To be continued.']