THE NEW ZEALAND COMPANY.

Lyttelton Times, Volume III, Issue 131, 9 July 1853, Page 5

THE NEW ZEALAND COMPANY.

[From the " Times. »]

After six months the Colonial Office has produced the papers moved for by Sir William Molesworth, on the conduct of the New Zealand Company, which form a bulky folio of 600 pages. We are not without apprehension that members of Parliament may find some difficulty in following the thread of the narrative through this tedious labyrinth, and therefore beg to refer them to page 342 of this ponderous volume for a clear and correct statement of the offences of Company, and a signal instance of the treatment which a public officer receives who acts up to the duty of his post, and refuses to be a party to the frauds of his superiors. Before they enter upon a case which exposes the manner in which the New Zealand Company have contrived to appropriate, in gratuities, mortgages, and guarantees, money, or moneys worth, to the amount of some seven hundred thousand pounds, it may be useful to afford to some of our readers a slight sketch of the history of this Company, so as to enable them to understand what manner of men and what manner of actions are rewarded with so large a fraction of the public income. As early as 1825 a Company was formed for colonizing New Zealand, which purchased a small portion of laud of little value and very unfit for its purpose, and left it uncultivated and uninhabited. In May, 1837, an Association for the colonization of New Zealand was founded, which at first applied for a Royal charter, and then rejected it when it found that the charter would be clogged with such restrictions as to give little scope to the enterprising genius of its promoters. Early in 1838 the Association brought its claims before the notice of the House of Lords; they were submitted to a Committee, and very decidedly rejected. In the same year a bill to carry out the objects of the Association was introduced into the House of Commons, and thrown out by a large majority. Thus visited with the disapprobation of all three branches of the Legislature, the Association, like* other people in indifferent repute, assumed an alias, and projected the wild and daring scheme of founding a colony in New Zealand, in defiance of the British Government, to be governed independently of the Crown, under a code of laws framed for it by its promoters. The Association was warned by the Government that such a proceeding could not be recognized, and that no pledge could be given for the future recognition of any proprietary titles which might be obtained by the Company from the natives. Nothing daunted, the Company put forth a prospectus, stating that they had already purchased and secured very extensive tracts of land, and had already despatched an expedition to survey tbe coast. Both these assertions were false. The Company had at this time no land, and had sent out no expedition, though they despatched one shortly after, under Colonel Wakefield. On the Ist of June, 1839, they advertised and sold a township of one "hundred and ten thousand acres for a hundred thousand pounds, although they admit " that this was done by anticipation"—that is, that they had not an acre of land at the time—a transaction which we find it very difficult to distinguish from obtaining- money under false pretences. Within nine months from the departure of the surveying expedition, aud before they had heard of its results, the Company despatched twelve vessels full of emigrants, containing two hundred and sixteen cabin and nine hundred and nine steerage passengers, without having, to their knowledge, an acre of land on which to settle them. While they were thus recklessly insuring the misery of their dupes in England,*their emissary Colonel Wakefield, was pursuing a course which has been the all-sufficing cause of ftie misery and ruin of New Zealand and the New Zealand Company, and of a drain on the English Exchequer such as no combination of jobbers, since the days of the South Sea Bubble, has effected. Colonel Wakefield went out to buy land, to get a colourable title to extensive districts for the purposes of sales in England, at a small expense ; and no one can deny that he executed his mission with vigour, and didjsomething to_

deserve the thousand pounds with which the Company presented him. For fifteen hundred pounds' worth of muskets, blankets, nightcaps, looking-glasses, jew's-harps, sealing-wax, and other luxuries, he obtained from three or four chiefs their mark to a deed conveying such right as they had to give to about thirty millions of acres north and south of Cook's Straits, inhabited by thirty thousand persons, whose rights were in no way represented by the vendors, and counting among their population missionaries and emigrants who had already possessed, themselves of land within these limits by purchase. Having done the thing so cheap, the rest of the goods he sold by auction. Of course the New Zealanders never meant to sell a thousand acres of land for sixpence any move than they understoodl the parallels qf latitude by which the scientific Colonel defined his acquisitions. Having by this " unprecedented liberality" obtained, as they said, an " unimpeachable title to at least one-third of New Zealand," the company made the disagreeable discovei-y that their acts were illegal and their title utterly void— the Crown having in the mean time taken pos-; session of the islands and sent out a Governor. Under these circumstances, they dropt the insolent tone of defiance which they had hitherto assumed towards the Parliament and Ministry, and applied to Lord John Russell, then Colonial Secretary, for the charter which they onpe so scornfully rejected. They assured the Min T ister that they had a valid title from the natives to a large tract on each side ol Cook's Straits. Lord John Russell, on that assurance, undertook to give them a charter, and proposed that an estimate should be made by an accountant of all sums expended by them in land purchases, emigration, roads, "buildings, and other incidental expenses, and that when this sum was ascertained they should receive an acre for every five shillings thus expended, to be selected by them within six months, in the territory which they claimed by contracts with the natires; and that they should on their part in r crease their capital by a hundred thousand pounds, which they have not fully paid up to this day. This offer the company gladly accepted, together with a condition that the validity of the titles claimed by them'fromI.'the chiefs should be decided on by a Commissioner named by the Crown.- Tbe accountant appointed to make the estimate allowed to the company as properly expended £161,560, including, among other very questionable items, £20,000 paid to members of their own company who were also members of the company of 1825 for their worthless land, and £25,000 to members of their own company for other rights whose nature is unknown. Thus, by its great Parliamentary interest, this company, which began by defying Queen, Lords, and Commons, and taking measures which amounted to little less than a breach of allegiance, followed up this offence by obtaining through grossly false representations a hundred thousand pounds of the money from the unsuspecting public, and capped this fraud by the attempt to cheat the aboriginal inhabitants out of their land, obtained from the Colonial Office concessions of unexampled liberality, and received, so far as the Crown had it to bestow, a title to four acres for every pound '-which they had jobbed away in enormous salaries, in purchases from each other, or in fitting out expeditions to bribe the natives to sell the property of their neighbours to which they had no title. 'What harvest they reaped from the seed they had sown—what gratitude the Government experienced for their enormous concessions—and how it fared with the settlers so recklessly exposed to the anger of the justly irritated natives —how all this ripened into an enormous charge on the English Treasury— and how the Colonial Office bought back from them for half a million the land which it had sold them for nothing, we propose to tell in another article.