ANNIVERSARY DAY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume LI, Issue 4405, 23 January 1930, Page 3

ANNIVERSARY DAY.

Yesterday, the Wellington province celebrated its 91st anniversary. The ship Tory sailed from London on May G, isSOj- with six notable passengers, including Colonel William Wakefield, Chief Agent of the New Zealand Land Company, and live other representatives of the Company, and arrived at Port Nicholson on September 20, 1839; the Cuba followed with the Company’s surveying staff, which landed on January 3, 1840; then came the first of the immigrants, 140 all told, who landed from the Aurora on January 22, 1840.

Somerset Playne, in his New Zealand, tells us that in exchange for goods valued at under £9OO0 — red blankets, mtiskets, single and double-barrelled guns, tobacco, gunpowder, shaving brushes, seal-ing-wax, and combs, principally, Colonel Wakefield -asserted that lie had bought for the Company an area of twenty million acres — “nearly the whole of what are now the provincial districts of Wellington, Taranaki, and a large slice of Nelson.” This exchange was effected by a series of deeds signed between the representatives of the Company and the native chiefs, during a period of three months •from September 27, 1839. It is almost incredible (comments the Dominion) to think that all this happened a little over ninety years ago, that the evidences we sec around as of advanced civilisation, with an abundance of social amenities, have been established from most primitive conditions within the lifetime of a nonagenarian.