The Colonial Story

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 738, 4 September 1953, Page 12

The Colonial Story

BRITISH COLONIAL DEVELOPMENTS, 1774-1834 (Select documents), by Vincent Harlow and Frederick Madden; Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, English price, 35/-.

(Reviewed by

F. J.

Foot

HIS is a collection of the more important colonial documents, in some cases with omissions of passages not considered important. It was the fashion during the Victorian era to say nothing good of the 18th Century. Carlyle, who took so much trouble about it, seemed to think the only sensible thing it did was to blow its own brains out in the grand universal suicide named the French Revolution. But it is becoming recognised that the Georgian and Regency period was an era of splendid -administrators in naval and colonial matters. (The handling of American and Irish affairs must be excepted, but must be bl4med on George III. who insisted on his own way in spite of plain warnings from Burke and the two Pitts.) The field ranges widely over Canada, South Africa, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Malta and elsewhere. The New Zealand documents are of particular interest to us. One cannot help being impressed by the commonsense so evident in the communications of officials concerning New Zealand. The instfuctions to Captain Cook for his third voyage indicate ‘that if the Earl of Sandwich was a dissolute scoundrel (he was a member of the .Medmenham Club with Wilkes and Lord le Despencer) at least he had excellent assistants in the Admiralty, Indeed, we know this from the naval events of the succeeding generation. The same sturdy commonsense informs the report of Samuel Marsden. | All these men who had ‘to do with the beginnings of New Zealand seem to have had the gift of-being-able to decide at once what was practically possible and yet to have had a cautious foresight of the place New Zealand would one day take. We find, for instance, Marsden’s reply to a request for his views on’the formation of a colony in New Zealand in 1824. He considered it essential first to establish law and order." And the southern whalers petitioning Lord Bathurst in 1826 say that New Zealand’s capacious harbours and fine seamen would obtain ascendancy in the eastern seas. It is interesting to be reminded of the high importance of New Zealand timbers to the Navy in the 18th Century. Timbers from our forests played their part in some of Nelson’s sea battles. There was also the trade in flax which contemporary — observers agreed was superior to that being then imported into England for the manufacture of linen and sail cloth. Although this is a short collection it is of use in the more elementary research work of students and historians, and serves as a preliminary guide to the whereabouts of important records.