GREEDY CRITIC

Te Ao Hou, November 1957, Page 55

GREEDY CRITIC The New Zealand Journal 1842 1844 of John B. Williams of Salem, Massachusetts.…Edited with an Account of his life by Robert W. Kenney. Peabody Museum of Salem and Brown University Press 1956. This is a short account of New Zealand by John Brown Williams, a New England merchant, who was United States consul for New Zealand for some years, residing from 1842 to 1844 in the Bay of Islands. A brief life of Williams is also included. The book is a disappointing one. The ‘Journal’ reproduces without acknowledgment, substantial portions of Gilbert Mair's ‘Pilot’. The latter work, written in 1839 by the original Gilbert Mair, consists of brief notes on the harbours of the northern portion of the North Island, and other information useful to navigators. It is reproduced in full as appendix B to “The Mair Family” by J. C. Anderson and G. C. Petersen (A. W. and A. H. Reed, 1956). These extracts are interspersed with rather incoherent remarks on the character, customs and manners of the Maoris and of the Europeans resident in the Country, and on the scenery, climate, geology and vegetation of New Zealand. Williams has an extraordinary capacity for moral indignation…except perhaps in relation to commercial transactions in which he himself might be engaged. There is little new material in the work which is of any value to the historian except, possibly, further confirmation of the rough and ready morals of the early European population in the far north. E.W.W. The book is beautifully produced and has some fine plates.