New Zealand Company ships
The New Zealand Company was a 19th-century English company that played a key role in the colonisation of New Zealand. The company was formed to carry out the principles of systematic colonisation devised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who envisaged the creation of a new-model English society in the southern hemisphere. Under Wakefield's model, the colony would attract capitalists who would then have a ready supply of labour—migrant labourers who could not initially afford to be property owners, but who would have the expectation of one day buying land with their savings.
New Zealand Company
Members of the two colonisation groups subsequently formed a new organisation, the New Zealand Land Company, with Lord Durham as its governor and five MPs among its 17 directors. The company acted urgently to fit out the "Tory", advertise for a captain and surveyor and select Colonel William Wakefield as the expedition's commander. William Wakefield was authorised to spend ₤3000 on goods that could be used to barter for land. By 12 May 1839, when the "Tory" left England under the command of Captain Edward Chaffers, the company had already begun advertising and selling land in New Zealand, and by the end of July—months before the company had even learned the "Tory" had arrived in New Zealand—all available sections for its first settlement had been sold. The company had already been warned in a letter from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary that the government could give no guarantee of title to land bought from Māori, which would "probably" be liable to repurchase by the Crown. The company had also been told that the Government could neither encourage nor recognise its proceedings.