New Zealand Company
The New Zealand Company, chartered in the United Kingdom, was a company that existed in the first half of the 1800s on a business model focused on the systematic colonisation of New Zealand. The company was formed to carry out the principles 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
As early as 1839 the New Zealand Company had resolved to "take steps to procure German emigrants" and appointed an agent in Bremen. A bid in September 1841 to sell the Chatham Islands to the German Colonisation Company—yet to be formed—for ₤10,000 was quashed by the British Government, which declared that the islands were to be part of the colony of New Zealand and that any Germans settling there would be treated as aliens. The party of German migrants on the "St Pauli", with 140 passengers including John Beit, the "overbearing and arrogant, greedy, untruthful" New Zealand Company agent in Hamburg, went to Nelson instead.