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.
Francis Petre
The Petres were an aristocratic family from Ingatestone in Essex, England. Francis Petre's immediate family was one of the first and most prominent colonial families of New Zealand; Petre Bay, Chatham Island was named after them, as—originally—was the town of Wanganui in the North Island. The Wellington suburb of Thorndon was named after their Thorndon Hall estate in England. Petre was the son of the Hon Henry William Petre, who first came to New Zealand in 1840 as director of the New Zealand Company of which his own father, William Henry Francis Petre, 11th Baron Petre, had been chairman. The New Zealand Company had been set up to promote the colonisation of New Zealand, and bought, sometimes dubiously, thousands of hectares of land from the Māori. Consequently, Henry Petre was one of the founders of Wellington. He was also colonial treasurer of New Munster Province. Henry seems to have been a man of strange appearance, from the description by his contemporary, the New Zealand social commentator Charlotte Godley: "He is immensely tall and thin and looks like a set of fire irons badly hung together".