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 ships
William Spain, who was appointed in 1841 as a New Zealand Land Claims Commissioner to investigate land purchases from the Māori people by the New Zealand Company, together with his family was a passenger on the ship. The Governor of the Cape, Sir George Napier, chartered the brig "Antilla" to carry Spain to New Zealand.