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
Wakefield arrived at Cook Strait on 16 August and spent several weeks exploring the bays and sounds at the north of the South Island. The "Tory" crossed Cook Strait on 20 September and with the aid of whaler and trader Dicky Barrett—who had lived among Māori in Taranaki and the Wellington area since 1828 and also spoke "pidgin-Māori"—Wakefield began to offer guns, utensils and clothing to buy land from the Māori around Petone. Within a week he had secured the entire harbour and all surrounding ranges, and from then until November went on to secure signatures and marks on parchments that supposedly gave the company ownership of 20 million acres (8 million hectares)—about one-third of New Zealand's land surface at a cost of about a halfpenny an acre. On 25 October he persuaded 10 chiefs at Kapiti to add crosses at the foot of an 1180-word document that confirmed they were permanently parting with all "rights, claims, titles and interests" to vast areas of land in both the South and North Islands as far north as present-day New Plymouth. On 8 November in Queen Charlotte Sound he secured the signature of an exiled Taranaki chief, Wiremu Kīngi, and 31 others for land whose description was near-identical to that of the Kapiti deal. On 16 November as the "Tory" passed Wanganui three chiefs came aboard the "Tory" to negotiate the sale of all their district from Manawatu to Patea. The areas in each deed were so vast Wakefield documented them by writing lists of place names, and finally expressed the company's territory in degrees of latitude.