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
The company also became indirectly involved in the settlement of New Plymouth in 1841, through its links with the Plymouth Company, to which it sold a total of 60,000 acres, of indeterminate location, in mid-1840. The Plymouth Company sent a survey party to choose where the settlement would be located and in January 1841 that company's surveyor, Frederick Carrington, selected Taranaki. The Plymouth Company encountered financial difficulties that led to a merger of the two companies on 10 May 1841.