johannes carl andersen notes that at least some of the canterbury colonists' criticism of campbell appears to have been warranted: ""the colonel wrote in a very minute, nervous hand and his letters were extraordinarily diffuse, even as compared with other letters in those days of formal long-drawn-out and often tedious official correspondence... he located his office at akaroa" (some 50 miles by bush track from the main settlement at christchurch) "and sometimes published instructions to canterbury stock-owners in the wellington spectator"" (i.e. in the new zealand spectator and cook's strait guardian, a wellington publication).