A Sort of Conscience by Philip Temple

Author:Philip Temple [Temple, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869405687
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Less than a month after Charley’s departure, Catherine wrote to him a letter filled with the import of domestic triviality (‘Priscilla is playing and singing Little Bo-Peep to Frances, who … says “more, more”’) but admits, ‘Stoke has lost its charm for me, and if it pleases God to point out the way I am ready to leave it for New Zealand’.9

Charles was never to shift from his favourite armchair but he did buy a section in Nelson and formally saw off the departing expeditioners at Gravesend with a reading from the First Epistle of St Peter: ‘Who is he that shall harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good?’ If Arthur had anything to do with it, no harm would befall the 27 cabin passengers and 77 emigrants in the barques Will Watch and Whitby, or their crews. He had thrown all his vast naval experience into planning and equipping the expedition. In telling Catherine of the departure on 27 April, EGW wrote, ‘We have not yet recollected to have forgotten anything – which speaks volumes for Arthur’s management. I hope that your feelings are, as your reason must be, reconciled to parting with Charlie …. I think that you ought to rejoice when you reflect, in the opportunity which Charly now has of making his own way in the world.10 He cannot be in better hands than those of our excellent brother.’11

The company’s second major settlement, under Arthur’s leadership, at first seemed better planned than the first. The preliminary expedition set out a full five months before the emigrant ships and the second in command and chief surveyor, Frederick Tuckett, had six assistant surveyors, as well as nine improvers, among them Charley Torlesse and Thomas Brunner. The labourers and their foremen were all carefully selected married men, whose wives and families would follow in the emigrant ships to find the settlement fully surveyed.

The mixture of land sections was to be different: 201,000 acres would be sold in 1000 £300 allotments that would comprise one town acre, 50 acres of ‘accommodation’ or suburban land and 150 acres of rural land. In the flush of their new charter and Colonial Office approval, the company said that these would be laid out at the best site available in New Zealand, probably on the eastern side of the southern island. Of the £300,000 received from sales, half would be spent for emigration, £50,000 for company expenses, £50,000 for public works, £15,000 for religious endowments, £15,000 for a college and £20,000 to ‘encourage steam navigation’ – surely Arthur’s initiative. The price of approximately 30s an acre was expensive but the 50 per cent increase was seen as of no consequence to purchasers who would rush to buy sections once the scheme was advertised.

A New Year letter from EGW to Molesworth superficially suggests that he had become more a man of business. He wrote of yet another new project that ‘may be an engine for getting the economy of New South

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