Carlyle on Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, circa 1850s.

Thomas Carlyle on Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862), best known in New Zealand as a colonial promoter and founder of the New Zealand Company:

"Gibbon Wakefield was there. I had seen Gibbon once before; he is the unlucky Theseus who attempted long since to steal Ariadne Turner, the young Chancery Ward; and, not prospering, had to lie in gaol,—and either rot, or become a political philosopher. He chose the latter; is head of the New Zealand and various other schemes: really a remarkable man.5 Ugly, fat; altogether without eyebrows, and with a pair of small crocodile eyes of sharp blue colour, much overlapped with their fat lids,—the face of him, sitting on its great thick neck, with its dirty snub nose, mouth silent yet half-open, expressive of lazy insolence, lazy violence, coarseness, strength and sensuality, is one of the most unloveable faces! But the man is of polite manners; taciturn-emphatic in speech; a fellow of infinite shift, decision, cunning: a kind of Mirabeau with the animal intellect only. I could heave [sic] learned something from him. But you cannot handle pitch and have your fingers clean! He has great practical sense; yet is of those fools who have said in their heart, There is no God!6 The greatest fools of all."

Thomas Carlyle to John A Carlyle, 1 August 1840 in The Collected Letters, Volume 12 of The Carlyle Letters On-line at Duke University.

That Wakefield aroused powerful emotions in friends & foe alike is not in much doubt. J. E. FitzGerald, a later political opponent in New Zealand, was to say that the only security against Wakefield was to hate him intensely.

One almost feels sorry for Wakefield as the object of such eviscerating dissections. And, then, maybe not.

A biography of Wakefield may be found at that site of great New Zealand public works in the Information Age, The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.

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In fairness to Wakefield, here are some portraits of Carlyle. Interested readers can write their own descriptions of Carlyle in the comments section to see if they can match his talent for description...

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881).

The Founding Mothers

If the first humans arrived in Aoteroa-New Zealand around 1280 – 1300 AD, how many of them were there and where did they come from?

One approach to answering this question has been to combine genetic analysis with population dynamics to work back to an origin and estimate of the numbers of women of child-bearing age to produce a Maori population estimated to number around 100,000 in the early years of European or Pakeha settlement in New Zealand in the late eighteenth century.

Whyte et al analyzed the mutational changes in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) samples, known as “the Polynesian motif”, of Maori and Polynesian individuals. The low rate of diversity between the two groups mtDNA suggests that they are close ancestrally and the time since they developed in two separate locations is relatively brief – if by brief, one means 7-8 centuries. Since the mutations studied are found generally across Polynesia, no precise island location could be pinpointed as the starting point for the migration to New Zealand.

Adopting a population growth model incorporating the sigmoid (or S curve) population growth curve, Whyte et al ran computer simulations that would result in the known estimate of a total Maori population by the time of European settlement.

From these simulations, it was estimated that approximately 190 women (within a range of 170-230) of child-bearing age were among those who were on the founding waka canoes that arrived in New Zealand around 1200 AD. These numbers may be conservative as it is likely that many of those on the first waka were related hence not potential breeding partners. Further studies are underway to adjust for these kinship factors.

Source: A Whyte, S Marshall, and G Chambers, “Human Evolution in Polynesia”, Human Biology, April 2005, vol 77 no 2, 157-177.