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Constantly 'Inconstant'- Colonial Wellington

© Philippa Jane Ballantine

This is a story about a young land, a hidden ship, and a driven man. For its mysteries to be revealed you have to travel far to the south, and back in time.

Dipping into the depths of the Southern oceans, and running back into the nineteenth century there was a little known little traveled corner of the world,. This place was a hive of activity, with strong masted ships plying the ocean carrying people into a new world. Here colonization was going on; in the nineteenth century New Zealand was being born. Later to arise to nationhood than Australia or America, it none the less went through the same birth pangs. It was and is a country of mountains and lakes, in those days barely broken by the thick layer of dense green forest (called bush in these southern climes), and it was a world away from the 'civilized' nations of Europe and America. It also attracted a similar kind of person in those early years as had journeyed to the Wild West or the back blocks of Australia; the rough, the brave and those looking for opportunity that the old world they knew did not offer them.

In the bottom of the northern of the two islands that make up the country, in a sheltered harbor that the native Maori called the Harbor of Tara, a young capital city was being constructed- or what would become a capital. The muddy streets and hastily constructed buildings of Wellington seemed to offer little chance of being a national capital in those days. The surroundings were far more regal though; a beautiful tree lined harbor, nestled in the all most encircling curve of the hills. The area was occasionally buffeted by the wild winds that met in the Cook Strait that is the gateway to the Southern Island, but the weather was generally kind. Unlike other new nations, New Zealand was being intensively colonized systematically. Wellington had been one of the first experiments of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's New Zealand Company. He'd wanted to bring immigrants to New Zealand in an organized fashion.

Unfortunately however by making too many bad decisions, such as wrong surveying of the land and ill thought out purchases from the local Maori tribes, he'd doomed his efforts. History would not look kindly on Wakefield and his schemes. Still when a young Englishman named John Plimmer stepped ashore in Wellington, everything must have seemed new and exciting. There was no proper anchorage for the ships at that point, so he would have been rowed ashore. Surely he must have wondered what he had done bringing his family to this wild untamed shore.