Nelson settlement established

Nelson was to be the New Zealand Company's second settlement, after Wellington. The Company's scheme called for 1,100 allotments of 201 acres each, all of it 'arable, cultivable land': 221,100 acres in all, one-tenth of which would become 'Native Tenths Reserves'. Before a site had even been chosen, word reached Wellington that immigrant ships were already on their way from England. The Company's claim to the district rested on deals William Wakefield had made in 1839 with Ngāti Toa leaders, including Te Rauparaha, who later insisted he had sold only Whakatū and Te Taitapu, the Nelson and Golden Bay areas. The land itself lay in Te Tau Ihu (the prow of Māui's canoe), the Māori name for the northern South Island, where the right to it was layered. In 1828 Te Rauparaha's alliance of Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Rārua, Ngāti Tama and Te Āti Awa had overwhelmed the earlier Ngāti Kuia, Ngāti Apa and Rangitāne, and the resident chiefs rejected Ngāti Toa's claim to the area.

The Company sent Captain Arthur Wakefield, a naval officer in his early forties and brother of William and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, to found the settlement. His advance party reached Wellington in September 1841 and held talks with Governor William Hobson before heading for Tasman Bay. In October three small ships, the Arrow, Will Watch and Whitby, sailed from Wellington and anchored at Astrolabe Roadstead, and parties explored Riwaka, Moutere, Motueka and the Waimea. Māori told Wakefield of their fishing grounds at Te Whakatū. On 19 October a boat party that included a Māori man named Pito crossed the bay and found a harbour sheltered behind the 13-kilometre Boulder Bank. Wakefield chose the Maitai River flats beside it, close to the Waimea Plains. The site had no permanent Māori residents, but several iwi (tribes) harvested its resources by season.

Wakefield's party had three months to survey town sections and farms and put up shelter. The first immigrant ship, the Fifeshire, was sighted on 1 February 1842, and by 1844 Nelson was celebrating that date as its anniversary. The Fifeshire herself was wrecked at Nelson later that year. Many early homes were fern huts; one settler recalled a woman who said that when the river rose and the rain came through, 'we stand on top of a big box, and hold up an umbrella all night'. Ships kept arriving, and within a few months the town had a population of several thousand. Germans followed, 140 on the St Pauli in 1843 and 141 on the Skiold in 1844. Nelson Māori at first did well selling food to the newcomers.

The trouble was land. The town sat against the hills, with far less flat land than the plan needed. Relations with Māori soured when the Company and the Crown went back on some of the purchase terms, and the hunt for more farmland led to the Wairau valley, where in June 1843 Arthur Wakefield and 21 other settlers were killed. Organised immigration stopped that year as the Company ran out of money. Commissioner William Spain's inquiry into the Company's purchases led to a Crown grant for Nelson, signed in late July 1845. The Native Tenths Reserves were meant to keep a tenth of the land for Māori, but the Crown appointed trustees to run them, leaving the Māori owners no say, and by the 1970s Nelson Māori were left with little more than 3,000 of the roughly 20,000 acres guaranteed by the 1840s purchase agreements. In 2008 the Waitangi Tribunal found Treaty breaches, including the failure to set aside the tenths, and Te Tau Ihu settlement legislation passed in 2014. In 2017 the Supreme Court ruled that the Crown had a duty to provide the tenths to their customary owners, and the dispute was finally settled between the Crown and Te Tau Ihu Māori in 2025.