Otago settlement founded

The Otago coast was Ngāi Tahu country. Their main settlement on the harbour was Ōtākou, near its entrance, and from 1831 the Weller brothers ran a whaling station beside it. Leaders such as Taiaroa and Karetai had dealt with sealers and whalers for years, and Karetai signed the treaty at Ōtākou on 13 June 1840. Disease had meanwhile cut deeply into the southern population and weakened the tribe's hold on its resources. In March 1844 the New Zealand Company's surveyor Frederick Tuckett sailed south from Nelson in the schooner Deborah to find a site for the planned Scottish settlement of New Edinburgh, and settled on Otago Harbour. He persuaded Taiaroa, Karetai and other chiefs to sell, and the deed for the Otago block was signed on 31 July 1844: some 400,000 acres by the figure of the time (NZHistory gives a modern estimate of about 534,000) for £2,400. Ngāi Tahu understood that a tenth of the block would be kept for them. Taiaroa and other leaders later travelled to Wellington to protest that they had never received it.

The settlers' side of the plan grew out of a split in Scotland's established church. In 1843 a large body of ministers and congregations left the Church of Scotland to form the Free Church, a move towards lay control. George Rennie and William Cargill, a retired army captain who had served under Wellington in India and the Peninsular War, had been promoting a Scots settlement along the lines of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's 'systematic colonisation', and on Wakefield's prompting they approached the Free Church. The Free Church minister Thomas Burns, a nephew of the poet Robert Burns, was appointed to the scheme in 1843. Years of setbacks followed. The Colonial Office obstructed it, the New Zealand Company would not provide adequate financial backing, and Scots were reluctant to go so far. Burns forced out the more liberal Rennie, and the venture became an exclusively Free Church one. The planned name New Edinburgh gave way to Otago, a version of Ōtākou, though the town was called Dunedin, a Gaelic form of Edinburgh. The company finally gained legal title to the block in 1847.

Cargill sailed from Gravesend on 24 November 1847 in the John Wickliffe with 96 others. Burns left Greenock a few days later in the Philip Laing, which he ran as a 'floating theocracy', with divine service every day and three times on Sundays. The John Wickliffe arrived off Otago Peninsula on 21 March 1848 and entered the harbour in calm autumn weather two days later, anchoring at what is now Port Chalmers; Cargill marked the moment by comparing the settlers to the Pilgrim Fathers. The Philip Laing arrived on 15 April. Sources differ on its numbers: Burns's biography says 239 people sailed with him, while Cargill's gives 246 passengers. Little had been done to prepare for them. There was no wharf and no proper road, a harsh, wet winter followed, and the Scots majority quarrelled with the English and Anglican minority, whom Cargill called the 'little enemy'. Sources differ on how many were Free Church: Te Ara says only about half of households, NZHistory two-thirds of the first settlers.

The settlement grew slowly. The New Zealand Company withdrew its support in 1850, and the land suited sheep better than the grain farming Wakefield had pictured; by 1861 some half a million sheep were grazing in Otago. A Sabbath ordinance banned games, work, shooting and shop sales on Sundays, and free public primary schooling was introduced, as in Scotland. Cargill was elected the province's first superintendent in 1853. Then the Tuapeka gold rush of 1861 drew miners from Victoria, and by 1881 Dunedin was the country's largest urban centre. By then Ngāi Tahu were a small minority in Otago, and the 1844 sale had become part of a claim they pursued for some 150 years. In 1991 the Waitangi Tribunal found that the Crown had owed Ngāi Tahu further provision beyond the reserves agreed at the Ōtākou purchase, perhaps through the promised tenths, and had never met it. The Crown apologised in the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998.