New Zealand Maritime History Up to 1840: People, Ships, Trade and Settlement

A typescript manuscript of a book titled They Came by Sea by Rear Admiral John O’C. Ross was left to the National Library by his widow in 1983. Rear Admiral Ross, CB,CBE was the retired Chief of Naval staff who had written and published two books, his Stern Coast and The Red Ensign in New Zealand as well as numerous articles for historical journals. The manuscript was complete but required indexing and formatting for publication. The subject of the manuscript was that of all shipping arrivals in New Zealand to 1840, some 1750 arrivals in total, and records all the information that Rear Admiral Ross could find on the ship’s visits.

Despite the huge amount of information in the manuscript, no writers of pre 1840 New Zealand history appear to have referenced it. And yet it shows that by 1838 about 4 ships arrived in New Zealand per week, almost all to trade in some form. These traders visited almost all parts of the New Zealand coast that had a navigable haven, and with every trading operation there were contacts between Europeans and Maori- pure trading, frequent intermarriage, formal and informal land transactions, employment and travel offshore for Maori.

This well documented account paints a very different portrait of relationships in pre-Treaty New Zealand than do records from Governments, missionaries, and the New Zealand Company.