Careless Talk
A French sea-captain let his tongue wag over dinner, and New Zealand’s destiny took a different turn.
1840
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
A French sea-captain let his tongue wag over dinner, and New Zealand’s destiny took a different turn.
1840
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
When Britain finally decided to make a colony of New Zealand, she sent Captain William Hobson (1792-1842) of the Royal Navy to North Island, as Lieutenant to the Governor of New South Wales in Australia. He landed at Kororareka (now Russell) in the Bay of Islands on January 29th, 1840.
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SO little was known or thought of the South Island that sovereignty was not proclaimed over it until four months after the Governor’s arrival in the North, and even then the royal flag was not hoisted there. The consequence was a narrow escape from an attempt by the French to plant a colony at Akaroa in Banks Peninsula.*
The French frigate ‘L’Aube’ put in at the Bay of Islands in July, 1840, bound for the south.* Her captain, hospitably entertained by Hobson, let fall some incautious words about the object of his voyage. Hobson took the alarm and promptly dispatched the ‘Britomart’ to hoist the English flag at Akaroa.* Thanks to bad weather, the ‘Britomart’ only reached the threatened port a few days before the Frenchmen.
The captain of ‘L’Aube’ finding himself forestalled good-humouredly made the best of it. A number of the immigrants did indeed land. There around a bay, still called French Bay, they planted vineyards and built cottages in a fashion having some pathetic* reminiscences of rural France.
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See Google Maps. Banks Peninsula is named after the botanist Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820).
L’Aube means ‘the dawn’ in French.
A monument now marks the spot: see Wikimedia Commons. ‘Britomart’ has become something of a New Zealand brand: the Britomart Transport Hub is a busy railway station at the heart of Auckland’s Britomart Central Business District. The name has nothing to do with Britain or markets: it derives from Britomartis, a Cretan goddess of hunting and nets. She was associated with Mount Dikte, the birthplace of Zeus, and also with the island of Aegina.
‘Pathetic’ does not have to be pejorative, though today it usually is; in the Nineteenth century, it could still carry its older meaning of poignant or emotional. “The separation between her and her family” said Jane Austen of Lydia Bennet going to Brighton “was rather noisy than pathetic” (Pride and Prejudice, 1813).
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.