Plate 16. From the Book. Pictorial illustrations of New Zealand

This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024) on pages 58-59.
This extract was authored by Rebecca Rice.

Samuel Brees was employed by the New Zealand Company in Wellington as principal surveyor and engineer from February 1842 to May 1845.1 He and his team were active in Wellington and the Hutt Valley, completing the survey of 1000 sections in rough land (these sectional subdivisions remain the basis of land registration for title purposes today).2 His employment was ill-timed, however. By 1843, following William Spain’s investigation and in the wake of the Wairau affray, the New Zealand Company was virtually bankrupt, with most of its land titles in dispute. Tensions in the Wellington region heightened when the company, seeking arable land, turned its attention to the Hutt Valley. Brees continued to lead the survey of land in Wellington and the Wairarapa, but in 1844 colonising operations were temporarily suspended. Without work, he pursued his favourite leisure activity of making sketches and watercolours of the increasingly colonised environment, views that were praised for their ‘correctness and truth to nature’ as well as for having subjects who were ‘happilyselected’.3 Brees’s views were circulated to a European audience as prints, intended to provide evidence of the company’s success. The presence of imperial soldiers in this scene could allude to the ferment in Wellington, but historian Charlotte Macdonald suggests that their very presence served as reassurance. She observes that in The Bank, Wellington, ‘two key underpinnings of British order were unambiguously and reassuringly visible: a bank to secure the gold, coin, bullion and notes of solid capital . . . and arms-bearing soldiers of the Queen who could be called upon to enforce order against theft or unruliness’.4 There would be no fighting until 1846, but precautions were taken in the same month that Brees left Wellington: in May 1845, detachments of the 96th and 58th Regiments as well as local militia were stationed at Thorndon Fort, Te Aro Barracks and Fort Richmond.5

1 Marian Minson, ‘Brees, Samuel Charles’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography [1990], Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand (teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1b31/brees-samuel-charles, accessed 6 April 2020).
2 AG Bagnall et al., ‘S. C. Brees, Artist and Surveyor’, in Turnbull Library Record, vol. 1, no. 4 (November 1868), pp. 36–53 (paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/TLR19681101.2.7, accessed 3 April 2020). 
3 New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian, 3 May 1845, p. 2. 
4 Charlotte Macdonald, ‘Woolwich to Wellington: From settler colony to garrisoned sovereignty’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 53, no. 1 (2019), p. 53. 
5 ‘District Orders’, Wellington Independent, 28 May 1845, p. 2.