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Overview
This flag was made on the Tory during its voyage from England to New Zealand in 1839 and raised at Petone on 30 September. The Tory carried New Zealand Company agents who intended to buy land from Māori. William Wakefield, the principal agent, referred to the flag as the 'colours of New Zealand' and the Tory gave it a twenty-one gun salute. It is possibly one of several used by the Company.
Design
The flag's design was based on a flag adopted by a group of Māori chiefs at Waitangi in 1834 when New Zealand was an independent territory. The flag came to be known as the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand, a term derived from an 1835 declaration of the country's independence by a group of northern chiefs.
Significance
The flag was the New Zealand Company's acknowledgement of the independent status of the country. After chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the British Crown in February 1840, the Union Jack was used as the national flag. When the Company continued to use the original New Zealand flag, Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson saw this as a challenge to the Crown's authority and dispatched an armed party to lower it on 30 June 1840. The next day the Union Jack was raised and British sovereignty proclaimed.
Māori attachment to flag
Despite the adoption of the Union Jack, the 1834 flag continues to have a special relevance to Māori and to the Treaty of Waitangi, and is known as Te Kara (The Colour).
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 page 45.
This extract was authored by Matiu Baker.
In May 1839, a New Zealand Company expedition, led by Colonel William Wakefield, Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s brother and the company’s principal agent, left for New Zealand aboard the barque Tory. He was accompanied by his 19-year-old nephew, Edward Jerningham Wakefield; Te Whāiti, who acted as interpreter; and a young artist and surveyor, Charles Heaphy. During the voyage, one of the Tory’s sailmakers made this flag for the New Zealand Company. Pieced together and hand-stitched from wool bunting and linen – materials found on board – it is styled after the flag adopted by the group of Māori rangatira at Waitangi in 1834, known as the United Tribes flag.