William Colenso. 



REV. WILLIAM COLENSO. 1811-1890. 



WILLIAM COLENSO, born at Penzance, Cornwall, in 1811, was the 

 eldest son of Samuel May Colenso, who married Mary Veale Thomas, 

 both being natives of that town. On his father's side he was cousin to 

 the late Bishop Colenso, of Natal, and on his mother's to Sir Penrose 

 Goodchild Julyan, a colonial official. As a youth he was apprenticed 

 to a printer of Penzance, from whence he went to London, where ha 

 was employed in the same capacity by the British and Foreign Bible 

 Society. This led to his being sent by the Society to New Zealand, 

 whither, in December, 1834, he carried the first printing press that was 

 established in that group of islands. This occurred five years before 

 they became a British Colony. 



The mission station was at Pahia, in the Bay of Islands, where, 

 within six weeks of his arrival, though hampered by an incomplete out- 

 fit, he printed the Epistles to the Ephesians and Philippians in the 

 Maori language. By the third following year he had printed the whole 

 New Testament in Maori, and, with the assistance of natives only, had 

 bound the copies with his own hands. 



In 1844 he abandoned the work of printer, left Pahia for Hawke's 

 Bay, took to missionary work, and after a training by Bishop Selwyn 

 at St. John's College, Auckland, was ordained to a church in Napier, 

 where he resided till his death in 1899. 



From the date of his arrival in New Zealand Mr. Colenso took an 

 active interest in the history, folk-lore, habits, languages, &c., of the 

 natives, and being gifted with the love of natural history and of travel, 

 a cultivated mind, an iron constitution, and methodical habits as an 

 observer, collector, and recorder, all of which he used to the best 

 advantage during a long life, it is 1101 surprising that he was regarded 

 as the Nestor of science in a colony his arrival in which antedated its 

 foundation. 



It was by a visit to the Bay of Islands in 1838 by Allan Cunningham,* 

 the celebrated Australian botanist and explorer, then in charge of the 

 Botanical Gardens of Sydney, that Mr. Colenso's attention was first 

 drawn to botany; and to this visit, and those of Darwin in the 

 "Beagle" in 1835, and of the Antarctic Expedition under Sir James 



* Allan Cunningham was naturalist in Capt. King's surveying voyage of the 

 coasts of Australia, and discoverer of ^he Darling Downs, to which the sudden 

 expansion of the sheep industry in New South Wales was due. 



