CHAPTEE VI 



SOUTH AGAIN : NEW ZEALAND AND THE CAPE 



In ten days they made the Three Kings' Islands, and on 

 August 16 entered the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Here the 

 ships stayed till November 17. New Zealand was still regarded 

 by many who had spent years there as hopeless for colonisation. 

 * Colonists,' wrote Dr. Sinclair sweep ingly, * had nothing to 

 do except they put themselves on a par with the natives and 

 breed pigs, cultivate potatoes on the sides of hills and perhaps 

 turn savages.' To a botanist, however, it was fascinating. 

 Hooker, under the guidance of Mr. Colenso,^ the printer to the 

 missionary establishment, and himself a keen botanist, made 

 a number of excursions into the country, though it was all 

 too swampy to go far, collecting many specimens, especially 

 of the Cryptogams, for the Bay of Islands was otherwise a 

 comparatively well-known centre. 



From New Zealand, on November 23, 1841, the ships set 

 out for their second voyage to the South, sailing on a more 

 easterly meridian in order to reach the Great Ice Barrier at 

 the point where they had been compelled to turn back the 



^ William Colenso (1811-99). He was born at Penzance, and was a 

 cousin to the late Bishop Colenso of Natal. As a youth he was apprenticed 

 to a printer of Penzance, and later was employed by the British and Foreign 

 Bible Society in the same capacity. The Society sent him to New Zealand in 

 1834 with the first printing press established there. In 1844 he became a 

 missionary, and after training at St. John's Coll., Auckland, was ordained to 

 a church in Napier, where he lived till his death. His botanical writings, though 

 numerous, are fragmentary and are chiefly contributions to the Tasmanian 

 Journal of Natural Science and of the New Zealand Institute, «&c. For sixty 

 years he collected information regarding the language, customs, songs, &c. of 

 the Maori. F.L.S. 1865 and F.R.S. in 1886. Sir Joseph named the genus 

 Colensoa after him. 



124 



