Passages

Every land is a land of immigrants. From the time when their ancestors began walking out of Africa some 50-80,000 years ago, humans have spread over the surface of the globe, at times populating virgin lands, at others displacing former inhabitants by pressure of numbers or by conquest. The push to populate new lands has at times been driven by pressures operating in the former homeland, often propelled by economic imperatives or by religious or political intolerance, but at others it has been driven pure colonizing zeal. In greater or lesser degree, all these factors entered into the peopling of New Zealand. This, then, is an account of immigration to New Zealand during the nineteenth century by "ordinary people" who sailed, often under dreadful conditions, half way around the globe drawn by the promise of land. Built around the fortunes of the author's family and set within the context of the developments that were occurring at the time in the parts of New Zealand to which they came, it not only tells the story of where the immigrants settled but also the nature of the organized schemes whereby they were recruited and given assisted passage from their home countries to New Zealand.