An Authoritative Voice

Charles Darwin visited New Zealand in December 1835 when the HMS Beagle dropped anchor in the Bay of Islands. Getting ready to teach my environmental ethics class in New Zealand, I recently read the relevant chapter from Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle.

He ends the chapter on a sour note, in his entry for December 30th:

In the afternoon we stood out of the Bay of Islands, on our course to Sydney. I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand.  It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity which is found in Tahiti; and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society. Neither is the country itself attractive. I look back but to one bright spot, and that is Waimate, with its Christian inhabitants.

The problem may have been more with Darwin's perception and his judgment than with New Zealand itself: he looked at it through the eyes of a young English gentleman of the era, and what he saw was not enough like the pastoral English countryside to please him. Even later in his life, when he had good reason to know better, he could never quite shake his European chauvinism, and his condescension toward "savages."

We'll go to New Zealand with a different outlook, I think. But then, New Zealand itself has changed since 1835, through decades of enthusiastic (and sometimes accidental) transformation of the landscape. I understand that New Zealand looks a lot more like England now than it did then . . .