Paul Moon: Fitzroy

David Ling Publishing

$34.95

Review: Jack Leigh*

Poor Captain FitzRoy. They gave him a command which was low in the water and seething with mutiny. And its name was New Zealand.

The ship did not sink, but Robert FitzRoy did and history sees only his disgrace, making little allowance for the hopelessness of his task and the ferocity with which his best efforts were scuttled.

It is true he was high-minded and high-handed, an autocrat who made it clear from the start that as our second Governor, from 1843-45, he was here to rule and not be ruled. But historian Paul Moon goes to original sources to discover what he calls "an entirely different person" from the one usually shown. The result is a compelling, consistent and fascinating portrait. Anyone so complex would have to be the real man.

When he arrived here just after the massacre of 22 Europeans at Wairau near Nelson, it was clear that with few troops and the colonists outnumbered 900 to one, it was no time to fight the Maori. But his decision not to seek revenge was only partly an appeasement. A strong sense of justice later led him to protect Maori from settler land-hunger, and the colonising New Zealand Company - whose business was threatened by the very presence of a British Governor - knew it had a dangerous enemy. The company went to war on FitzRoy both here and in Britain and brought him down.

Far from neglecting the settlers, FitzRoy claimed he was saving them from annihilation by preserving peace with the Maori. Twice in 1844 he feared for the safety of Auckland, a "straggling wooden town which might have burned like dry grass."

Efforts to revive the cash-strapped colonial economy led him to issue debenture notes and to tinker with the sources of revenue, even adjusting the Treaty of Waitangi to London's annoyance (a move reversed by his successor George Grey, who received better Colonial Office support than FitzRoy). Seaborne dispatches to and from Britain were slow but very detailed. They could get lost. Duplicates were recommended.

FitzRoy's Irish Protestant family had a blood connection with royalty and an aristocratic standing which had survived "the faint smear of illegitimacy." As the captain of HMS Beagle on its famous five-year voyage he was a close but anti-evolutionist companion of Charles Darwin, who found him moody and given to "austere silence produced by excessive thinking."

The fact is that FitzRoy took his work seriously, whether producing superb charts of the South American coast, being a British MP, trying to save the fledgling colony of New Zealand from self-destruction or, finally, battling an undeserved sense of failure in his devotion to weather forecasting, of which he was a foremost pioneer. He was made a Vice-admiral in 1863.

Though the reader of this absorbing book will be in no doubt of FitzRoy's great worth, he renounced it by killing himself with a razor in 1865, aged 59. The Royal Society of which he was a member, concluded that the "severe mental strain" of weather prediction contributed to his death.

* Jack Leigh is an Auckland journalist.