Darwin stumped by early cricket

Northlander and Black Cap Tim Southee is the toast of New Zealand after his record-breaking 7 wickets for 33 runs routed England in the World Cup on Friday.

Cricket World Cup fans might be surprised to learn about the link between a cricket game played in Northland in 1835 and Darwin's theory of evolution.

All right, we've used a bit of poetic licence there, but it is a fact that in his book The Voyage of the Beagle Charles Darwin wrote about a cricket game played in late 1835 at Te Waimate Mission Station, where the pre-eminent scientist, survival-of-the-fittest theorist and author of The Origin of the Species was staying at the time.

During his visit to New Zealand, Darwin was decidedly unimpressed with Kororareka (now Russell) "the hellhole of the Pacific".

Darwin had arrived in the Bay of Islands on December 21, 1835, and after being thoroughly disgusted by the grog-shops and brothels of the town, he and Beagle captain Robert FitzRoy took up missionary William Williams' offer to visit the Waimate mission station, 21km inland from Paihia.

At the station, set up by the Church Missionary Society to spread the Christian message and European farming techniques among local Maori, Darwin and FitzRoy were pleased to find an oasis of English civilisation, complete with cups of tea and cricket on the lawn.

Darwin recalls the scene: "Several young men redeemed by the missionaries from slavery were employed on the farm. In the evening I saw a party of them at cricket: when I thought of the austerity of which the missionaries are accused I was amused by observing one of their sons taking an active part in the game."

The first recorded game of cricket in New Zealand had taken place a few years earlier, in 1832 at Paihia, on the beach called Horotutu.

In December of that year, after equipment sent for by Rev Williams had arrived, two groups of students celebrated the end of the school term with a game of cricket on the beach.

It was not quite cricket. Rather than an 11-a-side match, each team fielded an enthusiastic 40-50 people in an early example of bicultural sportsmanship in which missionary families and local rangatira took part.

Edwin Fairburn later recorded in his diary that he scored a run when Rev Williams bowled, but the next bowler laid his wickets flat.

Fairburn, the son of W.T. Fairburn, catechist with the Church Missionary Society, was born at Paihia in 1827, the eleventh Pakeha child born in New Zealand.

He would have been only 5-years-old when his "wickets were laid flat" but, as he was educated at Te Waimate Mission, he might well have been one of the missionaries' sons taking an active part in the game, Darwin wrote about two years later.