An Old New Zealander — T. Lindsay Buick (1911)
T. Lindsay Buick published An Old New Zealander; or, Te Rauparaha, the Napoleon of the South in 1911. This is a later historical account, not an eyewitness narrative of the events of the 1830s and 1840s.
The publication
What the book preserves
The volume discusses Te Rauparaha, Kāpiti, Ngāti Toa, Cook Strait voyages and encounters involving traders, ships and whalers. Its illustrations list includes “Gillett’s Whaling Station, Kapiti, 1842”, credited to a sketch by Gilfillan, and a map of journeys associated with Te Rauparaha and Te Pūoho.
Reading this historical source
Buick’s descriptions and conclusions must be read in the context of his 1911 colonial-era assumptions. Some claims, especially about Polynesian origins and race, are outdated and should not be presented as current scholarship. Compare particular claims with original accounts, archaeological evidence and iwi and hapū histories.
Source and original text
T. Lindsay Buick (1911), An Old New Zealander; or, Te Rauparaha, the Napoleon of the South. Full digitised edition: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44726. See the illustrated HTML edition for the Gillett station image and its original caption.
A 1911 historical account of Kāpiti and Cook Strait
T. Lindsay Buick’s An Old New Zealander: or, Te Rauparaha, the Napoleon of the South was published in 1911. It gathers historical accounts of Te Rauparaha, Ngāti Toa, travel and conflict in Cook Strait, and encounters involving European vessels and traders. Its value is as an early twentieth-century synthesis of material that can be traced to earlier witnesses and publications.
Of particular interest to WhaleLIBRARY is its illustration captioned Gillett’s Whaling Station, Kapiti, 1842, credited to a sketch by Gilfillan. The image should be catalogued as a historical illustration with its stated date and source, not mistaken for a photograph. Buick’s account also needs careful reading against iwi histories and later scholarship because some of its colonial-era interpretations are outdated.
Research source: www.gutenberg.org — view record
A published history and a picture’s provenance
T. Lindsay Buick’s An Old New Zealander (1911) is a later historical account, not a contemporary logbook of the 1830s. The library uses it as a route into the published memory of early Kāpiti and Cook Strait history while checking particular assertions against contemporary sources.
The collection also records a watercolour copy made in 1907 from an 1844 sketch of Gillett’s whaling station. These are two different dates: the original scene was sketched in the nineteenth-century whaling period, while the surviving copy belongs to the early twentieth century. It is not a photograph.
The original artist, copyist, collection record and reproduction rights should accompany any image display. Where the spelling Jillett or Gillett varies between records, the source form should be retained and the variant indexed rather than silently “corrected”.