Abstract
In the minds of many Europeans, the islands of the South Pacific, including New Zealand, were an earthly paradise, as evident in the description of Tahiti in 1769 by Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain James Cook on the Endeavour.1 Yet Tahiti was a landscape assembled largely from plant and animal species brought in by people from elsewhere in the tropics. Even in paradise, however, there were limits to how many residents, let alone visitors, the food-producing systems of a Pacific island could support, as crew members of the Endeavour discovered when they tried to obtain supplies outside the harvest period. Much the same was true of New Zealand.
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John C. Beaglehole, ed., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Public Library of New South Wales and Angus & Roberson. 1963).
Peter Holland, Vaughan Wood, and Philippa Dixon, “Learning About the Weather in Early Colonial New Zealand,” Weather & Climate 29 (2009): 3–23.
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Don Garden, Droughts, Floods & Cyclones: El Niños that Shaped our Colonial Past (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010), 199–225.
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James Beattie, “Rethinking Science, Religion and Nature in Environmental History: Drought in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand,” Historical Social Research 29 (2004): 82–103; Garden, Droughts, Floods & Cyclones.
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© 2014 James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry
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Holland, P., Williams, J. (2014). Pioneer Settlers Recognizing and Responding to the Climatic Challenges of Southern New Zealand. In: Beattie, J., O’Gorman, E., Henry, M. (eds) Climate, Science, and Colonization. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_5
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