New Zealand's Declaration of Independence

On May 5, 1833, James Busby arrived in New Zealand to take up his appointment as Britain’s Resident in the country. The role of Resident was similar to that of a diplomat—Busby had no powers to enforce British law, raise taxes, or command any troops. Instead, he was instructed by colonial authorities to “conciliate the good-will of the native chiefs,” in order to maintain “tranquillity throughout the islands.” New Zealand had a settler population at this time of around 300 (most of whom were British), and an indigenous Maori population of perhaps 100,000. However, the main European settlement, in the northern town of Kororareka (in the Bay of Islands), was notorious for its lawlessness (it was popularly known as the “hell-hole of the Pacific”), and the British government was well aware of the harmful effects this group of settlers was having on surrounding Maori communities.

Busby was also asked to bring about peace between warring Maori tribes and even more ambitiously, to establish “a settled form of government” if possible. However, in the following two years, Busby’s influence in New Zealand proved to be slight. He had no means of enforcing his decisions, and technically, British law did not apply in the country, so Europeans lived in what was literally a lawless society. Frequent incidents of arson, theft, and stabbings within the country’s main European settlement at this time confirmed Busby’s powerlessness, and he became known among locals as a “man-o-war without guns.” Yet, despite repeated requests for more assistance and authority, his superiors in the neighboring British colony of New South Wales would not change the terms of his appointment.

By 1835, the situation in Kororareka was deteriorating, and Busby’s inability to control the behavior of some settlers was becoming more apparent. At the same time, authorities in New South Wales were refusing to allocate any troops to New Zealand to assist in maintaining order, despite Busby’s repeated pleas for them to do so. The pressure on him increased in September, when he received a letter from Baron Charles de Thierry—a French businessman and would-be colonist—announcing that he would soon be asserting sovereignty over New Zealand. Busby was convinced that de Thierry represented a serious threat to the country, and used this fear of a “French invasion” as a pretext to declare New Zealand’s independence.

On October 28, 1835, Busby obtained the signatures of thirty-four chiefs in the vicinity of Kororareka to his Declaration of Independence. The document, prepared in English and Maori, consisted of four articles. The first article referred to the chiefs who signed the document as being known, from that time onward, as members of the Confederation of United Tribes of New Zealand. However, these chiefs in no way represented all the tribes in the country, and so a codicil was added to the Declaration which clarified that those chiefs who were unable to attend the initial signing would still be able to join the Confederation at a later date.

The second article was at the heart of the Declaration. It asserted that “All sovereign power and authority within the territories of the United Tribes of New Zealand” was declared to reside “entirely and exclusively in the hereditary chiefs and heads of tribes in their collective capacity.” In addition, the signatories would “not permit any legislative authority separate from themselves in their collective capacity to exist.” The Confederation of Chiefs would therefore be the sole law-making institution in the country. Even Britain would not have the chance of exercising any formal jurisdiction in New Zealand unless the Confederation gave its permission. This article was especially important because while it aimed to deter any French intervention in New Zealand, it also prohibited the further encroachment of British authority in the country as well.

The Declaration’s third article offered an indication of how the Confederation would function. The Maori signatories would gather at Waitangi (in the Bay of Islands) every autumn and assemble as a form of parliament where they would pass laws “for the dispensation of justice, the preservation of peace and good order, and the regulation of trade” in the country. However, this went against the grain of longstanding political differences between various tribes, and so Busby also proposed that chiefs from outside the region be invited to “lay aside their private animosities” in the interests of “the safety and welfare of our common country” and join the Confederation of United Tribes.

The Declaration’s fourth and final article was written mainly for the benefit of Busby’s superiors in London. In it, the chiefs thanked the king (William IV) in anticipation of “his acknowledgement of their flag.” In return, they were prepared to protect “such of his subjects as have settled in their country, or resorted to its shores for the purposes of trade.”

Colonial officials in New South Wales were immediately concerned that the Declaration would be an impediment to the British government asserting more formal levels of jurisdiction over its subjects living in New Zealand. And in London, officials considered that Busby had acted “unwisely and . . . with great indiscretion” in creating the Declaration of Independence, on the basis that there was no way that Britain could endorse an agreement that would impede its ability to regulate its citizens or shipping in New Zealand. However, Busby responded to these concerns by claiming that Britain did not in any way “seek to promote the ascendance of British power or the extension of British interests at the sacrifice of the just rights of the Natives.” He also believed that there was no point in trying to impose on Maori a system of government that they may not have wanted. Instead, he hoped that through the Declaration, “the chiefs might be led to enact and to aid by their influence and power the enforcement of whatever laws the British Government might determine might be advantageous to the country,” and even went as far as to suggest that the Declaration was “the most effective mode of making the country a dependency of [the] British Empire in every thing but name.”

However, the Declaration failed to achieve any of its immediate goals. The Confederation of Chiefs never met, and so never passed any laws. And by 1837, some of the signatories to the Declaration were at war with each other, which destroyed the unity of the Confederation. On top of this, there was no official backing from Britain or New South Wales for the Declaration, which also contributed to its failure. One official denounced it as “a silly as well as an unauthorized act . . . it was, in fact, as I have said before, a paper pellet fired off at the Baron de Thierry,” and little more.

The failure of the 1835 Declaration of Independence led to Britain reconsidering its policy on New Zealand. This resulted in a set of instructions that were issued in 1839 for a British consul to go to the country and conclude a formal treaty with the chiefs, which would clarify the relationship between the two nations. The result was the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), signed by approximately 540 chiefs, which remains in effect to the present day.

Paul Moon, a professor of history at Auckland University of Technology, is the author of The Rise and Fall of James Busby: His Majesty’s British Resident in New Zealand (Bloomsbury, 2020).