Every land is a land of immigrants. From the time when their ancestors began walking out of Africa some 50-80,000 years ago, humans have spread over the surface of the globe, at times populating virgin lands, at others displacing former inhabitants by pressure of numbers or by conquest. The push to populate new lands has at times been driven by pressures operating in the former homeland, often propelled by economic imperatives or by religious or political intolerance, but at others it has been driven pure colonizing zeal. In greater or lesser degree, all these factors entered into the peopling of New Zealand. This, then, is an account of immigration to New Zealand during the nineteenth century by "ordinary people" who sailed, often under dreadful conditions, half way around the globe drawn by the promise of land. Built around the fortunes of the author's family and set within the context of the developments that were occurring at the time in the parts of New Zealand to which they came, it not only tells the story of where the immigrants settled but also the nature of the organized schemes whereby they were recruited and given assisted passage from their home countries to New Zealand.
About the Author: Edward Jones was a fourth generation New Zealander and a graduate of the School of Medicine at the University of Otago, (Mb.ChB. 1962). After a year as a house surgeon at Tauranga Hospital he turned to a career in biological research and took up an appointment in the Anatomy Department at the University of Otago. In 1965 he was awarded a prestigious Nuffield Dominions Demonstratorship to Oxford University to pursue a D. Phil. in (neuro)Anatomy. Returning to Otago University in 1969 he re-joined the faculty in the Anatomy department where he remained for three years continuing research begun at Oxford, and gaining an M.D. which is a post graduate degree in New Zealand. In 1972 he moved to the United States to a faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis. He moved to the University of California, Irvine in 1984 and then to the University of California, Davis in 1998. Edward Jones, known as Ted to family, friends and colleagues, was a man of many parts. He was a widely published and internationally distinguished scientist, a neurobiologist who was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a classical scholar and lover of literature and history for whom books and scholarship were an abiding passion, and a keen amateur winemaker and olive oil producer during the last part of his life in California. His interest in the history of his own family grew out of a desire to understand the genetics involved familial gastric cancer when he encountered a Maori family in Tauranga seriously afflicted by the disease, and later when he learned of the rather high incidence of depression leading to suicide and also inherited hemochromatosis in his own family. Edward Jones died in 2011.