1847 Wakefield and Featherston duel

Dr Isaac Featherston, the editor of the Wellington Independent, strongly attacked the New Zealand Company’s land policy in his newspaper’s 24 March 1847 issue. Colonel William Wakefield, the Company’s Principal Agent in New Zealand, interpreted this editorial as a thinly disguised accusation that he was a thief. In the resulting duel, held at Te Aro, Wellington, Featherston fired first and missed. Wakefield then fired into the air, commenting that he ‘would not shoot a man who had seven daughters’. Duelling was going out of favour as a means for upper-class men to reclaim their injured honour; this seems to have been the last duel fought in Wellington.

Featherston had arrived at Wellington in May 1841 as surgeon superintendent on board the New Zealand Company ship Olympus. He practiced medicine in Wellington and was heavily involved in local affairs. In 1853 he would be elected unopposed as the first superintendent of Wellington province.

After becoming the first editor of the Wellington Independent in 1845, Featherston used the paper to attack the New Zealand Company for deceiving migrants. He had himself been bitterly disappointed on arrival in Wellington: ‘Did those mud hovels scattered along the beach, or those wooden huts which appeared every here and there … represent the City of Wellington?’ Where, he asked, were the hundreds of acres of ‘fine fertile land which shall produce such astounding crops?’ His own investment was no more than ‘a useless swamp worth nothing’. William Wakefield, the Company’s main representative in Wellington, bore the brunt of his complaints.