Who was William Colenso and why is the association with him interesting and important?
William Colenso (1811-1899) arrived in New Zealand from England in December 1834 to work as a printer with the Anglican church under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society, a young man burning with missionary zeal. He was a significant and colourful figure in 19th Century New Zealand in all of his various capacities as missionary, printer, correspondent, trader, politician, linguist and first resident naturalist.
The biographies by Bagnall and Petersen (1948), Mackay (2012) and Wells (2011) give good insights into this complex man and his very colourful life. His interest in natural history, although primarily botanical, was broad and he published a number of zoological papers including several on insects.
Some recent detective work in archival correspondence between Mr Hill and Gilbert Archey, the museum’s Director at the time, confirmed that this is indeed Colenso’s giant weta specimen and I’m grateful to librarians Martin Collett and Bruce Ralston for help with this. The full story about the weta and its provenance can be read here.
In one of his letters, Hill wrote -
...and I believe that if the truth were known, that specimen is one of the oldest in N.Z. today.
- (Hill to Archey, 26 June 1931)
It certainly is the oldest insect in Auckland Museum’s collection. Enquiries to fellow curators of museums and other collections in New Zealand show that Hill's prediction was correct; it is indeed the oldest specimen of a New Zealand insect in a New Zealand collection.
The weta may also be the oldest N.Z. land animal collected alive that survives in any New Zealand collection. The oldest New Zealand bird is probably a takahe at Te Papa collected in 1851, but the oldest land vertebrate is a shore skink taken from the Bay of Islands in 1841, and is now in the Auckland Museum’s collection. It was collected by naturalists of the Erebus and Terror Antarctic Expedition under the command of James Clark Ross (1839-1943). The visit of the HMS Erebus to the Bay of Islands occasioned the meeting of Colenso and English botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker.
The two young men had an instant rapport and thus began a lifelong friendship, and collaboration. Colenso certainly showed Hooker his giant weta (Colenso 1882) and it seems probable that he (Colenso) may have seen the freshly-collected shore skink by Hooker. This is yet another link between these two pioneering naturalists who contributed so much to the early scientific knowledge of the flora and fauna of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Image (right): William Colenso, 1894, Gottfried Lindauer (b.1839, d.1926), Collection of Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust, Ruawharo Tā-ū-rangi, 7037.