New Zealand Company | United Tribes flag

In May 1839, a New Zealand Company expedition, led by Colonel William Wakefield, Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s brother and the company’s principal agent, left for New Zealand aboard the barque Tory with the intention to buy land from Māori.

He was accompanied by his 19-year-old nephew, Edward Jerningham Wakefield; Te Whāiti, who acted as interpreter; and a young artist and surveyor, Charles Heaphy.

During the voyage, one of the Tory’s sailmakers made this flag for the New Zealand Company pieced together and hand-stitched from wool bunting and linen – materials found on board – and it was raised at Petone on 30 September 1839.

William Wakefield referred to the flag as the ‘colours of New Zealand’ and the Tory gave it a twenty-one gun salute. It is possibly one of several used by the Company.

Design

The flag’s design was based on a flag adopted by a group of Māori chiefs at Waitangi in 1834 when New Zealand was an independent territory. The flag came to be known as the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand, a term derived from an 1835 declaration of the country’s independence by a group of northern chiefs.

Significance

The flag was the New Zealand Company’s acknowledgement of the independent status of the country. After chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the British Crown in February 1840, the Union Jack was used as the national flag. When the Company continued to use the original New Zealand flag, Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson saw this as a challenge to the Crown’s authority and dispatched an armed party to lower it on 30 June 1840. The next day the Union Jack was raised and British sovereignty proclaimed.

Māori attachment to the flag

Despite the adoption of the Union Jack, the 1834 flag continues to have a special relevance to Māori and to the Treaty of Waitangi, and is known as Te Kara.

Watch a video about the flag

Watch Riria Hotere discussing one of our country’s oldest and most controversial flags in this episode of Tales of Te Papa.