Articles in ‘History’

THIS IS THE ONLY TREATY DOCUMENT EVER ISSUED BY THE GOVERNMENT FOR USE IN THE TREATY PRESENTATION AND SIGNING ASSEMBLIES AT MANUKAU, PORT WAIKATO AND KAWHIA. NOTE: IT IS IN THE MAORI LANGUAGE! The foregoing is the ONLY official treaty document (handwritten by James Stuart Freeman in Maori) ever issued by the colonial government for use in the signing ceremonies at Manukau, Waikato Heads and Kawhia. These regions and districts, nominated for…

From the horses that powered commerce to the occasional whale spotted in the Thames, animals were as much a part of as the English capital as its people. Claire Martin explores the menagerie of creatures that kept medieval Londoners moving, fed and entertained… With a population that peaked at approximately 80,000 in 1300, and plateaued in the wake of the Black Death at around 40,000, London was never short of human residents. The merchants,…

Lord Normanby’s brief to Hobson was written by James Stephens, Permanent Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office (London) and son of a prominent abolitionist. The brief was essentially written by the anti-slave movement of Britain, initiated by William Wilberforce (1759-1833). The Mission of William Cornwallis Symonds. · On the 13th of March, Shortland sent a newly made, signed Maori copy, penned by James Stuart Freeman and bearing Shortland’s…

Without adequate supervision or a stringent directive to remain singularly consistent in despatching only one strictly worded English version of the Treaty of Waitangi, Freeman produced several variations. For these, he simply dipped, at will, into the 12-pages of rough, superseded and now obsolete draft notes in his possession and extracted text to make ad-hoc composite treaty versions. During February and March of 1840, he mostly used…

How did the Treaty of Waitangi, intended as it was from the outset to be a formula for unification and a totally egalitarian fair and friendly society, get so distorted after 1975? The true meaning and intent of the treaty was well understood for 135-years, until tampered with and maliciously reinvented by self-serving greedy opportunists. These twisted individuals, their lawyers and moral-coward rent-a-prick historians, couldn’t care less…

I recently discovered a fascinating book, ‘The Titanic and the Indifferent Stranger’, by Dr Paul Lee, a physicist. In it he outlines a compelling argument that the Titanic was not lost in a collision with an iceberg in April 1912, but instead went on to serve as the Olympic, her almost identical twin sister. The saga began on September 20, 1911, when the Olympic was involved in a collision with the cruiser, HMS Hawke, in the Solent. · The…

The following is a letter, that speculation claimed that Albert Pike wrote to Giuseppe Mazzini in 1871 regarding a conspiracy involving three world wars, that were planned in an attempt to take over the world. The Pike letter to Giuseppe Mazzini was on display in the British Museum Library in London until 1977. This letter has been claimed by many internet sites to reside in the British Library in London, which denies the letter exists. ·…

By Julie Halligan · Situated on the picturesque Otago Peninsula perched atop a rising ridge stands the imposing and lasting monument to one man’s insistent desire to announce to the world that he had arrived, that he was someone and that he had ‘done good’. William Larnach had grown up on the rural estate of Rosemount, in the Patrick Plains of the Hunter Valley near Singleton in New South Wales, the land holding of his Scottish father John…

Nellie Bly became a star journalist by going undercover as a patient at a New York City mental health asylum in 1887 and exposing its terrible conditions in the New York World. Nellie Bly became a star journalist by going undercover as a patient at a New York City mental health asylum in 1887 and exposing its terrible conditions in the New York World. Her reporting not only raised awareness about mental health treatment and led to improvements…

The wreck of one of the most famous exploration ships in history has been located. Using a robotic submersible, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust has found Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance, which was crushed in the Antarctic pack ice in 1915. In the wake of Roald Amundsen's 1911 expedition that became the first to successfully reach the South Pole, Sir Ernest Shackleton mounted his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, which was…