French South Island of New Zealand??

Hey,

I am currently travelling New Zealand (since half ayear now) and am started thinking about KIWI POD's :)

I've been to the tiny town of Akaroa on the Bank's Peninsula
two times. It is the site of a failed French settlement in the then already British (though not really controlled) NZ islands...
Based on what I read on the plaques i Akaro the WI question came to my mind:

So I started working out a detailed POD for a possible divided New Zealand (British North Island and French south Island) here

http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/New_Zealand_Two_Way

based upon what I found here
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ourstuff/SettlementatAkaroa.htm

Does nyone have any further ideas, quotations, material which might help me? i know the British had already established contrcts with the local iwi (Maori tribe) in the region and the Treaty of Waitangi was not far away, but maybe...:)

And of course what do you think about the idea?realistic? other variations , or Kiwi-focussed POD'S (Cook not finding it, Abel Tasman either) ... polynesian empire etc etc. anyone

Thx for responses:)

Xi'Reney
 
Great to see that you have been inspired by the South Island. I am from that area myself, although further south, Otago.


Regarding resources - well, if you are still about in NZ then the Christchurch Museum is a good start, and if I recall rightly the local City library or University of Canterbury libraries are pretty good for local history. Same goes for Dunedin, plus they have a rather good archives library (Hocken) and Early Settler Museum.

Regarding a POD well I guess you would need either a sort of break or other arrangement in Anglo-French relations in 1840 at the very latest. Anything later than that and the South Island will have too many British to easily be colonised by another group, in an allowable way.

Or I guess perhaps you could go for a later POD, perhaps something along the lines of the NZ colonial government desperately seeking European immigrants for settlement. Given that generally the government didn't go out of its way to encourage non Anglo settlement, I do not know what you would need to change this. Assuming you could find something, then even reasonably small numbers of migrants - say 15-20,000, concentrated in the same areas, in a short period of time could make for a much stronger French flavour and a correspondingly higher chain migration attractor (subsequant followup migrants from the same source). Then if this happened pre abolition of the Provinces (1870), then perhaps we could end up with a solidly French province of a federal NZ, sort of like a very small version of Canada.

As a point of reference the modern provinces of Southland and Otago have populations of 93,000 and 203,500. So you can see it wouldn't take much 19th century migration in order to dominate either region. Both provinces haven't experienced much in the way of population growth either, since the turn of last century

Or you could go for a more fun POD:

1. French refugees (similar to Huguenot ?) appeal for succor from Wise Britannia, and are settled en masse in the South Island
2. Britain expels rebellious French populations from Quebec, and some are resettled in the South Island
3. Somehow Canada falls and Loyalist French Canadians are settled in the SI rather than submit to the indignity of being ruled by the Zombie Abraham Lincoln/etc
 
Last edited:
Top