Colonial Promoters: Tactics, Rubrics and Rhetorics

Abstract

In 1848, the Emigrant’s Friend had cautioned prospective emigrants against false information purveyed by joint stock companies and emigrant associations, ship owners and others who had ‘too deep an interest in recommending a Colony, to do so with candour or truth’. Even the British government would show only the favourable side of a colony, the author warned, when its object was the removal of a large number of discontented poor. A few years later, Godfrey Mundy exhorted potential emigrants not to be seduced into thinking those benevolent societies and philanthropic individuals that solicited expatriation, nor the colonies that welcomed them with open-arms, were motivated wholly by generous feelings. It was in the interest of the former to ‘shovel you out’, he advised laconically, and for the latter to force down the price of labour by ensuring an excess of supply over demand. He assured his readers he had no particular interest in misrepresenting the colonies he described: as wholly independent of them, he had ‘neither pique, partiality, nor prejudice to indulge’. Writers and reviewers sometimes made a point of stressing the impartiality of their advice to emigrants. Joseph Townsend claimed to have written his work on New South Wales to meet the growing interest in emigration. Having quit the colony, he assured his readers, he had no land to sell, ‘and no interest in puffing a particular locality’.

We must confess that nothing short of gross, palpable, physical demonstration will ever enable Englishmen in needy circumstances to see that the back woods of Canada or the wilds of New Zealand are not every man’s El Dorado, or that interested ‘emigration agents’ are not the appointed and trustworthy instruments for raising any given desert or solitude whatever into the most flourishing and civilized of peopled cities (The Times, London, 10 December 1844).