The Long White Cloud

New Zealand was annexed by an English government that did not want it, to keep it from the French. In William Pember Reeves’s telling, that was only one of many turns no one had planned.

Writing in late-19th-century London, Reeves looks back across the history of the long, mountainous islands far out in the Pacific: from the Maori voyagers who first made them home to the European settlers who arrived centuries later. Here, forests crowd into tangled green depths, while volcanoes rise above snowfields—and the colony’s future repeatedly defies the plans made for it. Settlers expected one kind of society and built another; efforts to govern and protect the native people unfolded amid long, damaging wars. Reeves sees a people learning, often painfully, from their mistakes. What pattern, if any, can be traced through a history shaped by so many reversals?

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