James Hector - New Zealand

New Zealand

Following his return to Britain after the Palliser expedition, Hector again secured a paid scientific position with Roderick Murchison’s help. In 1862 he arrived in Dunedin in New Zealand to conduct a three year geological survey of Otago. Hector travelled throughout the south of New Zealand's South Island to assess its potential for settlement and to record the location of useful minerals. He also assembled a staff of half a dozen men to assist with such tasks as fossil collecting, chemical analysis, and botanical and zoological taxonomy.

In 1865 Hector was appointed to found the Geological Survey of New Zealand, and he moved to Wellington to supervise the construction of the Colonial Museum, which was to be the Survey’s headquarters. As the chief Government-employed scientist, Hector gave politicians advice on questions as diverse as exporting wool to Japan and improving fibre production from New Zealand flax. His political influence was underlined by his marriage in 1868 to Maria Georgiana Monro, daughter of the speaker of the House of Representatives.

Hector managed the Colony’s premier scientific society – the New Zealand Institute – for thirty-five years, and from 1885 was Chancellor of the University of New Zealand. He controlled virtually every aspect of state-funded science. He had close and, at times, tense relationships with other men of science, in particular Julius von Haast. At the end of his career he was criticized for failing to acquire Māori artefacts for the Colonial Museum and for not adequately defending his departments from the Liberal Government’s funding cuts. In 1902, for example, the ethnographer Elsdon Best wrote to Augustus Hamilton, the future director of the Colonial Museum, to state that Hector should be forced from office and that they should ‘put a live man in in his place’.

Hector retired in 1903, after four decades at the centre of organized science in New Zealand. In 1903 during a visit to Canada, he said of his mishap in Kicking Horse Pass, "When I regained consciousness, my grave was dug and they were preparing to put me in it. So that's how Kicking Horse got its name and how I came to have a grave in this part of the world." He died in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, in 1907.