He never returned to Scotland, never had a rest from duty. It was nearly forty years later that New Zealand mourned his death as one of its greatest statesmen. George” for Sydney, and reached there on April 10, 1839. He sailed from Oban on November 15 of that year in the ship “St. It was in 1838 that he bade farewell to the Highlands and the isles that he was never to see again. He was a boy of the out-of-doors, the hills and the sea, that lad of Tiree.īefore he was twenty he was in a new land, the world's width away, where his powers of body and brain were to be tried to the utmost. Young Donald's upbringing was a sound foundation for the life into which the hand of destiny presently led him. John Maclean, the father, died when Donald was very young, and the boy was brought up and educated by his mother's people, the McColls the grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Donald came from a long line of ancestors, from the founder, Maclean of Duart, to Ardgour, the first branch of which founded the House of Borrerae in Uist, and thence branched to Tiree and other of the Western Isles. His grandmother was the eldest daughter of Campbell of Dunstaffnage, and the last Campbell born in the Castle of Dunstaffnage. Kilmaluaig, on the island of Tiree (or Tyree), off the coast of Argyll, was the birthplace of Sir Donald Maclean, who for the greater part of his life was the chief intermediary between the pakeha Government and the Maoris.ĭonald Maclean was born on the 27th October, 1820 he was the son of John Maclean, of Kilmaluaig. A no less prominent man in his day, one whose public career began in New Zealand nearly a generation before Stout, was a son of the Western Isles. One of our famous men of light and learning, Sir Robert Stout, came from the remote Shetlands.
Leaders, statesmen, great sailors and soldiers and explorers are bred in such places. The struggle with the gales, the granite soil, the seagirt character of the place, the stern patriarchal upbringing of the sons of the clan, all tended to produce men of courage, resolution, vigour and training for the life of the pioneer in new lands when the old isles and the old glens had become too small. The little rugged islands on the West of Scotland, Atlantic-washed isles of mist and hard weather, have produced many a man who made abiding impression on the story of Britain, and especially of Britain overseas. The writer of this article has made a special study of the life and times of Maclean, who was dubbed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in the Fifties, “the great Maori mystery man.” The greatest figure in the pioneer period of New Zealand, in special relation to Maori affairs and the progress of settlement in the North Island, was Sir Donald Maclean, K.C.M.G.
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