Henry Williams
Henry Williams was a naval lieutenant who had fought at Copenhagen and became the missionary who ran the Church Missionary Society's stations in the Bay of Islands for forty years, and on the night of 4 February 1840, with his son Edward, translated Hobson's treaty into Māori so that it could be read to the chiefs the next morning; the words he chose, kawanatanga for sovereignty and tino rangatiratanga for the chiefs' possession, are the words New Zealand's courts and tribunal have been construing since 1975. He was born in 1792 at Nottingham, served in the navy from 1806 until the peace, was ordained in 1822, and reached the Bay of Islands in 1823 to a mission that had converted nobody in nine years and lived on the goodwill of the Ngāpuhi chief Hongi Hika, whom it had helped to arm. Williams changed the mission's method, refusing the musket trade and building a schooner to be independent of the chiefs' supply, and from 1830 the conversions began. He went unarmed between war parties to make peace, learned the language to the point of translating the New Testament, and had the standing among the northern chiefs that Hobson needed. At Waitangi he read the treaty aloud in Māori on 5 February, explained it as a protection against the settlers and the French, and told the chiefs, by his own account, that it was an act of love by the queen. Whether his translation softened the cession is the question the historians have not settled, and whether he could have made a Māori word mean sovereignty is doubtful. He then carried the treaty south for signatures. His own land purchases, eleven thousand acres for his eleven children, were the scandal of the colony. Governor Grey accused him and the society dismissed him in 1849, and reinstated him in 1854 when the chiefs and the bishop protested. He died at Pakaraka in July 1867, and his descendants are among the country's oldest settler families.
- Lived: 1792 CE – 1867 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: missionary, translator
