Percy Smith (ethnologist)

Stephenson Percy Smith (11 June 1840 – 19 April 1922) was a New Zealand ethnologist and surveyor. He founded The Polynesian Society.

Percy Smith (as he was known) was born in Beccles, Suffolk, the eldest son of Hannah Hursthouse and John Stephenson Smith, a merchant and later a civil servant. Smith emigrated to New Zealand with his family in February 1850. Percy Smith attended school at New Plymouth and later Omata, leaving to help on the family farm in 1854. Interested in the natural world and the landscape of the Taranaki Region, Smith took lessons in painting from John Gully, a landscape artist. In 1855, aged 14, he joined the provincial survey department, helping to survey the land around New Plymouth, spending long periods in the bush and coming into frequent contact with Māori. Following two years of training, he was made assistant surveyor. While still in his teens, he began a series of expeditions in his spare time, joining a party to scale Mount Taranaki in 1857, for example, and undertaking a journey in 1858 up the Mōkau River to Taupo, Lakes Rotomahana and Tarawera, the Tongariro-Ruapehu area, returning via Rangitikei and Wanganui. This expedition was over 1000 kilometres (600 miles) on foot, horse, and canoe.

During his service in the local militia, Smith also witnessed at first hand the conflict leading up to the Taranaki wars. In March 1858 he saw the fighting at Waitara, where he was employed to make sketches of the stockades. In 1859 was transferred to the Auckland district where he worked with the Land Purchase Department, surveying newly acquired government land in the Kaipara and Northern Wairoa. In April 1860 he was instructed to return at once to Kaipara, where he acted as an interpreter and intermediary to persuade Ngāti Whātua to help in the defence of Auckland against a rumoured attack from the Waikato tribes. Smith was then employed in laying out the boundaries of blocks at Coromandel and in the survey of military settlements in the Waikato.

Smith married Mary Anne Crompton on 23 April 1863. They remained in Auckland until 1865, when he was transferred back to Taranaki as district surveyor. There his main duties were the survey of lands confiscated from the Māori. In the following decade, he surveyed territories in various parts of New Zealand. In 1868 he was undertaking a survey of Pitt Islands in the Chathams at the time when Te Kooti escaped on the Rifleman to Poverty Bay. Smith was appointed the first geodesical surveyor and chief surveyor of the provincial district of Auckland in the department of the surveyor general in 1877 and assistant surveyor-general in 1882. Immediately after the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886, he made visits to the region and reported his findings in The Eruption of Tarawera (1886).

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