William Mein Smith

William Mein Smith (1798 – 3 January 1869) was a key actor in the early settlement of New Zealand's capital city, Wellington. As the Surveyor General for Edward Wakefield's New Zealand Company at Port Nicholson from 1840 to 1843, he and his team surveyed the town of Wellington, after finding the land on the Petone foreshore unsuitable, laying out the town belt and other features and making provision for the much debated "tenth" share of the land for local Māori.

Born in 1798 in Cape Town, South Africa, he was raised in Devon and the Scottish Borders, serving in the Royal Artillery from 1814 in Ireland and then Canada. There he met his wife, Louisa Bargrave Wallace, who was born in Canada in 1802 as the first child of then First Lieutenant, later General, Peter Margetson Wallace of the Royal Artillery and his partner, later wife, Louisa Turmaine. They married at Kingston, Ontario in 1828 and his next posting was to Gibraltar, including being part of a diplomatic visit to Marrakech in 1829-30, followed by appointment to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich where he taught as Master of Line Drawing, before being approached to assist Wakefield's New Zealand Company in 1839. He and his team of surveyors sailed to New Zealand on the New Zealand Company barque Cuba, arriving on 3 January 1840 in the harbour of Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Port Nicholson). His wife and older children arrived two months later.

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