In the history of crime in New Zealand there could hardly be a sorrier dossier than that of the infamous Minnie Dean who in June 1895 was tried and sentenced to death for the murder of an infant child. In legal history she has been known, with approximate accuracy, as the Winton Baby Farmer. Under the guise of benevolent motive she received unwanted children and apparently destroyed them, the generally illegitimate character of her victims no doubt contributing materially to the temporary success of her grisly operations. Minnie Dean was tried for only one murder, but the mass of evidence adduced against her at her trial, and the discovery in her garden at “The Larches”, Winton, of two bodies and the skeleton of a third, pointed strongly to a systematic programme of child murder. One curious aspect of her crime was that her husband, Charles Dean, who lived with her, was ignorant of it. At first his name was coupled with hers in the charge, but before the preliminary hearing had progressed very far he was discharged “without a stain on his character”. For a premium, never very large, Minnie Dean adopted unwanted infants, but the payment of the fee invariably marked the disappearance of the child into the care of a “lady” whose name or abode was never disclosed. After hearing 40 witnesses, the jury took exactly half an hour to return a verdict of guilty, and Mr Justice Williams, with equal dispatch, passed sentence of death on the first and only woman to be hanged in New Zealand. Hangings in those days still bore a high day and holiday flavour, and the final office of Minnie Dean's shameful end was described in the local press to the tune of a column and a half.

A case of wide interest and unusual circumstance which set the south Canterbury centre of Timaru agog in the 1880s was that of Thomas Hall, a young businessman who was convicted in 1886 of the attempted murder by poisoning of his wife, and in the following year had a verdict of guilty of the murder of his father-in-law, Captain Henry Cain (also by poisoning), quashed by the Court of Appeal because the only real evidence against him was his unsuccessful attempt on his wife's life. On a case reserved by the Judge (Mr Justice Williams, who had sentenced Hall to death) the Court of Appeal held that as there was not sufficient proof that the two poisonings formed part of the same transaction, or were effected in pursuance of a common design, the conviction must be quashed.

Hall first appeared in Court in October 1886 when he faced an attempted murder charge. The trial lasted eight days and he was sentenced to life imprisonment for what Mr Justice Johnston described as a crime that had been committed from “hour to hour, day to day, and week to week”. Hall, the year before, had married a young woman of means and even greater expectations, but almost from his wedding day he found himself all but submerged by a flood of debts, overdrafts, and defalcations which made the acquisition of a large sum of money essential. His wife's death seemed to be the answer. He insured her for £3,000 and persuaded her to make a will in his favour. In the meantime he had provided himself with Taylor on Poisons and fairly generous supplies of antimony and colchicum, both deadly poisons. These he began to administer systematically to his wife after she had been delivered of their first child. It was a long time before the family doctor could convince himself of the truth of what was going on almost under his nose, but Hall was finally arrested. The evidence, which included the discovery of a phial of antimony in Hall's pocket when he was apprehended, was overwhelming, and it took the jury seven minutes to find him guilty.

In the meantime, however, a month before, the police had exhumed the body of Captain Cain, who had died in January 1886. Hall had been a constant visitor at Cain's bedside for several weeks before his death. When, after exhumation, Cain's body was found to contain traces of antimony, Hall was brought from prison and in January 1887 was tried at Dunedin for murder. The Crown was handicapped by lack of evidence but presented the sordid story of his poisoning of his wife. The admissibility of such evidence was vigorously challenged by the defence, but Mr Justice Williams told the jury: “You have a perfect right to take all these circumstances into account…. If antimony is found in the body of a person to whom the prisoner has access, and if later antimony was without doubt administered by him to another person, it is for you to say if it is not a reasonable conclusion that the antimony found in the body of the first-named person was also administered by the prisoner”.

His Honour incidentally conceded that, without the testimony relative to Mrs Hall, there was insufficient evidence for any reasonable jury to convict. The jury did convict, and His Honour pronounced the death sentence; but at the same time he reserved for the Court of Appeal the question of the admissibility of the vital evidence. The Court of Appeal, presided over by the Chief Justice, Sir James Prendergast, quashed the conviction because, in the words of Mr Justice Johnston, who delivered the judgment of the Court: “In fine, the strong moral probability that the prisoner, as he was the agent in the one occurrence, also brought about the prior event, is not the kind of proof of guilt which the English law exacts – it is indeed a kind of proof which the English law, rightly or wrongly, rejects and excludes.”

So Thomas Hall escaped the scaffold and was returned to his prison cell.

Probably one of the most grisly crimes perpetrated in this country is that of the Maungatapu Mountain murders, and Murderers Rock in the Nelson district still bears the name with which it was invested when it was discovered that the killers used it for their ambush on 12 June 1866. As a result of this trial three men were hanged for the murder of four others. John Kempthorne and James Dudley (storekeepers), Felix Mathieu (a hotelkeeper) and James de Pontius (a miner) disappeared between the Wakamarina River and Nelson while en route to the West Coast goldfields with a joint capital of gold dust worth £300. They vanished so completely and inexplicably that murder was immediately suspected. Four men, Philip Levy, Richard Burgess, Thomas Kelly, and Joseph Thomas Sullivan, strangers in the area, were detained on suspicion and a 50-man search party at once began to scour the countryside. A dead packhorse and the missing men's swags were found, but there was no sign of the bodies. Rewards were offered in vain for information, but when the Government promised £200 and a free pardon to any accomplice (not the actual murderer) who would turn Queen's evidence, Sullivan, one of the four men in custody, confessed. Under his directions the bodies of the four men – two shot, one strangled, and the other stabbed and shot – were recovered on Maungatapu Mountain. And three days later a fifth body, that of James Battle, a Wakamarina farm labourer, who had not been seen after being paid off by his employer, was also found. He, too, had been murdered on 12 June. Sullivan's evidence was more than enough to hang the other three. He had been the party's lookout man. The trial took an unprecedented turn, however, when Burgess, one of the three accused, who was conducting the defence for himself and Kelly, savagely cross-examined Sullivan in the witness box. Failing to implicate Sullivan, who was in the witness box for 15 hours, he asked him why he had killed James Battle. The Court advised the witness that he need not answer such questions, but three days later, after his companions had been found guilty and condemned to death, Sullivan was charged with the murder of Battle and was also sentenced to be hanged. The other three were executed at Nelson Gaol on 5 October 1866, but Sullivan, because of his confession, escaped the gallows and received a life sentence. All four prisoners were natives of London with unsavoury criminal records in England, Australia, and the Central Otago goldfields. (See alsoMaungatapu Murders.)

When Captain William Andrew Jarvey, master of a small vessel trading between New Zealand and Australia, murdered his wife in Dunedin by poisoning in 1864, he did so almost in the presence of his 15-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. He was found guilty after a second trial and was hanged in Dunedin Gaol in October 1865. Unfortunately his crime and trial were also responsible for the death of an expert witness who had been brought from Melbourne to testify to the presence of strychnine in the exhumed body of the victim.

Elizabeth Jarvey was putting one of the younger children to bed in the house at Caversham, Dunedin, when she heard loud cries from her mother in the next room, where her father was administering “medicine” to the sick woman. She went to see what she could do, and arrived in time to be told by her mother: “Your father has poisoned me for the woman in the big hat and cloak”. The unfortunate woman then died. A Dr Hardy gave a certificate to the effect that the cause of death was “fits”, but the young girl knew only too well what had happened. Obsessed with the idea of what would happen to the motherless family of five if she disclosed the ugly circumstances, the daughter held her peace for three months, until her father's treatment of her, and the arrival in the house of “the woman with the big hat and cloak”, caused her to change her mind. Jarvey was at once arrested and his wife's body was exhumed in the Southern Cemetery. Stomach samples were taken, but because at that time there was no Government analyst in New Zealand, they had to be sent to Melbourne for examination. Dr Macadam, the Victorian analyst, reported the presence of strychnine in lethal quantities, and Jarvey was put on trial.

According to Dr Hocken, in the Report of Jarvey's Trial, Jarvey was an unsavoury character, being suspected of the murder in Tasmania of several of his illegitimate children. Actually, this damaging fact was injudiciously mentioned by his counsel at his trial. Mr Justice H. S. Chapman presided at the first trial in March 1865, and the strongest possible case was made out against the prisoner. Jarvey's daughter was unshaken both in evidence and in cross-examination, and the defence could make little impression either on the chemist who sold Jarvey strychnine, ostensibly for killing rats on his ship, or on the doctors who also gave evidence. Dr Macadam, however, was anything but at home in the witness box, and quickly fell a victim to astute cross-examination. In addition, he was severely reprimanded from the Bench because of his failure to bring the assistant, who helped in his investigations, into Court, and also on account of some out-of-Court observations he had made to local doctors. His evidence of the existence of strychnine in the body was never broken down, but the attitude of the Court towards him had some effect on the jury. After a retirement lasting from 6.30 p.m. on the Wednesday till 10 a.m. on the Friday, during which time the jurors were kept without food, drink, or fire, they failed to agree and Jarvey was remanded for a new trial.

Dr Macadam returned to Melbourne a very worried man. He had an accident on board ship on his way home, and after his arrival flung himself feverishly into the task of preparing the case for the second trial. But his treatment in Court had become an obsession, and when he left Australia for the new hearing in September, this time with his assistant, James D. Kirkland, he was a very sick man. He died at sea, one day out from Port Chalmers. The verdict at his inquest was “excessive debility and general exhaustion”. He was only 38.

When Jarvey again appeared in the dock, it was before Mr Justice C. W. Richmond, and the prosecutor was C. J. Prendergast, later to be Chief Justice of New Zealand. Kirkland presented both his own testimony and that of Dr Macadam, and it took the jury only four hours to find Jarvey guilty.

With only the excuse that his victim hounded and abused him on the parade ground and off, Colour-Sergeant James Collins, in 1861, strode into the orderly room of the Queen's 65th Regiment at Rutland Stockade, Wanganui, and shot Ensign William Alexander dead. His trial for murder was notable for the strenuous attempts made to save him from the gallows. He had been a fine soldier in peace and in war, but in the face of the jury's verdict and the starkly simple circumstances of the case, Mr Justice Johnston had no option but to sentence him to death. Throughout the district, and as far away as Wellington, where the Bishop of Wellington took a hand, unremitting efforts were made to secure a reprieve, but they were of no avail and Collins was hanged for his crime. This was the first occasion in the brief history of the colony when a hanging was not carried out in public, the Execution of Criminals Act 1858 having abolished the barbarous practice of hanging convicted murderers in public.

If not the first, at least one of the most significant of the early murder trials in New Zealand was that of a young Bay of Islands chief, Maketu, for the brutal killing of a Mrs Roberton, her two children, and a half-caste servant, at Kororareka, in November 1841. Maketu made no secret of his crime and in consequence posed a pretty problem for a Government hardly yet established and totally lacking in law-enforcement authorities. It was Maketu's own father who delivered him up to justice after a meeting of chiefs at Paihia, and the prisoner was tried before the colony's first Chief Justice, Sir William Martin, at the first criminal sitting of the Supreme Court in New Zealand. In every respect the occasion was an embarrassment to the Administration. First, it was necessary to make the mechanics of trial intelligible to the Maori; and secondly, it was essential that the European notion of the sanctity of human life should be demonstrated.

To this end, Maketu's trial, originally fixed for 28 February 1842, was postponed for a day to enable a European to be tried for murder first, in order to convince the Maoris that English law was no respecter of persons, but was prepared to treat Maori and Pakeha alike. The European was found guilty of manslaughter only, but Maketu was convicted of murder and was hanged. His body was buried in the precincts of the old gaol in Queen Street, Auckland, but a year or two afterwards his relatives were permitted to take the remains away.

Trevally (Caranx lutescens), or araara of the Maoris, is mainly a North Island fish, frequently occurring in large schools in coastal waters. The flesh is white and firm and of good flavour, but, strangely, is not popular as food, being more frequently used as bait. Average-sized trevally range about 15 in. in length, but occasional solitary females grow up to 36 in. It is a handsome fish of iridescent blues, greens, and silver. They move with great speed but, when schooling, will seldom take a spinner.

by Arthur William Baden Powell, Assistant Director, Auckland Institute and Museum.

(1846–1931).

Public servant and scholar.

A new biography of Tregear, Edward Robert appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

Edward Tregear was born in Southampton on 1 May 1846. His father, Captain W.J. Tregear, was descended from an old Cornish family. Tregear was educated in English private schools and trained as a civil engineer. In June 1863 he arrived in Auckland and found employment as a surveyor. His work brought him into close contact with the Maoris whose language and culture he studied. He saw active service in the Maori Wars in the Tauranga area and was decorated with the New Zealand War Medal. After the war Tregear engaged in a variety of occupations in many parts of the North Island – gold mining, engineering, saw milling, but mostly surveying in the Government service. He continued his studies of Maori anthropology, writing frequent articles for scholarly journals overseas, and was honoured by fellowships of the Royal Geographical, Historical, Anthropological and other learned societies.

A freethinker and socialist, Tregear was a personal friend of Ballance and Reeves. In 1891, when the Liberal Party took power, he was chosen to head the new Bureau of Industries, later renamed the Department of Labour. In close partnership with Reeves as Minister, Tregear was responsible for the prodigious amount of advanced labour legislation which was passed in the nineties. As editor of the Journal of the Department of Labour and in contributions to overseas journals, he explained and praised the social experiments of the Liberal era, sometimes in terms which embarrassed his political superiors for their frankness.

In 1891 Tregear published his most outstanding contribution to scholarship, the Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary, and in the following year helped to found the Polynesian Society of which he became first joint secretary. He edited the society's journal and published several vocabularies of Polynesian dialects and a comprehensive work The Maori Race (1904). When a Civil Service Association was formed in 1907, Tregear was elected president and held this office while he remained in the Government service. He served as chairman of Royal Commissions in 1897, 1898, and 1912 and, on his retirement as Secretary of Labour in 1911, he was honoured with the Imperial Service Order.

Ballance had vainly urged Tregear to stand for Parliament. After his retirement, however, Tregear took an active part in politics. In 1913, the “Grand Old Man of New Zealand Labour” was elected to the Wellington City Council and, that same year, he accepted the presidency of the new militant Social Democratic Party (with Peter Fraser as secretary-treasurer). Early in 1914, disheartened by the defeat of the waterfront strike and troubled by failing eyesight, Tregear resigned all offices and retired to Picton where he died on 28 October 1931. He was survived by his wife and only daughter.

Tregear was a prolific writer in many fields –satire, poetry, and children's fairy stories, besides anthropology and sociology. His theories of the Aryan origin of the Maori people have not been widely accepted, but the body of his linguistic work has retained its value to the present day. As Secretary of Labour, Tregear was a scholar rather than an administrator. He left office routines to his subordinates while he concentrated on drafting and enlisting support for social legislation. He was absolutely sincere, genial, and kindly in manner, yet a man of very firm convictions which he expressed vigorously in his writings and speeches. He deserves to rank as one of the architects of the Liberal era of advanced social reforms which drew world-wide attention to New Zealand.

by Herbert Otto Roth, B.A., DIP.N.Z.L.S., Deputy Librarian, University of Auckland.

• Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol. 40, Dec 1931 (Cbit)
• Fair Play (Wellington) Vol. 1, No. 13 (1894)
• New Zealand Railways Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1934), article by J. Cowan.

(1884–1918).

Victoria Cross winner.

A new biography of Travis, Richard Charles appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

Richard Charles Travis was born at Opotiki on 6 April 1884, the elder son of James Savage, farmer and former member of the Armed Constabulary, and was named Dickson Cornelius Savage. He was educated at Opotiki School and subsequently worked on his father's farm, becoming notable as a horsebreaker when he was still a youth. He left Opotiki for the Gisborne district in 1905 and worked there as a driver and farmhand until he went to Southland early in 1910. It was at this time that he changed his name. In Southland he worked on farms and threshing mills and was known as a great horseman. He enlisted from Ryal Bush in August 1914, joining the Otago Mounted Rifles.

Travis was on Gallipoli Peninsula for the last month of the occupation and it was here that he began the scouting in front of the New Zealand lines which was later to make him famous in France and Belgium. In the reorganisation of units after Gallipoli, Travis joined the 8th (Southland) Company of the 2nd Battalion, Otago Infantry Regiment, in March 1916, and two months later he began his nightly prowling in No Man's Land. The information he brought in was of such value that it was mentioned in Routine Orders; moreover, he carried out preliminary reconnaissances for the earliest raids made by the New Zealanders.

By a rapid series of steps from 26 September to 1 November 1916, Travis was promoted from the rank of private to that of sergeant, and he was the first Otago patrol leader of the specialist units known as Sniper and Observation Sections which were formed about that time. The group of men he led became known as “Travis's Gang” and their exploits in capturing enemy soldiers for interrogation and in bringing in information soon became legendary. On 15 September 1916 Travis stalked and eliminated enemy snipers who were enfilading the battalion's advance in the Somme Battle, and for this he was awarded the D.C.M. on 25 October. In the same battle he and two others outflanked a pillbox which was holding up the advance and silenced the occupants with hand grenades.

Both as a lone scout and as a patrol leader, Travis continued his remarkable reconnaissances. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre (Belgian) in February 1918 and the Military Medal in May 1918.

In July 1918 the New Zealanders were engaged in heavy fighting to reduce a German salient around Rossignol Wood. When the Germans withdrew from the wood, Travis led a reconnaissance to locate their new lines. When members of the Otago Battalion attacked the new position on 24 July, the advance was held up by two machine guns which kept the New Zealanders pinned down. Sergeant Travis rushed the gun position and killed the crews. The objective was taken after hard fighting in the German trenches, and it was for his work in this attack that Travis was awarded (posthumously) the Victoria Cross.

The following morning, when he was visiting the new New Zealand front line, Sergeant Travis was killed by a shell.

by James Arthur Gasson, Public Relations Officer, Tourist and Publicity Department, Wellington.

(1819–1903).

Lawyer, politician, and naturalist.

A new biography of Travers, William Thomas Locke appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

William Thomas Locke Travers was born on 19 January 1819 at Castleview, County Limerick, Ireland, the son of General Boyle Travers, once of the 56th Regiment, and of Caroline, nèe Brockman. He was educated at the College of St. Servan in France. During the Spanish Carlist Wars (1835–38) Travers served with the British Foreign Legion, being a lieutenant in the 2nd Regiment of Lancers and, for a short time, A.D.C. to General Espartero, Duke of Vittoria. He returned to England in 1838, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1844. From then until 1849 he practised first at Chipping Campden and, afterwards, at Evesham in Gloucestershire. In the latter year he emigrated to Nelson where he continued his profession. He represented Nelson Town in the first Parliament and was listed as a member of the abortive ministry of T. S. Forsaith. In 1855 he contested the Nelson Superintendency unsuccessfully against Stafford and, shortly afterwards, was appointed Resident Magistrate. He was returned to Parliament for Waimea in 1856, but was obliged to retire three years later following the passing of the Disqualification Act of 1858. During these years Travers explored several possible overland routes between Nelson and Canterbury. In 1860 he moved to Christchurch. He served on Bealey's Executive for a few months in 1864 and campaigned, unsuccessfully, against Moorhouse for the superintendency two years later. Early in 1867 Travers was returned to represent Christchurch City in Parliament and Heathcote in the Provincial Council. He resigned from the latter in December 1867 when he moved to Wellington permanently, but remained in the House until 1870. In 1877 he entered Parliament for a third term, this time as member for Wellington City and, in his year there, collaborated with Sir James Hector and W. B. D Mantell to have Wellington Botanical Gardens transferred to the city council.

Besides his political and legal interests, Travers was a skilled observer in many branches of natural history and always kept himself informed on the latest developments. The geographical distribution of plants interested him particularly, and he made a special study of the flora of Nelson, Marlborough, and Canterbury. Hooker considered the contributions of Travers to the Kew Herbarium especially valuable because he always noted at what elevation the specimens were found. Travers, who was a fellow of the Linnean Society, also spent much time trying to discover an easy way to process Phormium tenax (q.v.). Baron Mueller dedicated his Vegetation of the Chatham Islands to him, while Hooker named a small shrub of the daisy order, Traversia, in his honour. Very interested in ethnology and Maori-European relationships, Travers made a point of trying to understand the Maori attitude. His Stirring Times of Te Rauparaha (1872) seeks to explain the reasons behind the Maori troubles of the 1840s. In 1877 he contributed the letterpress for C. D. Barraud's portfolio of lithographs, New Zealand – Graphic and Descriptive. A founder of the New Zealand Institute (1872), Travers drafted the original rules and was president for a term. He also contributed many papers to the Natural History Review and to the Transactions of the Ethnological Society. In 1888 he published From New Zealand to Lake Michigan, which is an interesting account of a trip he made through the north-western and central United States. For some years he acted as Vice-Consul for France and was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Cambodia.

Travers was twice married: first, in 1843, at Cork, Ireland, to Jane Oldham (who died on 2 January 1888); and, secondly, on 9 April 1891, at St. Peter's, Wellington, to Theodosia Leslie, daughter of Captain William Barclay. He had one son and one daughter by his first marriage. In 1893, at the instance of his close friend, John Ballance, Travers tried to re-enter Parliament as a Liberal. He continued to practise law in Wellington until his death on 27 April 1903, following a tram accident.

As Travers was one of the earliest explorers who penetrated the upper Wairau region of Nelson Province, his name has been commemorated on several features about Lake Rotoiti (Nelson). He himself bestowed a number of place names with Crimean War associations in this vicinity. Travers' son, Henry (1844–1928), was also a well-known botanical explorer who made a special study of the Chatham Islands.

by Bernard John Foster, M.A., Research Officer, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington.

• Botanical Explorers of New Zealand, Glenn, R. (1950)
• Evening Post, 27 Apr 1903 (Obit)
• New Zealand Times, 28 Apr 1903 (Obit).