Captain William Cargill was the leader of the Otago settlement scheme and the single most important person in seeing the idea of Dunedin through to reality. He was born in Edinburgh in 1784 and grew up in difficult circumstances, with an alcoholic father who died when William was 15. This left the family in a difficult position financially but Cargill’s mother was able to see her sons well educated and into professional careers thanks to family support. William went into the army, reaching the rank of captain and serving under the Duke of Wellington in the wars with Napoleon on the continent. He married the daughter of a fellow officer in the 74th (Highland) Regiment while serving in Portugal in 1813. They were to have 17 children together, 10 of them surviving to adulthood.
William left the army in 1820 but continued to use the title ‘Captain’ for the rest of his life. He worked for many years as a wine merchant in Edinburgh before joining the Oriental Bank in London in 1841. By then he had developed an interest in emigration and was an early supporter of the idea of a Scottish colony in New Zealand. Following the Disruption in Scotland’s Presbyterian Church in 1843 Cargill and George Rennie (the initial promoter of the scheme) won support for a Free Church settlement from the new church body. Within a couple of years Cargill had displaced Rennie to become the leading figure in the Otago scheme. It took all his considerable tenacity and determination to overcome the numerous obstacles that first delayed and then threatened to prevent the settlement from taking place at all.
Cargill must have been very relieved when he finally set sail for Otago in November 1847. He led the party aboard the expedition’s supply ship, the John Wickliffe, which sailed from London. Five-and-a-half-months later they reached Port Chalmers, three weeks ahead of the main group of Scottish settlers aboard the Philip Laing. On landing Cargill gave an inspirational speech, comparing the Otago pioneers to the Mayflower pilgrims in America two centuries before. The nitty-gritty work of creating a new society then got under way. It proved a long and winding road. Cargill maintained his leadership role throughout the crucial first decade and held firm to some rather narrow views about what Otago should be about. He sometimes overreached his capabilities and let tenacity give way to plain stubbornness. Nonetheless, he provided genuine leadership to the early settlers and earned their widespread admiration and appreciation.
Cargill died in 1860, just before the gold rushes which were to transform his beloved Otago from the small scale and essentially Scottish settlement he had worked so hard to create. By then Dunedin was firmly established and beginning to prosper. Much of what Cargill had set out to achieve had become reality. The early settlers remembered him as a strong-willed personality who kept their best interests at heart.
Captain William Cargill