28/09/2026
⛵ In 1848 two small ships carried a church across the world and built a second Edinburgh at the bottom of it. 🏴
The John Wickliffe anchored at Port Chalmers on the twenty third of March with ninety seven passengers and William Cargill aboard. The Philip Laing followed on the fifteenth of April with two hundred and forty seven more and the Reverend Thomas Burns, a nephew of the poet. They had been sent by the Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland, which had split from the established church five years earlier and wanted somewhere to begin again on its own terms.
The settlement was to be called New Edinburgh. They named it Dunedin instead, from Dùn Èideann, the Gaelic for the city they had left.
From that harbour the names spread out across the map. Mosgiel took its name from Mossgiel in Ayrshire, the farm Robert Burns worked. Balclutha means the town on the Clutha, and the Clutha is the Clyde. Invercargill, away in Southland, was named for Cargill himself.
Not all of it was Free Kirk and not all of it was Scottish. Only about two thirds of those first settlers belonged to the church that sent them, and Waikouaiti had been a whaling station with farming families since 1840, eight years before the ships came. Lawrence and the inland goldfields came later, with the rush of 1861.
But the accent stuck. It is still there today, in a city with a Robert Burns statue in its centre.
They did not name it after the old place out of homesickness. They named it that because they meant to build it. 🏴
