Haast, Johann Franz Julius von

(b. Bonn, Germany, 1 May 1822; d. Christchurch, New Zealand, 16 August 1887)

geology.

Haast was the only son of Mathias Haast and Anna Ruth. His father, a merchant, was elected burgomaster at Bonn. Haast studied geology and mineralogy at the University of Bonn, where, tradition says, he rescued the prince consort from drowning in the Rhine. Although he did not graduate, he worked for a time with August Krantz, a mineral dealer—leading a somewhat undistinguished life gripped by wanderlust and rendered more unsettled by the early death of his first wife, Antonia Schmitt.

Haast’s opportunity for a more rewarding career came in 1858 with his appointment to advise an English shipping firm on the prospects of encouraging German immigration to New Zealand. Exploration and scientific appraisal of resources was exactly the kind of work for which Haast longed. Immediately after fulfilling his contract to the shipping firm, he joined the explorer Ferdinand von Hochstetter in his explorations of New Zealand (1859), traveling extensively throughout both islands. Among the areas he visited was a volcanic wilderness closely controlled by the Maoris and, because of later outbursts of fighting, not revisited by Europeans for several decades.

Through the fame attendant on his journeys with Hochstetter, Haast was engaged to make a topographic and geologic survey of the west coast of South Island by the Nelson provincial government. He and his team discovered a new coalfield at Westport and reported on other coal and gold resources (1860).

A crisis arose at the South Island port of Lyttelton, situated in the heart of an ancient volcano which the authorities had hoped to pierce by a tunnel to the nearby city of Christchurch. The contractors had struck a hard lava flow and refused to go on. Hurrying to the scene, Haast made a rapid and competent survey of the geology to convince the workers that the amount of hard rock was limited. Work was resumed on the tunnel, which provided a vital link between city and port.

Haast was rewarded with appointment as geologist for Canterbury province (1861). He was naturalized as a British subject in the same year and made Christchurch his home. There he married Mary Dobson, daughter of the provincial engineer Edward Dobson and, like his first wife, musically gifted. Haast contributed enormously to the intellectual and cultural life of Christchurch. He founded the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury in 1862, the Canterbury Museum in 1870, the Canterbury Collegiate Union with Bishop Harper, later to become the University of Canterbury, and the Imperial Institute. When the provincial geological survey was concluded, he became director of the Canterbury Museum and professor of geology at the university. He also served as a member of the senate of the University of New Zealand.

A pioneer scientist in a largely unexplored land, Haast had interests that ranged far and wide. He collected new plants from the Southern Alps; he inquired into problems of early human settlement of New Zealand; and he gained great immediate attention through his discovery of bones of the gigantic moa and a giant extinct (eagle which he named Harpagornis. Most of his research was devoted to geologic and topographic surveys of Canterbury province and the west coast. These activities were closely related, and he never perpetrated the modern error of divorcing current geological processes from the study of ancient rocks. Haast thus accurately recognized that most of the Canterbury plains were composed of rubble fans, formed as glacial outwash, rather than accepting more fanciful theories, then current, involving torrential deposition as drift.

A forceful, ebullient man who was well aware of having “made himself” and willing, according to C. A. Fleming, to prove and underline the point by festooning himself with honors, Haast naturally made both scientific and personal enemies. He scathingly condemned the brilliant government geologist Alexander McKay for “poaching” his moa bones, and he repeatedly resisted and opposed with his provincial experience geological theories advanced on a national scale by the small but excellent team of geologists in the New Zealand Geological Survey. As a result he found a natural ally in another great geologist, F. W. Hutton, in opposing the towering figure of nineteenth-century science in New Zealand, Sir James Hector. It would be difficult to allow that Haast matched either of these two contemporaries in scientific achievement, and politically and administratively he was much less significant than Hector. His ebullience, a certain lack of originality, and his geographically circumscribed field of work told against him. Yet some of his concepts live on, and to this day there is a recognizable Canterbury outlook on geology established by Haast.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Haast’s writings include Report of a Topographical and Geological Examination of the Western Districts of the Nelson Province (Nelson, N.Z., 1861); “Notes on the Geology of the Province of Canterbury;’ in Government Gazette, Province of Canterbury, 9 (1862); “Report on the Geology of the Malvern Hills, Canterbury,” in Report. Geological Explorations, 7 (1871–1872), 1–88; and Geology of the Provinces of Canterbury and Westland, New Zealand (Christchurch, 1879).

II. Secondary Literature. On Haast or his work, see P. Burton, The New Zealand Geological Survey 1865–l965, Information Series, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research no. 52 (1965); C. A. Fleming. “Haast, Sir Julius von, K.C.M.G., F.R.S. (1822–87),”in A. H. McLintock, ed., An Encylopaedia of New Zealand, I (Wellington, 1966), 892–893; H. F. von Haast, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast (New Plymouth, N.Z., 1948); and J. B. Waterhouse, “A Historical Survey of the pre-Cretaceous Geology of NewZealand.” in New Zealand Journal of Geology andGeophysics, 8 (1965), pt. 6. 931–998: 10 (1967), pt. 4. 923–981.

J. B. Waterhouse