sketcher, author and traveller, was an ironfounder from the Cannon Foundry, London who promised to bring a large amount of capital and a steam-engine for government saw-milling to NSW. He reached Sydney in the Earl Spencer in 1813, shed his partner, abandoned any interest in commerce and took up with Rev. Samuel Marsden. From November 1814 to March 1815 he accompanied Marsden on his pioneer missionary visit to New Zealand, reporting on their travels in Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand (London 1817). It contains three engravings, presumably after Nicholas’s sketches, by Samuel Neele, an English engraver who specialised in the production of maps and plates for antiquarian works: A Chief of New Zealand , Three Kings (coastal profiles) and North Cape of New Zealand . An additional woodcut has the interesting annotation, 'A fac-simile of the Amoco or tattooing on the face of a New Zealand chief, as drawn by himself on board the ship Active, March 9th, 1815’ – the chief in question being one of the Maoris whom Marsden had brought back to Sydney.
No drawings are known from Nicholas’s Australian sojourn, although watercolour portraits of Maoris he allegedly painted could have been done in Sydney before he left for England in November after acquiring a 700-acre land grant (which he later sold to Marsden). But the putative drawings could equally have been painted in London. Nicholas mentioned meeting two Maoris there in 1818. Having settled into the comfortable life of a leisured English gentleman, he kept in touch with Marsden and supported Elizabeth Fry in her work for women convicts. He died at Reading, Berkshire on 22 July 1868.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
