 The New Zealand Company also established a settlement at Wanganui in 1840, chiefly as a spillover settlement, the site of the rural land promised to Wellington purchasers.A traveller in the colony at the time described Wanganui as "one of the unwholesome, mushroom settlements engendered by the New Zealand Company for the purpose of removing to a distance a portion of the clamorous script-holders who, on arriving from England, looked, and looked in vain, for their land.