Ian RobinsonFrom Full Circle. A History of Cricket, chapter 10.
“Cricket arrived in New Zealand with its earliest British colonists, as in Australia. Early in its life, it had a distinguished spectator. Charles Darwin wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle of his experience in Waimate North in the Bay of Islands, in 1835. 'Several young men redeemed by the missionaries from slavery were employed on the farm. In the evening I saw a party of them at cricket.”