the ongoing rebellion by Hone Heke in the mid 1840s the government encouraged retired but fit British soldiers and their families to migrate to Auckland to form a defense line around the port settlement as garrison soldiers. Amongst the first settlers were some Catholics and in 1841 they established Auckland's first school of any sort which held its first class on 27 September 1841. By the time the first Fencibles arrived in 1848, the rebels in the north had been defeated, so the outlying defensive towns were constructed to the south stretching in a line from the port village of Onehunga in the West, to Howick in the east. Each of the 4 settlements had about 800 settlers, the men being fully armed in case of emergency but spent nearly all their time breaking in the land and establishing roads. In the early 1860s, Auckland became a base against the M?ori King Movement. This, and continued road building towards the south into the Waikato, enabled P?keh? (European New Zealanders) influence to spread from Auckland. Its population grew fairly rapidly, from 1,500 in 1841 to 12,423 by 1864. The growth occurred similarly to other mercantile-dominated cities, mainly around the port and with problems of overcrowding and pollution. Auckland had a far greater population of ex soldiers than other settlements, many of whom were Irish. About 50% of the population was Irish which contrasted heavily with the majority English settlers in Wellington, Christchurch or New Plymouth. Most of the Irish, though not all, were from Protestant Ulster. The majority of settlers in the early period were assisted by receiving a cheap passage to NZ.
Trams and railway lines shaped Auckland's rapid expansion in the early first half of the 20th century, but soon afterward the dominance of the motor vehicle emerged and has not abated since; arterial roads and motorways have become both defining and geographically dividing features of the urban landscape. They also allowed further massive
