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By about 1450 the moa had been killed off by moa hunters who lived in the area now known as Christchurch
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North Island Māori arrived in Canterbury between 1500 and 1700. The remaining moa hunters were killed or taken into the tribes.
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On 16 February 1770 Captain James Cook in his ship the Endeavour first sighted the Canterbury peninsula.
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In 1815 sailors from the sealing ship Governor Bligh landed, this is probably the first time Europeans set foot on Banks Peninsula.
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During the 1820s and 1830s the local Māori population fell. The reasons were fighting between different groups of Ngāi Tahu and the impact of European diseases.
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In May 1840 Major Thomas Bunbury arrived on the HMS Herald to collect the signatures of the Ngāi Tahu chiefs for the Treaty of Waitangi.
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In 1843 The Manson and Gebbie families also came with them, to work on the farm. Together they built the first European house on the Canterbury Plains.
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Early in 1848 the Canterbury Association was formed, and it was decided to name the capital city Christchurch after the college John Godley had gone to at Oxford University.
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The first of the ships, the Charlotte Jane, arrived in Lyttelton on the morning of December 16, 1850
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The city’s first proper theatre, the Royal Princess Theatre, was opened on 26 December 1863.
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Christchurch had to wait until the 1880s for an underground sewerage system, but it was the first city in New Zealand to have one.
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