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The first people to live in the place now known as Christchurch were moa hunters, who probably arrived there as early as AD 1000. The hunters cleared large areas of mataī and tōtara forest by fire and by about 1450 the moa had been killed off. -
North Island Māori (Ngati Māmoe and later Ngāi Tahu) arrived in Canterbury between 1500 and 1700. The remaining moa hunters were killed or taken into the tribes. -
On 16 February 1770 Captain James Cook in his ship the Endeavour first sighted the Canterbury peninsula. He thought it was an island, and named it Banks Island after the ship’s botanist, Joseph Banks. -
By 1800 the Ngāi Tūāhuriri sub-tribe of Ngāi Tahu were in control of the coast from the Hurunui River in the north to Lake Ellesmere in the south. Their largest settlement was a fortified pā at Kaiapoi. This was also a major trading centre for pounamu or greenstone. -
The main track between Kaiapoi and another settlement at Rāpaki followed a path between the swamps and the two rivers, Ōtākaro (Avon) and Ōpāwaho (Heathcote). One of the two remaining patches of forest or bush was at Pūtaringamotu (later Riccarton), and was an important place for food gathering (birds, eels, fish and freshwater crayfish). -
It was probably not until 1815 when sailors from the sealing ship Governor Bligh landed that Europeans first set foot on Banks Peninsula. In 1827 Captain William Wiseman, a flax trader, named the harbour (now known as Lyttelton Harbour) Port Cooper, after one of the owners of the Sydney trading firm, Cooper & Levy. -
During the 1820s and 1830s the local Māori population fell. The reasons included fighting between different groups of Ngāi Tahu, raids by the Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha from 1830 to 1832, and the impact of European diseases, especially measles and influenza, from which hundreds of Māori died. -
More whaling and sealing ships visited the peninsula and harbour, and in 1837 Captain George Hempelman set up a whaling station on-shore at Peraki on Banks Peninsula. -
Captain William Rhodes first visited in 1836. He came back in 1839 and landed a herd of 50 cattle near Akaroa. -
In August 1840 Captain Owen Stanley of the Britomart raised the British flag at Akaroa, just before the arrival of sixty-three French colonists on the Comte de Paris. -
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. The Treaty had been signed by many North Island chiefs in the Bay of Islands earlier in the year on 6 February. During Bunbury’s visit only two of the Ngāi Tahu chiefs signed it. -
The first attempt at settling on the plains was made by James Herriot of Sydney. He arrived with two small groups of farmers in April 1840. Their first crop was successful, but a plague of rats made them decide to leave -
In 1843 William and John Deans arrived and established a farm at Pūtaringamotu. 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. They named the area Riccarton after the parish they came from in Scotland, and the nearby river the Avon, after a stream on their grandfather’s farm.
On 7 January 1844 the first European child (Jeannie Manson) was born at Riccarton.