Banks Peninsula - History

History

Three successive phases of Māori settlement took place on the peninsula which is still known to Māori as Te Pataka o Rakaihautu ( The great store house of Rakaihautu). Rakaihautu brought the Waitaha to Te Wai Pounamu (South Island New Zealand) in the waka (canoe) Uruao they were the first people to light the fires of occupation. Thus Banks Peninsula was named Te Pataka o Rakaihautu in recognition of his deeds and the abundance of mahinga kai (foods of the forests, sea, rivers and skies) found on the peninsula. Waitaha settled there first, followed by Kāti Mamoe and then Ngai Tahu took over in the 17th century.

The crew of Captain James Cook became the first Europeans to sight the peninsula, during Cook's first circumnavigation of New Zealand in 1769, when he named the feature in honour of the Endeavour's botanist, Joseph Banks. The peninsula occasioned one of Cook's two major New Zealand cartographical errors – unable to see the low plains adjoining the peninsula, he charted it as an island. Distracted by a phantom sighting of land to the southeast, he sailed away before exploring any closer and never discovered the two good harbours.

By the 1830s, Banks Peninsula had become a European whaling centre – to the detriment of the Māori, who succumbed in large numbers to disease and inter-tribal warfare exacerbated by the use of muskets. Two significant events in the assumption of British sovereignty over New Zealand occurred at Akaroa. First, in 1830 the Māori settlement at Takapuneke became the scene of a notorious incident. The Captain of the British brig Elizabeth, John Stewart, helped North Island Ngāti Toa chief, Te Rauparaha, to capture the local Ngai Tahu chief, Te Maiharanui. The settlement of Takapuneke was sacked. (Partly as a result of this massacre, the British authorities sent an official British Resident, James Busby, to New Zealand in 1832 in an effort to stop such atrocities. The events at Takapuneke thus led directly to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.) Then in 1838 Captain Langlois, a French whaler, decided that Akaroa would make a good settlement to service whaling ships and "purchased" the peninsula in a dubious land deal with the local Māori. He returned to France, floated the Nanto-Bordelaise company, and set sail for New Zealand with a group of French and German families aboard the ship Comte de Paris, with the intention of forming a French colony on a French South Island of New Zealand.

However, by the time Langlois and his colonists arrived at Banks Peninsula in August 1840, many Māori had already signed the Treaty of Waitangi (the signatories including two chiefs at Akaroa in May) and New Zealand's first British Governor, William Hobson, had declared British sovereignty over the whole of New Zealand. On hearing of the French plan for colonisation, Hobson quickly dispatched the HMS Britomart from the Bay of Islands to Akaroa with police magistrates on board. While Langlois and his colonists sheltered from unfavourable winds at Pigeon Bay on the other side of the peninsula, the British raised their flag at Greens Point between Akaroa and Takapuneke and courts of law convened to assert British sovereignty over the South Island.

From the 1850s, Lyttelton and then Christchurch outgrew Akaroa, which has developed into a holiday resort and retained many French influences as well as many of its nineteenth-century buildings.

Historic harbour defence works dating from 1874 onwards survive at Ripapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour, and at Godley Head.

In 2011, the Christchurch earthquakes of Feb and June had their epicentres in the Port Hills, significantly affecting communities.