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The first people know to live in the place known as Christchurch were moa hunters, and probably arrived in the early AD 1000. -
Iwi began to move down to the South Island form the North island between the 1500s and the 1700s.
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James Cook first spotted the Canterbury Peninsula and thought it was an island, and naming it Banks Island after Joseph Banks, the ship's botanist. -
Kaiapoi was established as a major trading area for pounamu by the 1800s. -
Tracks developed in Ōtautahi between Kaiapoi and Rāpaki
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It was probably around 1815 when sailors from the sealing ship Governor Bligh landed that Europeans first set foot on Banks Peninsula. -
The reasons why Maori populations were rapidly declining included fighting between different groups of Ngāi Tahu, raids by the Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha and the diseases that Europeans brought over.
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Captain William Rhodes first visited in 1836. He came back in 1839 and landed a herd of 50 cattle near Akaroa. And his farm was the first European farming settlement in Akaroa. -
Major Thomas Bunbury arrived on the HMS Herald to collect the signatures of the Ngāi Tahu chiefs for the Treaty of Waitangi. -
The Deans arrived and established a farm at Pūtaringamotu. 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 -
In November 1847 John Robert Godley and Edward Gibbon Wakefield met to plan the Canterbury settlement. Early in 1848 the Canterbury Association was formed. But first the land had to be bought from the Māori owners.
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Governor Grey sent the land commissioner Henry Kemp to the South Island in 1848 to buy land for the new settlement. Sixteen Ngāi Tahu chiefs signed ‘Kemp’s Deed’, This was signed at Akaroa on 12 June 1848. -
The first of the ships, the Charlotte Jane, arrived in Lyttelton on the morning of December 16, 1850.