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White Wings Vol II. Founding Of The Provinces And Old-Time Shipping. Passenger Ships From 1840 To 1885

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There was a wide difference between settlement in the North Island and in the South Island, and nothing shows it more clearly than the stories of Wellington and Canterbury. Wellington was the spear-head of organised colonisation; upon her first settlers fell the task of showing the way. Taranaki was much in the same category. Auckland was different, for there the first settlement was a "flitting" from the Bay of Islands, rather than the act of an organised band of settlers from overseas. In considering these North Island settlements we must always remember the important part the Maori played. In the North the Maori neighbour was a very real problem; in the South he was a negligible factor in the case.

Canterbury was founded in a typically English manner—thorough from first to last. It was not until ten years after the founding of the settlement on the shores of Port Nicholson that the Canterbury scheme was actually carried into effect, so that the leaders had the valuable experience of others to guide them. Then, again, by fixing on Port Cooper and its hinterland, they had vast plains, free from the heavy bush with which the Northern settlers had to struggle, plains that offered something much nearer to the Englishman's ideas of farm land. Evidence of the comparative ease with which farming was begun is found in the fact that four years after the first ships dropped anchor in Port Lyttelton, a full cargo of produce was sent to London in the ship Edward Grenfell, the main item being wool valued at over £l5,000.

There is not much doubt that we can trace the settlement of Canterbury to a momentous interview at Malvern between Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the founder of the New Zealand Company and J. R. Godley, a well-connected, well-educated young Irishman with a penchant for colonisation. The enthusiasm with which Godley was inspired was communicated to the aristocratic band of men who formed the Canterbury Association with the Archbishop of Canterbury at the head—for from the first the scheme was strongly Church of England in tone, and would have been wholly so, but for circumstances that arose—probably the difficulty of getting sufficient numbers of the working class of that denomination.

In 1849 Captain J. Thomas, a surveyor, who had come out with the Wellington settlers, was dispatched to Lyttelton to see about the laying out of the settlement, and in April, 1850, Mr. J. R. Godley arrived, he being the executive head of the Association. page 67 Under these two men adequate preparation was made for the reception of the settlers who were to follow close on Godley's footsteps; barracks being erected at Lyttelton, and precautions taken to ensure that the profiteers would not run provisions up to famine prices

At the end of the year the ships arrived, and it did not take the newcomers long to decide upon fixing their capital on the plains instead of at Lyttelton, as was originally intended. When the first settlers climbed what we now call the Port Hills, and looked over the wonderful expanse of plains, they saw the futility of building their chief town on the steep shores of Lyttelton, and so they trekked across and took possession of the "Promised Land."