Banks Peninsula

Banks Peninsula is a peninsula of volcanic origin on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand. It has an area of approximately 1,150 square kilometres (440 sq mi) and encompasses two large harbours and many smaller bays and coves. The South Island's largest city, Christchurch, is immediately north of the peninsula.

Three successive phases of Māori settlement took place on the peninsula, which is still known to Māori as Te Pataka o Rakaihautu (The Storehouse of Rakaihautu). Rakaihautu brought the Waitaha to the South Island 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 on 17 February 1770, during Cook's first circumnavigation of New Zealand. Cook described the land as "of a circular figure ... of a very broken uneven surface and [having] more the appearance of barrenness than fertility." Deceived by the outline of higher land behind the peninsula, Cook mistook it for an island and named it "Banks Island" in honour of Endeavour's botanist, Joseph Banks. Distracted by a phantom sighting of land to the southeast, Cook then ordered Endeavour away to the south without exploring more closely.

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 intertribal 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.

...
Wikipedia