Pūrau #2
My last post ended in 1847 with William Barnard, Robert Heaton and George Rhodes buying rights to the Māori lease of Pūrau from the Greenwood brothers. By this time, still three years before the first Canterbury Association’s first four ships were to sail up the harbour, land at Pūrau had been cleared and cultivated and a wooden house built high up a gully under Mt Evans.
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| Mr Rhodes’ Station, Acheron Bay. Canterbury, c.1849, William Fox, Hocken Library |
When I put that post together I was struggling with the complexities of the leasing and sale of Māori land in Whakaraupō (Lyttelton Harbour). Given that the focus of this blog is the jetties and associated settlements of Whakaraupō I wanted to understand for myself – and share with others - just how Ngāi Tahu land was acquired by European settlers.[1]
On 1st October 1846 the Akaroa Police Magistrate wrote out and witnessed a Māori lease for the Greenwood brothers. Senior Whakaraupō chief and Pūrau resident Tiemi Nohomutu was the lead signatory. The lease extended far beyond Pūrau to include about 25,000ha of the hill country around Port Cooper - all this for an annual rental of £8. When William Barnard Rhodes purchased the lease on 6 July 1847 he was actually acquiring the right to farm all of the Port Hills, the Whakaraupō catchment and the whole of the Te Ahu Patiki (Mt Herbert) divide.[2]
At much the same time the New Zealand Company was seeking suitable land for a new company settlement to be known as ‘Canterbury’. Banks Peninsula and the adjacent plains fulfilled many of the necessary criteria. For the New Zealand Company to acquire the land, Māori title had to be ‘extinguished’ by purchase and Walter Mantell was charged with this task. Mantell presented the offer on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis. If the Māori chiefs quibbled they would have no claim on the reserves to be set aside for their use. There was no negotiation.
On 10 August 1849 the Port Cooper Deed was signed by Chief Nohomutu and 17 others. For £200 the Crown received 65,000 acres. The deed transferred ‘all the land and all belonging thereto’ to the queen with the exception of 850 acres at Rāpaki and nine acres at Pūrau. All the Pūrau gardens beyond the allotted area were to be abandoned after the current crops had been harvested. It wasn’t until 1870 that the nine acres was legally confirmed as Native Reserve 876 Pūrau.[3] Ngāi Tahu not only received inadequate reserve land to support their needs, but also lost control of, and access to, their traditional mahinga kai. A census in 1857 listed 48 Ngāi Tahu living at Rāpaki, 12 in Taukahara and 12 in Pūrau. Fifty years later only the Rāpaki kainga remained.
Tiemi Nohomutu died in 1850 and is buried in the public reserve along with at least 11 other Ngāi Tahu. That the reserve contains an urupā or Māori burial ground is the basis for repeated requests over the past 100 years that the reserve come under the ownership and management of Ngāi Tahu.
Even before the Port Cooper Deed was signed, the Rhodes brothers received a grant of 450 acres in Pūrau from the New Zealand Company plus an entitlement to graze their stock on ‘unoccupied lands’.[4] The Rhodes brothers farmed Pūrau from 1847 until 1874. They were astute businessmen with large land holdings on Banks Peninsula, in Timaru and Hawkes Bay. Eventually William Barnard Rhodes directed the family’s land interests from Wellington while Robert Heaton took up residence at Pūrau - the headquarters for the brothers’ peninsula operation.
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Lyttelton and Port Victoria March 1851. Sketch made by Dr Hocken. Rhodes Bay (Pūrau ), the house built by the Greenwood brothers and, I think, the Māori kainga are marked with numbers on the drawing.
http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/items/browse/tag/Canterbury+(N.Z.)
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Robert Heaton Rhodes in the 1860s probably taken while he was on the Provincial Council. Alexander Turnbull Library
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In March 1848 the survey ship Acheron anchored at Pūrau and purchased fresh mutton from the Rhodes’ farm. The Acheron Captain named the bay after his ship and Mt Evans after one of his officers. Several months later the three Canterbury Association surveyors Captain Joseph Thomas, Thomas Cass and Charles Torlesse arrived at Port Cooper.
On 15 December 1848, Torlesse recorded in his journal...
Very fine. NE. Up at daylight and entered Port Cooper at 5.00am. Anchored at Puru or Rhodes Bay. Captain Thomas, Mr Fox, Cass and I breakfasted at Rhodes’s; afterwards pulled across the harbour and ascended the ridge that bounds the harbour on the North side to Mt Pleasant, an out-station of the Rhodes; from which we had a fine view of the Northern part of the plain. Returned Rhodes 6.00pm ... Rhodes sheep shearing – men whalers during the season.[5]
The next morning William Fox and Charles Torlesse “bathed in the stream at Puru” before heading off to walk to John Gebbie’s farm at the head of the harbour.
Edward Ward arrived in Lyttelton on the 16 December 1850 aboard the Charlotte Jane. Six days later he wrote the following account in his journal.
After service Wortley and I went in his little boat across the harbour to Pulao Bay, a beautiful little land-locked inlet. There was a little level land at the upper end, but all round were high and wall-shaped hills ... We landed and found the beach strewn with oysters, mussels and cockles. The oysters were sticking fast to the large stones. We gathered about a couple of dozen in five minutes and might easily have loaded the boat with them. We then beached the boat higher up, close by a Maori village, and walked up the hill to Mr Rhodes’ station.
George Rhodes, at that time still living at Pūrau, was away but ‘his man’ provided the visitors with a lunch of bread, milk and mutton. The garden was luxurious - full of thriving vegetables and fruit trees; even Indian corn and tobacco. At the end of a very hot, windless day,
we reached our boat, having been assisted by the Maoris ...They had done us a real service, for as we had tied our boat, the tide had come in upon it, lifted it, and thumped it against the shore stones. They saw it bumping, unfastened it and anchored it in the sand safely.[6]
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Sadly Edward Ward, who farmed on Quail Island, was drowned at the head of the harbour in 1851
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From 1850 onwards there was a ready market for Pūrau produce. By the following year there was a ferry service of sorts between Pūrau and Lyttelton, run by Pūrau boatmen and dairymen Charlie Walters and George Dean. The heavily laden whaleboat would carry mutton or beef, dairy supplies, vegetables from the Rhodes’ garden and fresh fish caught by Māori from the Pūrau kainga. The boat also accommodated settlers heading for Port Levy, Pigeon Bay or Akaroa who travelled from Lyttelton to Pūrau by sea and then continued overland.
All this traffic - produce and people - hastened several developments at Pūrau. In 1853 the station workmen built a whare for their own accommodation. At the end of the same year Robert Heaton Rhodes commissioned the building of a handsome two-storied, gabled homestead using reddish-brown volcanic stone quarried from the local hills. The first house in Canterbury to be built of permanent materials, it is still occupied today. The Rhodes also built a jetty on the east side of Pūrau Bay. Unfortunately this jetty was carried away in the 1868 tidal wave that also destroyed the Manson’s 300ft jetty at the Head of the Bay. Mary Stapylton-Smith surmises that Rhodes’ jetty must have been rebuilt as it appears intact in a 1925 photo. The few remaining piles of this jetty are still visible today.
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Pūrau homestead. Photographer Alfred Charles Barker, Canterbury Museum
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| Rhodes Bay jetty, undated. This, I think, is the jetty built by the Rhodes brothers on the east side of Pūrau Bay. If you rotate the plan to the left the orientation matches that of the remaining piles. Lyttelton Harbour Board, Archives NZ/ECan
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Up to 20,000 sheep could be shorn at Pūrau, mustered and driven from as far away as Wairewa (Lake Forsyth), Kaituna and off the heights of Te Ahu Patiki (Mt Herbert).
The wool was delivered on board ship very cheaply. There was a good sized woolstore on the beach. When it was full a small craft used to come in at high tide and run as far ashore as it could – then we used to load up with drays and it was soon over. It was very cheap because the craft used to take the wool straight to the ship and there was no wharfage to pay.[7]
James Ashworth recalled...
When the sea was calm two men were sufficient to work the boat from Purau with the meat and two experienced boatmen were kept for that purpose, but when it was rough three of Rhodes’ men had to go and assist the boatmen...I remember one particularly rough trip when the boat got nearly swamped and I put in about two hours bailing out water with my boots.[8]
During the Rhodes’ tenure Pūrau, with its gently sloping beach, became a desirable picnic spot. In January 1862 over three hundred Lyttelton Sunday School children went across to Rhodes Bay by steamer and then were landed in whaleboats on the beach. They had games followed by a picnic – “huge baskets of sandwiches, cut in the most solid proportions...followed by equally gigantic platters of bread and cheese, and mountains of gooseberries and currants, assisted by countless buckets of tea and fresh, sweet milk.”[9]
Not everyone had a good time at Pūrau. In 1863 brother George took up residence while Robert and his wife Sophia visited England. Mrs George Rhodes sister, Mary Jane Wood, stayed with them. Pūrau was, she wrote, “a most miserable place it is to live at. No-one ever comes near us, we can only get away by boat, and that is not pleasant at all times.[10]
The Pūrau story continues in the next post with the arrival of the Gardiner family – and the building of a new jetty on the other side of the bay.
[1] I am grateful to Donald Couch of Rāpaki for his advice and guidance.
[2] Harry C. Evison, Te Wai Pounamu: The Greenstone Island (Wellington & Christchurch, Aoraki Press, 1993) 214 and 221-2. Donald Couch, Pūrau Māori History: A Ngāi Tahu View, paper in progress.
[3] Pūrau NR 876 was the only reserve where a single individual, Wikitoria Nohomutu, was named as recipient of the award. This land was bequeathed to Rahera Muriwai Uru in 1913 and on-sold to Mrs Christina Gardiner the following year for £360. Thus in 1914 Ngāi Tahu land rights in Pūrau were extinguished (Couch, 6-7)
[4] J. Hight & C.R. Straubel, A History of Canterbury (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd, 1957), 117
[5] Peter Bromley Maling (ed), The Torlesse Papers 1848-51 (Christchurch: The Pegasus Press, 1958), 40
[6] The Journal of Edward Ward 1850/51, (Christchurch: The Pegasus Press, 1951), 91-92
[7] Extract from Letters from Edward Dobson to A.E. Woodhouse, 1934 quoted in Elisabeth Ogilvie, Purau (Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1970)
[8] Akaroa Mail, 21 September 1926. ‘Recollections of an old pioneer as recounted by James Ashworth in 1918’
[9] Lyttelton Times, 11 January 1862
[10] Elisabeth Ogilvie, Purau, 47
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