In November 1830 a brig called the Elizabeth anchored in this bay on
Banks Peninsula. Her captain, John Stewart, came ashore with a story:
he was a flax trader, and he wanted to do business with the man who ran
the place, Te Maiharanui, the paramount chief of Kāi Tahu.
The bay was made for it. Takapūneke, "the bay to drag in a fishing net,"
had the safest anchorage on the peninsula, and it had become the busiest
trading post on the coast. Flax was collected around the harbour and
brought here to be worked into rope that sailors said was better than
the hemp they carried. The village was unfortified, a place of fishing
nets and trade, not a war camp. When Stewart waited and Te Maiharanui did
not appear, the crew did nothing unusual. They just sat in the bay for
days, keeping up the pretense.
Te Maiharanui had been away collecting flax. When he returned he went
on board the Elizabeth to trade, as he always did, taking his wife and
his daughter. The moment he was on deck the ship's hold opened and a
hundred armed warriors of Ngāti Toa came out from where they had been
hidden below. They took the chief and his family, and that night they
raided the village and killed or enslaved everyone they found. The
accounts of how many died vary, but the Christchurch City Council, which
has studied the site longest, puts the number at one hundred and fifty
people, and most other accounts say more.
This was revenge, two years in the planning. In 1828 eight chiefs of
Te Rauparaha's Ngāti Toa had been killed at Kaiapoi, lured inside the pā
on the same promise of trade that Te Rauparaha now used in reverse. He
had waited, and he had chosen the one place on the coast that trusted
ships. For the Elizabeth, the payment was the cargo of flax it carried
away.
Te Maiharanui's daughter was killed by her own parents on the voyage to
Kāpiti Island, to keep her from being taken by the men who had captured
them. Te Maiharanui himself was handed over to the wives of the eight
chiefs killed at Kaiapoi, who then tortured him to death. Captain Stewart was
charged with murder in Sydney, discharged on a legal technicality, and
died at sea before the law could catch him again.
The killing of so many people by the crew of a British ship, for a cargo
of flax, so alarmed the governor in New South Wales that he appointed a
British Resident to New Zealand, the first official step that would
lead, nine years later, to the Treaty of Waitangi. This bay is directly
in that chain.
The village was never rebuilt. The survivors moved along the harbour,
and for generations Ngāi Tahu elders told their children to stay away
from Takapūneke. Then in 1960 the local council built a sewage treatment
plant on top of the old village, digging up the remains of the people
killed there; the council now calls it an act of particular cultural
insensitivity. The plant is being moved. The site is sacred again, and
the plan for this bay is a place of healing and learning, with walking
trails through the native bush and space to remember the hundred and
fifty who died because a ship came in peace.
Source
Wikipedia