Page:Ashburton•Scotter•1972.pdf/30

are evidence at least that Maoris sometimes travelled by other routes than those known. The results of very recent investigations (1970)^[1] suggest that at a much earlier period there was some settlement particularly at the mouth of the Ashburton River.

Whalers and traders visited and even established stations on the coast at Banks Peninsula and Timaru during the 1830s. Many of their sketch maps are still extant, but the earliest one to show the surface features of the plains between these two points dates from 1840.

Some of these first visitors may have used the land route between their whaling stations, but no traveller left an account of his journey until 1844. Early in that year, both the missionary bishop of New Zealand, George Augustus Selwyn, and the government official in charge of relations with the Maoris, Edward Shortland, ‘Protector of the Aborigines’, tramped along the shoreline and crossed the rivers. Selwyn, who walked many hundreds of miles during his pastoral visitations, set out from Banks Peninsula on 9 January 1844. Two days later he reached the Wakanui Creek outlet near the mouth of the Ashburton. He records of the journey from the Rakaia River only that

we had a tract of twenty-four miles to pass without fresh water over a dry gravelly plain. My Macintosh . . . as usual did extra duty being converted into a water skin . . . . The want of water is so unusual in New Zealand that I think that this is only the second or third time I have been obliged to carry it.^[2]

Five days later Selwyn met Shortland, much to their mutual surprise. The latter had gone to Otago by sea in order to take a census of the southern Maoris, and was returning north. He was engaged in pitching his tent for the night near the Waihao River when his companions recognized the bishop in the distance by his shovel hat and his habit of striding well ahead of his attendants. Parting from the bishop next morning, Shortland visited Arowhenua and crossed the Rangitata River on 24 March. His party then took what was probably the usual route to avoid the swamps which bordered the coast. He described his passage as follows:

1. ↑ See pages 339–41.
2. ↑ G. A. Selwyn, New Zealand Part III, Letters from the Bishop to the S.P.G., 1851, p. 10