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island in the Rangitata River. After his companions went in search of help he apparently managed to reach the north bank of the river and his body was found many miles away probably near the present site of Willowby.

The Canterbury Association secured from the New Zealand Company the rights to a block of land extending from the Waipara River in the north to the Hakatere. Thus half of what became Ashburton County fell into this ‘Canterbury Block’; the rest was still controlled by the New Zealand Government. Captain Thomas, the association’s agent, renamed the boundary river the ‘Ashburton’ in honour of Lord Ashburton, a member of the association. Similarly he gave the names of other members to features in the locality: that of the Marquis of Cholmondeley to the Rakaia River, of Archbishop Whately to the plain on its southern bank, of Bishop Hinds to the Hekeao, of Viscount Alford to the Rangitata River and to the only large forest nearby, and of John Hutt, first chairman, to the most prominent peak in the front range. The only projected town in the region—near the Alford Forest—was to take its name from the Duke of Buccleuch. Possibly the Maori names of the larger rivers were too widely known to be displaced.

Following the colonizing ideas of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the association planned Canterbury as an agricultural settlement of landlords, farmers and labourers. Its original terms of land purchase, indeed, provided for licences to pasture animals on unsold land within the Canterbury Block, although these licences were issued on restrictive terms in order to discourage the colonists from settling too readily at any distance from the capital, Christchurch. However, over a period of some six years before the association’s immigrant ships arrived, colonists from Wellington had already made arrangements with the local Maoris and established extensive pastoral runs on Banks Peninsula and to the north of the plains. John Robert Godley, the leader of the settlement, quickly realized that the success of Canterbury as a colony depended on the establishment of large-scale pastoralism. He also saw that unless he granted pastoral licences on more liberal terms, sheepmen—especially those arriving from Australia at the time—would prefer to settle outside the block because the New Zealand