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Settlement, 1853–78
In May 1855 they lost their hut by fire. Two of the men set out for Christchurch with the dray for fresh stores; the others remained to hold the sheep together. Owing to an accident at a river crossing the stores did not arrive for forty-six days. In the interval Lawrence suffered severely from cold, wet and the shortage of rations. ‘. . . bread and meat, wrapped in a cloth, and lying under our heads, froze so hard that we could not cut it with our knives’, their boots, under their saddle-pillows, were ‘like iron cases, and frozen to the ground’.[1] They began to rebuild the hut on a better site only to have the walls washed away by drenching rain. When the supplies at length arrived they enjoyed the luxury, not only of ample food and drink, but also of being able to sleep on a pile of wool bales under the dray and protected by a tarpaulin.
Settlement in this district began in the same year, 1853, that provincial government was established in New Zealand. Chapman began farming in that year probably ahead of the Halls and certainly in advance of anyone else in the district. When, soon afterwards, Alexander Lean set out to inspect the run he had secured (Lendon, which he called Lyndhurst) he wrote that ‘from Selwyn to Rakaia we had the poles of Edward Chapman to guide us’ across the featureless plain.[2] Two years later, early in 1856, Henry Sewell, the chief Canterbury Association official, visited Chapman and found him well established in a substantial house. The homesteads which Sewell had seen on his way south, accompanying a friend driving sheep, had caused him to describe the typical dwelling, caustically, as ‘a rude affair’ little better than a barn, but Chapman’s was a contrast. Sewell wrote: