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the first of these competed against rather than co-operated with the north-bank ferrymen, the service was not necessarily improved.

In a report made about this time, the provincial engineer condemned almost all the ferry services throughout Canterbury as being badly conducted. He made an exception of only two—Turton’s over the Ashburton and the one crossing the Waitaki River. He recommended that punts large enough to carry a dray with a whole team should be installed on the Rakaia. The provincial authorities, recognizing the need for assistance, provided boats, no doubt of the suggested size. But their action only served to emphasize the one special problem of the Rakaia. Soon afterwards one of the boats was carried away by ‘a very heavy fresh’, and the government had to seek a substitute from Felton’s ferry on the Waimakariri River.^[1] Nor were flat-bottomed punts altogether satisfactory; they tended to stick on the shingle ridges in the streams. In 1866 when Dunford returned to the Rakaia ferry, he designed two large punts with round keels—‘resembling the Norwegian yawl’—to overcome the difficulty. At the same time, his son was responsible for another innovation which, like the new vessels, met with the approval of travellers. Until this time, bullock wagons had been used to convey passengers across the smaller streams and the wide stretches of shingle to the boats. These were replaced with a spring wagon and horses. For all that, Dunford’s boats proved as difficult to manage as the earlier punts and during the last two years of the ferry service (1868-70) wagons took their place across the whole width of the river bed.

In 1865 the Canterbury Provincial Government commenced to build a railway southward from Christchurch. The government’s intention was also to bridge the Rakaia and to establish a railhead on the southern bank of that river. By thus providing easy access to the Ashburton region it expected to promote land sales there for the benefit of the provincial treasury. The line reached Selwyn in 1867 but no further progress was made because of the onset of a commercial depression in that year. Nevertheless the authorities remained anxious to bridge the river and called for a report from Edward Dobson, the provincial engineer. By that time, William White, a contractor with no formal engineering training, had proved that wooden piled bridges withstood the flood waters of Canterbury rivers better than the iron structures favoured by

1. ↑ For a traffic count see References, Part 1, p. 432.