inhabitants." He stayed on this part of the coast four days. Sydney Parkinson, the expedition's artist, described what seems to be Cape Wanbrow, in Oamaru. On 20 February he wrote "...we were near the land, which formed an agreeable view to the naked eye. The hills were of a moderate height, having flats that extended from them a long way, bordered by a perpendicular rocky cliff next to the sea."
M?ori did live in the area, and sealers visited the coast in 1814. The Creed manuscript, discovered in 2003, records:
Some of the [local] people [had been] absent on a feasting expedition to meet a great party from Taumutu, Akaroa, Orawenua [Arowhenua]. They were returning. The [sealers'] boat passed on to the Bluff 8 miles north of Moeraki where they landed & arranged their boat � & lay down to sleep in their boat. At night Pukuheke, father of Te More, went to the boat, found them asleep & came back to the other Natives south of the Bluff. They went with 100 [men] killing 5 Europeans & eat them. Two of the seven escaped through the darkness of the night & fled as far as Goodwood, Bobby's Head, after being 2 days and nights on the way.
Pukeheke's party killed and ate these as well. The P?keh?, a party from the Matilda (Captain Fowler), under the first mate Robert Brown with two other Europeans and five lascars or Indian seamen, made eight in all, not seven as the manuscript says. They had been sent in an open boat from Stewart Island in search of a party of absconding lascars. Brown must have had some reason for searching for them on the North Otago coast.
After Te Rauparaha's sack of the large pa (fortified settlement) at Kaiapoi near modern Christchurch in 1831, refugees came south and gained permission to settle at Kakaunui (Kakanui), and the territory between Pukeuri and Waianakarua, including the site of urban Oamaru, became their domain.
Whalers sometimes visited this part of the coast in the 1830s. The Jason,
