published a full report of his notes on the nine whaling stations he had visited, but confined reports on his remarks about the Port Cooper country to the statement: ‘We hear he brings highly favourable information of that locality.’ Yet it was the impression he gained of the Port Cooper district during this cruise, in which he had seen a great deal of the South Island, that confirmed Deans in the decision to settle there — a decision that led to the first effective occupation of the Canterbury Plains. He had found it impossible to get suitable land in Wellington and he had a very poor opinion of Nelson. Immediately after his return to Wellington he began preparations to break up his establishment at Eastbourne, on Wellington harbour, and to transfer it to Port Cooper. Within a fortnight of Deans' return from the south, the Surveyor-General to the New Zealand Company, Captain W. Mein Smith, left Wellington to examine the harbours on the east side of the South Island. Deans' tour had been a private investigation; Captain Smith's was an official survey. Unfortunately, after completing the southern part of his work, covering the coast between Akaroa and Stewart Island / Rakiura, Captain Smith lost his charts, field books, and surveying instruments in the wreck of the cutter Brothers inside Akaroa heads on 10 November 1842. He then went by boat to Pigeon Bay, Port Levy, and Port Cooper. Without his instruments he could do no surveying. He made sketches of the harbour, however, and supplied a fairly full report to Colonel Wakefield. Summing up his report, he states: ‘Should it be the intention of the New Zealand Company to establish a settlement in New Munster, Akaroa will be found best suited for the purpose.’ After this, it was nearly 18 months before there was any further official investigation of Canterbury as a site for organised settlement. In the interim, a small group of enterprising Wellington settlers, of whom William Deans was the first, decided that the risks and the hardship of isolation involved in settling in the south were preferable to the slow frittering away of their resources in Wellington, where the uncertainty concerning the New Zealand Company's land claims and the hostility of the Māori made it virtually impossible for all but a few to obtain possession of land. By the beginning of 1843 William Deans was ready to