Chatham Islands
The Chatham Islands are an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean about east of New Zealand's South Island, administered as part of New Zealand, and consisting of about 10 islands within an approximate radius, the largest of which are Chatham Island and Pitt Island. They include New Zealand's easternmost point, the Forty-Fours. Some of the islands, formerly cleared for farming, are now preserved as nature reserves to conserve some of the unique flora and fauna.
The first human inhabitants of the Chatham Islands are the Moriori. They are descended from the Polynesians who settled New Zealand and from whom the Māori also descended. A group of the Polynesians migrated from mainland New Zealand to the Chatham Islands, probably in the 15th century.
In 1835, members of the Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama Māori iwi from the North Island invaded the islands and nearly exterminated the Moriori, enslaving the survivors. In 1863 the Moriori were officially released from slavery through a proclamation by the resident magistrate.
In the period of European colonisation, the New Zealand Company claimed that the British Crown had never included the Chatham Islands as being under its control, and proposed selling them to the Germans to be a German colony. In 1841, a contract was drawn up for the sale of the islands for £10,000, but the sale fell through and the Chatham Islands officially became part of the Colony of New Zealand in 1842.
The Chatham Islands had a resident population of Waitangi is the main port and settlement. The local economy depends largely on conservation, tourism, farming, and fishing. The Chatham Islands Council provides local administration – its powers resemble those of New Zealand's unitary authorities. The Chatham Islands have their own time zone, which is 45 minutes ahead of mainland New Zealand.
History
Moriori
The first human inhabitants of the Chatham Islands are the Moriori. They are descended from the East Polynesians who settled New Zealand and from whom the Māori also descended. A group of New Zealand Polynesians migrated from mainland New Zealand to the Chatham Islands, probably in the 15th century. Traditions of Moriori genealogy and some features of artefacts suggest that some arrivals may have come directly to the Chathams Islands from tropical East Polynesia. The Chathams are no further from Rarotonga than the Coromandel coast is, and it is possible that they were settled separately during the Polynesian exploration of the South Pacific, with most of the immigrants coming from New Zealand later. It is clear from artefacts and linguistic evidence that the final migration was from New Zealand.The plants cultivated on mainland New Zealand were ill-suited for the colder Chathams, so the Moriori lived as hunter-gatherers and fishermen. While the islands lacked suitable trees for building ocean-going craft for long voyages, the Moriori invented the waka kōrari, a semi-submerged craft constructed of flax and lined with air bladders from kelp. This craft was used to travel to the outer islands on 'birding' missions. After generations of warfare, bloodshed was outlawed by the chief Nunuku-whenua and Moriori society became peaceful. Disputes were resolved by consensus or by duels in which, at the first sign of bloodshed, the fight was deemed over. The population before European contact was about 2,000.
Parts of a carved and decorated traditional ocean-going canoe were discovered in 2024 in a creek on the northern coast of the main island. Approximately 450 pieces, including rare examples of braided fibre lashed to timber, have been removed, catalogued and stored. Maui Solomon, chair of the Moriori Imi Settlement Trust, has no doubt that it is a "Moriori ancestral waka" that brought some of his ancestors to the islands hundreds of years ago. The question of ownership of the waka is before the Māori Land Court, with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage working with all stakeholders on "their future aspirations for the waka". The report , issued by an expert panel after visiting the site in April 2025, concluded that the waka was of pre-European construction and likely to originate in a period before there came to be significant cultural separation between New Zealand and inhabitants of the wider Pacific. However, more detailed conclusions about the exact age and size of the waka depend on the recovery of the 90–95 per cent that remains buried.
Early European arrival
The name "Chatham Islands" comes from the name for the main island, which itself gets its name from John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, who was the First Lord of the Admiralty in 1791, when reached the island. The ship, whose captain was William R. Broughton, was part of the Vancouver Expedition. The crew landed on the island on 29 November 1791 and claimed possession for Great Britain. Following a misunderstanding, Broughton's men shot and killed a Moriori resident of Kaingaroa, named Torotoro. Chatham Islands date their anniversary on 29 November, and observe it on the nearest Monday to 30 November.Sealers and whalers soon started hunting in the surrounding ocean with the islands as their base. It is estimated that 10 to 20 per cent of the indigenous Moriori soon died from diseases introduced by foreigners. The sealing and whaling industries ceased activities about 1861, while fishing remained as a major economic activity.
Māori settlement in 19th century
On 19 November and 5 December 1835, about 900 Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama men, women and children, previously resident in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and led by the chief Pōmare Ngātata, arrived on the brig Lord Rodney. The group brought with them 78 tonnes of seed potato, 20 pigs and seven large waka.The incoming Māori were received and initially cared for by the local Moriori. When it became clear that the visitors intended to stay, the Moriori withdrew to their marae at Te Awapatiki to meet and debate what to do about the Māori settlers. The Moriori decided to keep with their policy of non-aggression. Soon, Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama began to takahi, or walk the land, to lay claim to it.
Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama saw the Moriori meeting as a precursor to warfare on the part of Moriori and decided to act against them. The Māori attacked: in the ensuing violence more than 260 Moriori were killed. A Moriori survivor recalled: " commenced to kill us like sheep... were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed—men, women and children—indiscriminately". A Māori chief, Te Rakatau Katihe, said in the Native Land Court in 1870: "We took possession... in accordance with our custom, and we caught all the people. Not one escaped. Some ran away from us, these we killed; and others also we killed – but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom. I am not aware of any of our people being killed by them."
After the killings, Moriori were forbidden to marry Moriori, or to have children with each other. Māori kept Moriori slaves until 1863, when slavery was abolished by proclamation of the resident magistrate. Many Moriori women had children by their Māori masters. A number of Moriori women eventually married either Māori or European men. Some were taken away from the Chathams and never returned. Ernst Dieffenbach, who visited the Chathams on a New Zealand Company ship in 1840, reported that the Moriori were the virtual slaves of Māori and were severely mistreated, with death being a blessing. By the time the slaves were released in 1863, only 160 remained, hardly 10% of the 1835 population.
Further European arrivals
In early May 1838 the French whaling vessel Jean Bart anchored off Waitangi to trade with the Māori. The number of Māori boarding frightened the French, escalating into a confrontation in which the French crew were killed and the Jean Bart was run aground at Ocean Bay, to be ransacked and burned by Ngāti Mutunga. When word of the incident reached the French naval corvette Heroine in the Bay of Islands in September 1838, it set sail for the Chathams, accompanied by the whalers Adele and Rebecca Sims. The French arrived on 13 October and, after unsuccessfully attempting to entice some Ngāti Tama aboard, proceeded to bombard Waitangi. The next morning about a hundred armed Frenchmen went ashore, burning buildings, destroying waka, and seizing pigs and potatoes. The attacks mostly affected Ngāti Tama, weakening their position relative to Ngāti Mutunga.In 1840, Ngāti Mutunga decided to attack Ngāti Tama at their pā. They built a high staging next to the pā so they could fire down on their former allies. Fighting was still in progress when the New Zealand Company ship Cuba arrived as part of a scheme to buy land for settlement. The Treaty of Waitangi, at that stage, did not apply to the islands. The company negotiated a truce between the two warring tribes. In 1841, the New Zealand Company had proposed to establish a German colony on the Chathams. The proposal was discussed by the directors, and the secretary of the company John Ward signed an agreement with Karl Sieveking of Hamburg on 12 September 1841. The price was set at £10,000. However, when the British Colonial Office stated that the islands were to be part of the Colony of New Zealand and any Germans settling there would be treated as aliens, Joseph Somes claimed that Ward had been acting on his own initiative. The proposed leader John Beit and the expedition went to Nelson instead.
The company was then able to acquire large areas of land at Port Hutt and Waitangi from Ngāti Mutunga and also large areas of land from Ngāti Tama. This did not stop Ngāti Mutunga from trying to get revenge upon Ngāti Tama for the earlier death of one of their chiefs. They were satisfied after they killed the brother of a Ngāti Tama chief. The tribes agreed to an uneasy peace, which was formally confirmed in 1842.
Reluctant to give up slavery, Matioro and his people chartered a brig in late 1842 and sailed to Auckland Island. While Matioro was surveying the island, two of the chiefs who had accompanied him decided the island was too inhospitable for settlement, and set sail before he had returned, stranding him and his 50 followers. Pākehā settlers arrived in 1849 and Matioro and most of his people moved to Stewart Island in 1854.
An all-male group of German Moravian missionaries arrived in 1843. When a group of women were sent out to join them three years later, several marriages ensued; a few members of the present-day population can trace their ancestry back to those missionary families.
In 1865, the Māori leader Te Kooti was exiled on the Chatham Islands along with a large group of Māori rebels called the Hauhau, followers of Pai Mārire who had murdered missionaries and fought against government forces mainly on the East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand. The rebel prisoners were paid one shilling a day to work on sheep farms owned by the few European settlers. Sometimes they worked on road and track improvements. They were initially guarded by 26 guards, half of whom were Māori. They lived in whare along with their families. The prisoners helped build a redoubt of stone surrounded by a ditch and wall. Later, they built three stone prison cells. In 1868 Te Kooti and the other prisoners commandeered a schooner and escaped back to the North Island.
Almost all the Māori returned to Taranaki in the 1860s, some after a tsunami in 1868.
In 1868 Percy Smith undertook the first detailed survey of the Chatham Islands. As well as laying out block boundaries he added "paper roads".