Daily Photo – The Akaroa Britomart Monument
Akaroa was quite lovely in the morning sunshine. Beyond the town, out in the bay, sailboats drifted casually on a slow-moving tide, and in the still, clear air the rolling green hills of Banks Peninsula rose up, still partly wrapped in clouds that seemed reluctant to lift. I walked into town and carried on through the bays to the Akaroa Lighthouse, then followed a path that traced the contours of the shoreline for another kilometre until I came to a sign that read “Britomart Monument”. The track headed up into the bush, and so did I, beneath a thick canopy of trees. I’d read somewhere that at the end of the track, out toward Green’s Point, there’s a monument marking one of those small but pivotal moments in our history: the raising of the British flag to signal the arrival of HMS Britomart in 1840. It doesn’t sound like much at first, a ship arriving, a flag going up. But that simple act carried weight. It was a sign to any approaching French ships and hopeful colonists that the South Island, at least in the eyes of the Crown, was already spoken for.
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