This monument commemorates the raising of the British flag on Green’s Point and convening of a British court of law nearby on 11 August 1840.
This exercise of sovereignty was intended to forestall any intention the French may have had of establishing a French colony on Banks Peninsula. Captain Stanley had been ordered to bring his ship, the Britomart, to Akaroa to make this demonstration of British sovereignty by New Zealand’s first British Governor, Hobson, after a French naval vessel, L’Aube, sent out to facilitate the founding of a settlement at Akaroa by the Nanto-Bordelaise Company, had called in at the Bay of Islands. Both L’Aube and the French immigrant ship, Comte de Paris, reached Akaroa less than a week after the British flag had been raised on Green’s Point.
The monument, designed by a Christchurch architect, S.C. Farr, who had been an early settler of Akaroa, was unveiled in June 1898, before a crowd of around 2,000. The decision to erect a monument had been made when Akaroa considered how it could mark Queen Victoria’s 60th Jubilee in 1897. A small reserve around the monument was gazetted in 1926. The original inscription on the monument stated that sovereignty over the South Island had been proclaimed on the site in 1840. Some time after 1927-28, the inscription was altered to state, correctly, that what took place on 11 August 1840 was a demonstration of British sovereignty over the South Island, which had been proclaimed elsewhere some months earlier.
