Epitaph: Captain Thomas Nicholson Clarkson (1837-1909)

Carved in stone in Christchurch's principal square is a monument to the "Canterbury Pilgrims" of the "First Four Ships" of 1850. There are no monuments to the thousand or so settlers who had come before them in the previous fourteen years.

Tom Clarkson celebrated his third birhday just four days before the Bolton dropped anchor in Port Nicholson on the 30th of April 1840. It had been an arduous five and a half month voyage from London for his parents and their five children. William, his father and a former Royal Navy seaman, set himself up as a boatman on Lambton Quay, ferrying passengers and their luggage from the vessels that lay off the nascent township that would eventually become the Capital city.



With the family increased to ten children, in 1849 the Clarksons moved to Lyttelton, where Tom's father built a cottage above the southern end of Dampier's Bay on the western side of the port. Seen above in this detail from an early 1852 sketch, their home was reached by steps cut into the bank above the beach. Assisted by his elder sons, William continued in the trade of a boatman and their sailing cutter can be seen lying below the steps.


By 1852 fifteen year-old Tom Clarkson was ferrying settlers from Lyttelton to Ferrymead (above). Situated at the estuary of the Heathcote River, coach and carrier's services would then convey the passengers and their luggage to Christchurch. He would go on to enjoy a considerable reputation as a Pilot for vessels crossing the notorious Sumner Bar and destined for the wharves of the Port of Christchurch at what is now suburban Woolston.

In 1857, at the age of twenty, Tom gained a Master's Certificate and also married Caroline Brighting at the Christchurch Registrar's Office. About this time his parents and elder brother took up farming beside the Heathcote River and Tom and Caroline set up home in the family's Dampier's Bay cottage. Here they began a family that eventually included seven sons and seven daughters, all of whom were born at Lyttelton.

For the next three decades Tom Clarkson commanded a number of Lyttelton sailing vessels, originally for John & Peter Cameron of Norwich Quay, then William Langdown (1825-1903) and then for the almost forgotten Christchurch shipowner Charles Wesley Turner (1834–1906). In a maritime career spanning six decades Tom lost only a single vessel. She was the schooner Triumph, which was driven ashore at Kaikoura on the 3rd of February 1868, when her moorings gave way in a gale.


Titan 1866-1901

Mana 1890-1948
Subsequent to the loss of the Shaw, Savill & Albion Line's 1,180 ton emigrant ship Lyttelton in Timaru Harbour in June 1886, the port needed a new Pilot, who also acted as the Deputy Harbour Master, and in October Tom Clarkson was appointed. He is subsequently recorded as Master of the paddle tugs Titan and Mana (above). Promoted to that port's Harbour Master in 1887, it would be a post that he would fulfill, without mishap, until 1909.


Born at London on the 26th of April 1837, Captain Thomas Nicholson Clarkson is recorded as having been a man of a quiet and retiring dispostion, with a proud and haughty wife. He died at his home on Le Cren's Terrace (now The Terrace), Timaru at 6.30 am on the 27th of September 1909, aged 73 years.

Tom Clarkson's pioneering parents William and Sarah are buried in Lyttelton's Church of England Cemetery. It was estimated that by 1989 they had about four thousand descendants.