Located in what was historically a dry and windswept area populated only sparsely by Maori, Christchurch came into being as the result of a programmatic policy of colonization by the Canterbury Association . Formed in 1849 by members of Christ Church College Oxford, and with the Archbishop of Canterbury at its head, the association had the utopian aim of creating a new Jerusalem in New Zealand; a middle class, Anglican community in which the moralizing culture of Victorian England could prosper. The site of the city was chosen by the association's surveyor Captain Joseph Thomas, who was quick to recognize the agricultural potential of the surrounding plain. A few Europeans were already farming the area (notably the Scottish Deans brothers, who had arrived here in 1843 ), although the main centre of white settlement at the time was the port of Lyttelton to the southeast, a base for whalers since the 1830s. It was at Lyttelton that four ships containing nearly 800 settlers arrived in 1850, bound for the new city of Christchurch - by this stage little more than an agglomeration of wooden shacks. Descent from those who came on the "four ships" still carries enormous social cachet among members of the Christchurch elite. The earliest settlers weren't all Anglicans by any means, and the millenarian aspirations upon which the city was founded soon faded as people got on with the exhausting business of carving out a new life in unfamiliar terrain. However, the association's ideals had a profound effect on the cultural identity of the city. The elegant neo-Gothic architecture which still characterizes Christchurch's public buildings oozes with the self-confidence of these nineteenth-century pioneers, while the symmetry of the city's grid-iron street plan hints at the order the planners hoped to impose upon the community.