5 minute read
A life on the ocean waves
On 21 December 1964, a grisly milestone of sorts was marked: the last commercially hunted whale was harpooned off the Kaikōura Coast, drawing to a close 170 years of whaling that - like it or not - had been pivotal in the development of colonial New Zealand.
The whaling and sealing industries had a massive impact, they brought ships and seafarers from around the world to our shores, and the stations those seafarers built connected the remotest parts of the country to trade routes that from 1830 made whaling our biggest employer and largest commercial industry. Whaling and sealing directly influenced the Musket Wars and the Treaty of Waitangi, and were the key drivers of early colonisation. Simply put, without whaling and sealing, Aotearoa New Zealand would be a very different place today.
One of the remote places that soon became a part of the global whaling web were the Chatham Islands. Whaling stations were established on the Island, ship-based whalers visited regularly, and many locals were soon working side by side with the hardy whalers and sealers who set up shop. Hardy is an understatement; however, they hailed from virtually all over the world (though many of the Chatham whalers were Americans) and their lives consisted of weeks, sometimes months, of grinding, freezing monotony as they searched for their prey, and short, brutal and deadly spasms of violence when they found it.
Butchering the whales was filthy work that involved climbing down into the carcasses to harvest whale bone (also known as baleen) to make corset stays and umbrella ribs, and the blubber was stripped off and boiled down in stinking vats to make lamp oil to light homes and lubricants to grease the wheels of the industrial revolution. Sealing was an equally brutal and messy business, the animals killed for their precious skins, which were used to make shoes and clothing. But hunting them on jagged coastlines - often at night while the seals slept - was perilous, the male ‘bull’ seals could fight back, and drownings were common.
On the ocean the ships reeked constantly of the oil, the holds were cramped and unventilated and the southern ocean could be cruel to anyone who ventured out on it. Things weren’t much better ashore: men slept in caves or under boats that they shared with the rats that feasted on the broken bodies of whales; their clothes were ragged, their faces sunburned and dirty, they subsisted on hard tack biscuit and seal meat; and their mates were their dentist and doctor. Many were former convicts, very few were educated, and for most Māori and Moriori this motley crew - not the red-coated marines of the Royal Navy - were their first contact with the wider world. One contemporary source called them ‘the greatest ruffians unhung in their time’, which is surely an overstatement but speaks volumes of how they were perceived. It’s hard to imagine a greater clash of cultures, but it is also important to remember just how resourceful, energetic and ambitious they were.
Māori and Moriori gained introductions to western culture and technologies and facilitated trade, and in return they provided food, labour and essential local knowledge.
Remarkably, many of these first contacts grew into relationships, with some of the sealers and whalers marrying Māori and being incorporated into hapū as ‘Pākehā Māori’. Māori and Moriori gained introductions to western culture and technologies and facilitated trade, and in return they provided food, labour and essential local knowledge. The sealers and whalers also brought diseases like measles and influenza however, and the decimation of the seal colonies deprived Māori and Moriori of an important food source. In addition, a popular item of trade was the musket, and the greater availability of firearms in the fledgling country was never going to end well.
The industrial scale of sealing and whaling could never last however. By 1850 whales had been nearly hunted to extinction, and the invention of gas and later electric lighting and synthetic oils had also made whale products obsolete. The seal skin trade had collapsed several decades earlier, again because numbers had been so dramatically depleted.
So while whales and seals would no longer be hunted in Kiwi waters, it was not because of conservation concerns, but because we had virtually killed them all; ironic given that New Zealand now stands at the forefront of the anti-whaling movement.
Between 1835 and 1888 an incredible 311 whaling ships - 244 of them American - were recorded as working in the seas around the
Chathams. They killed hundreds of thousands of whales, but they also helped establish trade and communications routes that founded the nation - and perhaps introduced the classic Kiwi can-do attitude that lives on in the Chathams and the mainland. Today, little remains of their physical presence except sun-bleached bones and tools, but regardless, their legacy lives on.
