Dicky Barrett was an English trader who came to New Zealand in 1828. He married into the Te Āti Awa tribe and came with them to Port Nicholson (Wellington) in 1832. He established a whaling station at Queen Charlotte Sound and was an interpreter for the New Zealand Company in its 1839 land purchases.

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Born in Australia to an English father and an Aboriginal mother, Thomas Chaseland first came to New Zealand about 1826 as a sealer. He subsequently became a whaler, and in 1835 he caught 11 whales in 17 days at Mataura River mouth. Later he managed Johnny Jones’s whaling station at Taieri Mouth.

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Robert Fyffe was a Scotsman who came to New Zealand in 1836 and began whaling in the Marlborough Sounds. When catches declined there he established a station at Kaikōura in 1842. When whale numbers dwindled there too, he moved into farming.

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Betty Guard married the English whaler and former convict John Guard at the age of 15, and joined him at a whaling station in the Marlborough Sounds in the late 1820s. She was captured, along with her two children, by members of Ngāti Ruanui when the Harriet was wrecked near Cape Egmont, Taranaki, in 1834. They were later rescued.

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John Howell left his native Sussex as a stowaway, eventually joining a whaling ship and coming to Kapiti Island in 1827 or 1828. He served at Johnny Jones’s whaling station at Waikouaiti before setting up a station at Jacob’s River (later Riverton). As whaling declined Howell became a pastoralist and a political leader of the Riverton community.

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Born in Australia, Johnny Jones was a whaler who eventually controlled most of the whaling in southern New Zealand, where he employed 280 people on seven stations. In 1843 he moved to a station and farm at Waikouaiti, and later settled in Dunedin to pursue his interests in shipping and trading.

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Edward Weller and his brother Joseph sailed to Otago Harbour from Australia in 1831. There they established a whaling station which by the mid-1830s employed up to 85 men. As catches declined, Weller dabbled in land purchases before returning permanently to New South Wales in 1840.

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