WHALING IN NEW ZEALAND WATERS 1791–1963

Throughout its history the nature and scope of New Zealand whaling have been influenced primarily by the local abundance and the habits of three species of whale, namely the sperm, southern right, and humpback. It is therefore necessary to distinguish clearly the relevant differences between these three mammals.

Sperm Whale

Sperm whales are the largest of all toothed whales (which include dolphins and porpoises) with males sometimes exceeding 60 ft in length and females up to about 40 ft. They feed mainly on giant squid which occur most abundantly in the deep waters of all oceans. Sperm whaling was therefore carried out mainly from vessels operating some distance off shore or over the deep submarine trenches which approach the New Zealand coast at various points. Sperm oil and the spermacetic wax, which was once in such great demand for high-quality candles, are the main products of this whale, with ambergris (used for perfumes) as an occasional but formerly very valuable by-product. These whales were the primary quarry of pelagic sailing ships from 1791–1880, but have never formed a significant part of the catch of New Zealand shore stations. They are still hunted in the Antarctic Ocean, the North Pacific, and off shore from South America, but in the waters off New Zealand relatively few were caught after 1850 and only a negligible number after 1880, until the development in 1963 of a shore-based sperm whale industry in Cook Strait. This ended in 1965.

Southern Right Whale

The southern right whale reaches 50 ft in length, with females slightly larger than males. Instead of teeth, they possess 300 or more horny plates up to 6 ft in length suspended from the upper jaw where their bristlelike inner edges are used to filter small shrimplike animals from the sea. The plates, known as baleen or “whalebone”, were once in great demand for umbrella and corset ribs, upholstery packing, and other uses which raised the price to a peak of £2,000 per ton. Three whales could produce a ton of baleen which was therefore frequently much more valuable than the oil produced per whale, despite the very high oil production of this species. Southern right whales had regular seasonal migrations from sub-Antarctic waters, where they fed in summer, to a belt between 30°S and 45S where they came to breed in winter and spring. In this belt they occurred both on the high seas and close inshore where many females produced their calves. Hunting, therefore, occurred from vessels ranging considerable distances off shore, from others at bay anchorages, and also from a large number of open boats based on shore stations. Indiscriminate hunting included the slaughter of cows and calves and caused a rapid decline in the 20 years from 1830 to 1850 to very low numbers from which the stocks have not built up. Despite strict protection during most of this century, the southern right whale is still a very rare animal.

Humpback Whale

Humpback whales grow to about 48 ft in length, but their baleen plates are much shorter and coarser than those of right whales and have never been of much commercial value. Humpbacks are caught primarily for oil, as adults processed by modern methods produce 10 or more tons each. In recent years, however, the meat has become important for pet food and meat meal. Humpbacks pass New Zealand annually in winter and spring when they migrate north to tropical breeding grounds and in late spring they return south to the Antarctic feeding grounds. Many travel relatively close to shore while they pass New Zealand and some have been caught in past years by New Zealand shore stations. As they were less valuable and harder to catch from open boats than southern right whales, small numbers only were taken during the nineteenth century.

The large, fast-swimming fin and blue whales, which form the greatest part of the Antarctic factoryship catch today, tend to avoid coastlines, and New Zealand shore whalers have caught a total of less than 10 individuals. Many small species, such as pilot whales, dolphins, and beaked whales occur, but they have never been hunted commercially in New Zealand waters.

Early Whaling Operations

Whaling commenced in New Zealand waters only 22 years after Captain Cook's first voyage to New Zealand. The first recorded whale ship was the William and Ann under the command of Captain William Bunker, who called at Doubtless Bay in 1791 during a sperm-whaling voyage in the Pacific Ocean. His was the forerunner of a large number of ships of different nationalities which either whaled in New Zealand waters or called at the ports for provisioning as part of sperm-whaling operations during the following hundred years.

During 1801 there were reports of three sperm whalers which returned from the New Zealand grounds as full ships, while six others were still operating off northern New Zealand as pelagic whalers, that is, catching off shore in the open ocean. By 1805 vessels were calling regularly at the Bay of Islands primarily for taking on water and any fresh food which could be bartered from the local Maoris, but, at the same time, some Maoris were occasionally taken on as members of the crew and the development of the Bay of Islands as a provisioning, refitting, and recruiting centre had commenced.

Despite the great predominance of American whalers (from New England ports) in the Pacific Ocean throughout the nineteenth century, it was British and Australian whalers who dominated whaling in New Zealand waters until 1835. American whalers had been excluded from Australian ports until 1831, and for a considerable time they operated mainly in the eastern, mid, and north Pacific closer to other bases. Meanwhile, British and colonial spermwhaling vessels in New Zealand waters increased steadily. During one month, March 1833, 27 British and colonial vessels, mainly whalers, were recorded at the Bay of Islands. Substantial numbers of whalers from France and a few from Bremen and Portugal added to the above. Occasional American whalers had called during the early nineteenth century, but from 1835 American whalers arrived in rapidly increasing numbers to join in the right whale fishery established shortly before in bays. They also hunted right whales off shore as well as sperm whales on the high seas.

In the peak year, 1839, Clendon, the American Consul at the Bay of Islands, entered 62 American ships and, although this included a few repeat visits in the year, many American whale ships used other New Zealand ports. Some vessels caught whales off shore from New Zealand but did not enter any New Zealand ports. It is impossible to give a precise figure for the total number of vessels which whaled off New Zealand during 1839, but it was probably of the order of 150 American and up to 50 or more vessels of other nationalities. This is much less than the clearly inaccurate figure of 600 American vessels off New Zealand, sometimes quoted (the peak fleet for the entire Pacific Ocean was 760), but it nevertheless shows that whaling was being carried out on a very substantial scale. Annual catches for individual vessels ranged from nil to 10 or more, but returns were usually recorded in barrels of oil instead of numbers of whales. It is a hazardous exercise to attempt to estimate the total number of whales caught per year, but in a few peak years this probably exceeded 1,000 whales (both sperm and right) in New Zealand waters.

Pelagic whaling dropped sharply in 1841, the year following the Treaty of Waitangi which established British sovereignty, with the accompaniment of port dues and excise duties. But it rose to a second and lower peak in 1846 and then declined to a relatively small scale as right whales had become depleted around New Zealand and new whaling grounds for sperm and other whales had been opened up elsewhere.

Shore Stations

During the rise of pelagic whaling carried on from vessels of various nationalities, New Zealand's first locally based whaling commenced at two small shore stations, at Te Awaiti, in Tory Channel, Cook Strait, and at Rakituma, in Preservation Inlet, in 1829. The former was at a site which is only a few hundred yards from that of the modern factory of today. During the 1830s operators from New South Wales and elsewhere established shore stations along many other parts of the New Zealand coast, particularly around the South Island coast from Preservation Inlet to Timaru. John Jones owned several Otago and Southland stations and the Weller Brothers station in Otago Harbour has become one of the best known through descriptions left us in correspondence and in diaries. Other stations were set up along the remaining part of the east coast of the South Island with major concentrations of small groups on Banks Peninsula and in the Cook Strait area from Port Underwood to Kapiti Island. Further north “Dicky” Barrett operated for a few years in the late 1830s from Sugarloaf Islands near New Plymouth. His was the only station established along the west coast of the North Island, north of Kapiti. Many groups formed small shore stations along the east coast of the North Island, particularly in the Mahia Peninsula area and around East Cape into Bay of Plenty during the late 1830s and early 1840s.

Shore establishments required only a small capital outlay for the relatively simple equipment. Trypots, windlasses, knives, and barrels were the main requirements, together with two or more longboats per party for the actual catching. As the work was seasonal, whalers did not depend entirely on their catch for a living. Thus whaling was a supplement to farming or other activities during the rest of the year. For this reason small stations could exist on catches as low as two or three right whales per season and still find the venture worth while. There were nearly a hundred small shore parties in the peak years of 1843 to 1845, and the oil and whalebone they exported indicates that their total catch per season was then of the order of 400 right whales. To these must be added the hundreds of right whales killed by pelagic whalers off shore and in the bays where ships' boats were often in direct competition with those of the shore whalers.

The inevitable decline of right whales rapidly affected shore as well as pelagic whalers. Many southern parties stopped hunting in the early 1840s, and in other regions there was a progressive reduction from 1845 to 1849. At the Auckland Islands there was an unsuccessful attempt to establish a whaling industry in 1849. The Enderby settlement was founded from England, but it was poorly organised and, proving a complete failure, was closed within two years.

From 1850 to the early twentieth century right whales were caught from shore in small numbers intermittently by various parties operating with open boats from Kaikoura, Tory Channel, and the Mahia to Bay of Plenty area, but their catches remained uniformly small.

Pelagic whalers, however, could still hunt on the high seas for sperm whales which had not been so severely decimated. Some American sperm whalers called at northern ports until the turn of the century and up to 20 were entered annually in the 1870s at the Bay of Islands and a smaller number at Mangonui. There were some attempts to found a local pelagic industry by New Zealand owned vessels based on Auckland (e.g., Albion, Especulador, and Magellan Cloud) and on Dunedin (e.g., Othello, Splendid, and Chance). These vessels were not sufficiently successful to encourage larger scale efforts along the lines of whaling from Tasmania where a peak of some 60 locally owned vessels were in the Pacific Ocean. The New Zealand vessels are remembered most from Frank Bullen's service on the Splendid which resulted in his masterpiece The Cruise of the Cachalot.

The next phase of New Zealand whaling developed after a change to humpback catching by New Zealand shore parties. A few humpbacks were taken by some shore parties as early as 1837 when John Wade's catch at Palliser Bay included 10 humpbacks and two right whales. Humpbacks also formed a significant part of the catch from stations along the east coast of the North Island, where the whalers at Te Kaha (Bay of Plenty) were able to carry on with open-boat catching until the 1930s by adding humpbacks to the occasional right whales they caught.

Technical Development and Mechanisation

The foundations of the earliest modern-type factory for processing humpback whales were laid at Whangamumu, near the Bay of Islands, by H. F. Cook in 1890. At first the Cook family caught whales by a method which has no exact parallel elsewhere. Cook's group used massive steel nets spread across a narrow channel not far from their station, and with open longboats they drove the whales towards the nets which the animals struck and carried away, wrapped partly around the body. While the humpbacks were thus impeded, longboats could approach more closely for hand harpooning. By these methods catches of 10 or a dozen humpbacks per year were made. In 1910 Cook purchased a Norwegian-type steam chaser with a heavy explosive harpoon gun, and it is from this date that the modern industry in New Zealand can be dated. With the new catcher his annual take rose to an average of 70 per year until the station ceased operations in 1931, after Cook's death.

At about the time that the Whangamumu station became mechanised, there was a world-wide extension of the Norwegian whaling industry following on their greatly increased operations after Svend Foyn had developed the combination of steam chaser and heavy explosive harpoon in 1867. The first southern operations began at South Georgia in 1905, but ships converted as factories for processing whales worked along the coast lines of many of the Southern Hemisphere areas. Their first trial activities along the New Zealand coasts were in 1912 when the factory ship St. George, with a fleet of six chasers, started work off the northern part of New Zealand and continued south to Stewart Island. Their total catch, however, was little more than 200 whales (mainly humpbacks), which would have been insufficient to pay expenses for the venture if it had not been for the fortunate chance discovery of a large piece of the then highly valuable ambergris in the stomach of a sperm whale caught near the Solander Islands. Although there were many inquiries by other Norwegian companies, no further development of a modern-type pelagic industry along the New Zealand coast occurred.

In Tory Channel, at the site of one of New Zealand's earliest shore stations, there were several parties who had been engaged on a small scale using rowing boats into the twentieth century, and some of these in 1907 extended their activities to Campbell Island where they engaged in shepherding and shearing the semi-wild sheep, varied by catching right whales during the winter months. Their catches were of the order of 10 to 12 per year, but the significance of this venture for New Zealand was the development of an explosive-type spear. The whalershepherds used hollow pipes containing plugs of gelignite fired by detonator after they had plunged the sharpened pipe into a whale.

This technique was improved by J. A. Perano, who commenced whaling, with launches approximately 30 ft in length, in Tory Channel in 1911. The launches gave considerably greater speed and a light explosive harpoon was used to fasten quickly to the whale, to facilitate the action of the gelignite pipe. These advances raised the catches in Cook Strait where the return averaged approximately 50 humpbacks per year over the next two decades. Improvements to the factory brought about more complete oil extraction and fuller utilisation of the whale carcass, while in recent years a large deep-freeze plant has allowed much fuller use of whale meat. With improved lookout and catching boats the catch has exceeded 200 in some post-war years. The catches, however, dropped sharply in 1961 and still further in 1962.

Not far from the site of the Cook Station at Whangamumu, Great Barrier Island, whaling with a modern factory and chasers commenced in 1957, but persisted for only two years due to disappointing returns. Another company resumed operations at the same factory in 1960, but after one successful season it had very poor catches in 1961 and 1962. The recent drop at both shore stations in New Zealand, together with a decline in catches from East Australia, Norfolk Island, and the Antarctic, shows that the combined efforts of these operations have now overtaxed the humpback stock.

End of an Era

During 1963 the International Whaling Commission prohibited humpback catching throughout the Southern Hemisphere for an indefinite period. At the close of the 1962 season, whaling at the Whangaparapara Harbour station, Great Barrier Island, came to an end. In January 1965 it was announced that the Tory Channel whaling station would also close down, because catches had been steadily declining. For a number of seasons the company had been running at a loss, in spite of a Government guarantee of £45 per ton for whale oil. This decision probably marks the end of the long and sometimes desultory era of shore-based whaling in New Zealand.

by William Henry Dawbin, M.SC., Senior Lecturer, Department of Zoology, University of Sydney.

Bibliography

All New Zealand general histories, most provincial or district histories, and many biographies include some mention of whaling and whalers. There is, however, no single work dealing with all the phases of whaling in New Zealand, and it is necessary to use contemporary newspaper reports and unpublished sources, such as port shipping lists, Customs returns, consular and Government records, and the logs and diaries of whalers, to fill in many details. The following list names some of the books which provide further information on various phases of New Zealand whaling:

• History of Otago, McLintock, A. H. (1949)
• Murihiku, McNab, R. (1909)
• Old Whaling Days, McNab, R. (1913)
• The Piraki Log, or the Diary of Captain Hempleman, Anson, A. A. (ed.) (1911)
• The Cruise of the Cachelot, Bullen, Frank T. (1898)
• Whaleman Adventures, Dakin, W. J. (1938)
• The Whaling Journal of Captain W. B. Rhodes, 1836–38, Straubel, C. R. (ed.) (1934)
• Adventure in New Zealand, Wakefield, E. J. (1908).