Story: Sealing

Page 1. The rise and fall of sealing

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Māori sealing

It seems likely that before the arrival of Polynesians, between 1250 and 1300 CE, New Zealand fur seals and to a lesser extent sea lions and elephant seals were widespread around the coast. They were an obvious prey for Māori. As the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster recorded, seal meat was ‘a most excellent & palatable food; by far more tender, juicy & delicate than beefstakes’. 1 In addition, seal teeth were valuable for fish hooks.

In the first two centuries of settlement, Māori were more often seal hunters than moa hunters. There is evidence of extensive sealing in the far north, Coromandel, Taranaki, Cook Strait, the Canterbury coast and the south from Waitaki to Fiordland. However, by the 1700s seals were confined to the far south.

First European sealers

It was perhaps bad luck for seals that in 1773 James Cook spent time in Dusky Sound, where numbers of fur seals still survived. Cook’s men shot or clubbed the seals for food, and used their skins for repairing rigging, and their oil for lamps. Their potential as a trading item was especially noted in Sydney – from 1788 merchants in the new convict settlement were seeking ways of paying for imports. The London firm of Sam Enderby and Sons, who were active in transporting convicts to Sydney and had a licence from the East India Company, arranged for the Britannia to drop a sealing gang in Dusky Sound in November 1792. They were to procure skins for the China market as payment for tea. When the men were picked up in September 1793 they had collected 4,500 skins, and had also built New Zealand’s first sailing ship. However, the opening of Australia’s Bass Strait rookeries (as seal colonies were known) in 1797 diminished the attraction of New Zealand.

Seal rushes

Sealing in New Zealand revived after 1803 when the Bass Strait rookeries were exhausted. Traders looked to England, where seal fur was in demand for hats, and the leather for shoes. In addition seal oil, especially from elephant seals, burned without smoke or smell and was needed for lighting and some industrial processes. Sealers tried to keep their sealing locations secret from competitors, and were nervous about the legality because of the East India Company’s monopoly in the area. It appears that there was a rush to Dusky Sound and the West Coast in 1803, mainly for skins. Two years later American sealers initiated a surge to the Antipodes Islands, and to a lesser extent the Bounty and Auckland islands. In three years, 140,000 seals were killed in the Antipodes Islands. By 1808 sealers were back, working around Foveaux Strait and Stewart Island. Two years later there was a rush to Macquarie and Campbell islands, largely for elephant-seal oil rather than skins.

Decline

Sealing dwindled from about 1810, apart from a few operations around Foveaux Strait and the occasional visit from Sydney traders like John Grono. In the early 1820s the removal of duties on colonial oil, a renewed demand for sealskins and a recovery in the rookeries revived activity, and for a few years there was a new boom, which quickly faded. Sealers were now more often shore-based, and numbers of Māori became involved.

Increasingly sealers supplemented their incomes with trade in potatoes, flax and timber, and by the 1830s most had become traders or even whalers. Sealing survived only as an off-season hobby of shore-based whalers. As seal numbers dwindled, hunting was confined to the winter by a law of 1875. But after 1894, with the exception of 1914 and 1915, there was no open season. The last sealing came in 1946 when an open season was declared in Otago and Southland from fear that seals were harming the fisheries. The 6,187 seals killed from June to September in that year were the last legally killed in New Zealand.

Footnotes:
  1. The Resolution journal of Johann Reinhold Forster, 1772–1775, edited by Michael E. Hoare. Vol. 2. London: Hakluyt Society, 1982, p. 275. › Back
How to cite this page:

Jock Phillips, 'Sealing - The rise and fall of sealing', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/sealing/page-1 (accessed 29 March 2024)

Story by Jock Phillips, published 12 Jun 2006