EARLY WHALERS OF BANKS PENINSULA

Press, Volume C, Issue 29524, 27 May 1961, Page 8

EARLY WHALERS OF BANKS PENINSULA

Brave Men Were Needed For Dangerous Work

t Specially wntten for "TM Pr«s»" by R. R. BEAUCHAMP! IN the first years of the nineteenth century * as the search for raw materials and the urge to trade anti to explore were slowly eating away the boundaries of the unknown world, the’settlement of this country by one of the enterprising while races was inevitable. That such a rich prize was tossed, like the golden apple of Paris, into British hands was largely due to the sealing and whaling industries. From the start of the eighteenhundreds the sealers had been active all about tlie higher latitudes of the Southern Ocean, plying their disagreeable (but very profitable) trade right down to the islands off the coast of Antarctica.

There was never a great killing to be made on New Zealand beaches: but. as the fur seal was almost exterminated. the shrewd traders of Sydney and the hardy seamen who sailed their ships, turned their attention to whaling. First, they sought the mighty sperm whale, with the whole South Pacific for a hunting ground, and then the capture of the right whale, which species was found more easily in the coastal waters of New* Zealand, where the cow whales came to calve through the winter season.

The story of these early whalers should not be lost. In our increasingly material civilisation we often forget both the charm and the importance of earliest New Zealand history: when, as McNab writes in "Old Whaling Days,” “men are confronted by no law but that of nature—the whales in the bays, the seals on the beaches, the timber in the forests and men who still practised the rites of cannibalism. The student of these things finds his taste is spoilt for the investigation of any history which records the matter-of-fact doings of men who are compelled to live under the laws of organised government.”

A Hartl Life The life of the whaling seaman was hard. E. J. Wakefield, in “Adventure in New Zealand,” wrote the classic account which can never be surpassed. He was 23, product of a famous family and a good education. He made his notes during a stay of some weeks at one of the whaling stations off Kapitl Island and, during his long homeward voyage, he expanded these impressions into the most notable chapter of his book. Wakefield wrote of conditions in the North Island, where the Maoris were more numerous and more influential than in the South Island. But life on a Banks Peninsula whaling station was much the same. Perhaps the saving grace which raised unlettered men of devious and often brutal background to courage, comradeship and pride was the very nature of their occupation. It demanded toughness, team work and skill. It gave in return a mere pittance; but every whale chase combined the physical effort of a hard-fought football match with the thrill of big-game hunting.

Seven Lives Lost Such was the essence of whale hunting in small boats as practised during the years of the Banks Peninsula industry. Captain Hempieman’s Peraki log reports many cases of boats stove in and on three occasions they were shattered beyond repair, seven men losing their lives. The chase and capture of the whale was the supreme moment of the whaler’s life. It came perhaps a dozen or 20 times in the average season—a brief tour of thrilling effort, high endeavour and ever-present danger, when the labour, and drudgery of the rest of the year were forgotten. The flurry was over and the exhausted men lay on their oars in the encrimsoned sea, and then came the long tow home; or weather or darkness might overtake the scene of battle and the carcase must be anchored to be brought in later for stripping and boiling down. Young William Barnard Rhodes, first of the three brothers who made so much early Canterbury history, reduced his crew to mutiny by demanding that they tow their whale home rather than leave it for the night in threatening weather. We know the youth and energy and ambition of W.8.R.. and his desire to make a success of his first whaling adventure; but some of us have an idea of what towing a 50-ton whale many weary miles at the end of a day s hunt and kill would mean! These labours, too. were done on a diet of salt meat and biscuit, with only a small keg of grog (rum and water) in the boat.

If the life of the whaler was hard, his financial reward was pitifully small. Payment was usually by share in the proceeds of the voyage, ranging from one-twelfth to the captain down to one twohundredth for an able seaman—a margin for skill and experience that unionists today might find excessive. The detailed accounts kept by Captain Rhodes show the returns for his barque Australian over her two years’ whaling vovsge durtng the years 1836-38. His share amounted to £285. or £142 10s for each year. The able seaman's share was £2B 8s lOd, and this was reduced by the charge for "slops”—clothing, tobacco and so forth, so that the average "take-home” pay for all the seamen was £7 10s a year. Neither captain nor crew could put away much for their old age on such a return. But there were compensations. Men of foresight and ability used whaling as a stepping stone to something better—or, at least, something

more profitable. Rhodes, while anchored in Port Cooper in 1836. climbed the hills behind what is now Lyttelton and noted the grazing possibilities of the wide plains spread out before him; laying up in his keen mind the future possessions of the Rhodes family. While their captain was thus profitably employed, his men (observing the life of the Maori neople, so gallant and carefree by comparison with their own cramped quarters and endless labours) dreamed of "rest after toil, port after stormy seas." Some married into the tribes and achieved their simple hearts’ desire—to live in patriarchal dignity and die, often at a great age, accepted and respected by both Maori and pakeha.

One such was James Robinson Clough who, about 1837, married a wahine of high rank and, when British and French dickered over the first settlement of Banks Peninsula. he was the man on the spot—the Interpreter and gobetween. In 1840 he provided the flagstaff on which the first British flag was hoisted at Akaroa. He put up the first post-and-rail fence for Ebenezer Hay at Pigeon Bay: worked for the Deans family at Homebush; and raised a notable family whose names crop up throughout the early history of Canterbury farming and as far afield as the Chatham Islands. In 1955 I found myself making ensilage on my neighbour's farm alongside a Clough who was a great-great-grandson of James Robinson Clough.

Most of these men, the earliest white settlers on Banks Peninsula, lived out their unrecorded lives to find peace beneath the offshore waters or in some forgotten grave. Their names appear in a whaling station log book for the last time . . . "Mate’s boat stove and sunk. James Watson and Boy Paddy drowned. . . ." But some are remembered and some founded families, generally of mixed blood, with a long and honourable tradition. William Gilbert, carpenter on a whaler, "a splendid tradesman,” lived at Pigeon Bay and Okains Bay, where he built boats and small ships. He married a Maori girl and died at the age of 95, leaving a large family. William Simjfson. “a renowned whaler," worked for Hempieman and is remembered by Simpson's look-out at Peraki. Philip Ryan, cooper on a whaler, made “tubs, churns and chessels” for the early settlers and died at Little River aged 98. H. C. Jacobson in "Akaroa and Banks Peninsula" records a visit to Ryan in 1893, when the old man was 91 and lived with his son in a "neat and tidy" whare far up the Western Valley. "He was a man of fine presence and must have possessed great strength in his time — still full of intelligence and by no means wanting in bodily as well as mental vigour. He lived there with his son, who was a halfcaste; Mr Ryan having married a Maori woman many years ago. who was his good and faithful wife until death came.”

True Pioneers James Wright came to Banks Peninsula in a whaling ship in the very early days and worked for Paddy Woods at his station at Onshore. Before going to wa he had been a Life Guardsman. A man of great strength and soldierly bearing, he was known as the Baron of Waka. moa, where he took up land and established a dairy herd. He boasted that he‘and his nine sons laid end to end measured a chain. He and his kind were the true pioneers. There are others whose long lives and large families are recorded in Jacobson's and Hay's accounts of the earliest days. But many are forgotten.

The contribution made to the settlement of Banks Peninsula by this little group of whaler seamen should not be forgotten. They were the first to come: slipping ashore. In ones and twos before the Frenchmen came, before the Rhodes's and the Hay’s, before the Monarch and long before the First Four Ships. Men of little or no education. most of them had followed the sea since childhood and those who survived the perils, physical and moral, of that hardest of all schools, carried to the grave a degree that no university masterpiece or dortorate can confirm. Closely bound as they were to the native Maori, they served to smooth th" early relationships of the two races. None rose to eminence: but in all their long lives they put their hands to the hard and n< w 'es«ary work pioneering. In this’and in the example of their domestic affairs thev «how-d ’he' without benefit of formal education or religious affiliation—“a man's a man for a' that”

Film Qn Mclndoe s Life Lady Mclndoe. widow of the New Zealand-born plastic surgeon, Sir Archibald Mclndoe, has formed a company to make a film of ter husband's life, reports the “Daily Mail.” The film will feature his work for disfigured servicemen at Fast Grinstead 'Sussex) Hospital —London, May 25.