EARLY WHALING DAYS

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 224, 18 June 1936, Page 2

EARLY WHALING DAYS

Captain James Heberley’s Life FIRST TO ASCEND EG3IONT ITobably there is up one at work in the new National Art Gallery amt Dominion Museum, building who has a closer family connection with the history of New Zealand before it became a Crown colony than Mr. Thomas Heberley. This gifted carver of wood, in whose veins runs the blood of both the Maori and pakeha, was discovered yesterday patiently chipping away at a totara pile, grey with exposure to the weather. It. was no great specimen of the totara family, for it was somewhat gnarled and split with advancing age.

“Tlte rougher the bette - -. so some of them say,” said Mr. Heberley referring to wood for carving. “But give me good timber to carve every time.”

Mr. Heberley has carved in many parts, being allied to certain Maori families in Taranaki and Wellington, but for many years was resident at Petone.

Mr. Heberley’s family dates back to the days of the first coining of the pakeha. Mr. James Heberley, grandfather of the carver at the Dominion Museum, arrived from Australia as a member of the crew of a whaler in 1829, and as an old man could tell stories of incidents which occurred in Tory Channel (Marlborough Sound) in that year, even then a base for whalers, as it is to this day. Then James Heberley became a captain, and used to sail a schooner for old Captain Guard lietween Tory Channel and Sydney with cargoes of whale oil. Captain Heberley’s knowledge of the coast of New Zealand was unexcelled in his day. He became a pilot in Wellington in the fifties before there was a Harbour Board, operating at one stage of his career from his home in or near the Pipitea pa, and later at Worser Bay. Such was the estimation of his coastal knowledge that Captain Heberley was appointed pilot to H.M.S. Galatea when she came to New Zealand in 1870 with the late Duke of Edinburgh. It was Captain Heberley, too, who was selected as guide by Dr. Ernest Dieffenbach, naturalist (who came out to Wellington in the Tory in 1839), when that scientist undertook an expedition to Taranaki toward the end of that year. Heberley was probably selected because of his knowledge of the Maori language and Native ways, for he and Dr. Dieffenbach are said to have been the first white jveople to ascend Egmont’s crest.

It is related (with what truth is not known) that when nearing the top Heberley cleared out from his scientific companion, and racing ahead was actually the first white man to reach the peak Possibly these two were the first human beings to ascend that picturesque peak, as it is not on record that the Maoris were great mountaineers. Indeed, the great peaks were usually regarded by them with awe as being the abiding place of their gods of terror, and were, in consequence, tapu.

Captain Heberley remained in the ■Wellington pilot service up till the year ISSI, which meant that apart from his life at sea before coming to New Zealand, he saw 52 years’ service on the coast of New Zealand. His son (Thomas Heberley’s father) was also connected with the sea, having for some years been harbourmaster at Picton.