FIRST ORGANIZED INDUSTRY

Southland Times, Issue 23610, 10 September 1938, Page 9

FIRST ORGANIZED INDUSTRY

WHALING IN N.Z. OPERATIONS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO In September 1838, while a late winter kept their boats ashore, the whalers established on the New Zealand coasts were busily preparing their equipment for the new season’s operations. At this time there were something like 500 white men resident in the country to take part in this adventurous but still profitable trade. They had their stations from Preservation Inlet and Otago Harbour to as far north as the New Plymouth Sugar Loaves. The Bay of Islands, though a great resort of ocean-going whaling captains, was not itself a shore base for whaling till later. Not the least active stations were those scattered about Cook Strait— John Guard’s at Te Awaite, Bell’s at Mana Island, \frhich he had stocked with sheep and cattle and where there was ,even tobacco grown, and four or five more round about Kapiti Island. Kapiti was such a favourite base, that, besides one station on the island itself, those diminutive specks, Tahoamaurea and Motungarara, as well as another neighbouring islet, Evans’s, had each their party of whalers resident. Tile whalers prepared for the perils and chances of the chase by repairing their boats, on which their safety as well as their livelihood depended. These boats were built for quick manoeuvring, both ends bowshaped to facilate backwatering when Leviathan lashed the water with ponderous fury; light and thin-skinned, they were easily damaged. Try-pots, those huge iron cauldrons for rendering down the whale’s blubber into oil, had to be set up somewhere near the water’s edge, often on sites specially excavated. The “spades,” razor-sharp knives on four-foot handles, rather resembling modern slashers, which were used to cut up the blubber and dissect the whalebone, had to be whetted, and the all-important harpoons ground and sharpened. Then they needed a good supply of casks to take the oil. An expert cooper sailed on every whaler and was to be found at every whaling station ashore. He would have made or repaired scores of barrels to cope with a catch on a generously optimistic scale. It would have courted bad luck as surely as sailing on Friday the 13th not to have plenty of casks ready for the oil that was still sporting innocently in the ocean. Not least in importance, lines had to be spliced to provide a rope 200 fathoms long for each boat. OLD-TIME WHALE CHASING It is a commonplace that it required courage of a high order to row up to a whale in a frail cockleshell and pierce its quaking mountainous flesh with a puny harpoon. It is sometimes overlooked that it required skill even more. The judgment of a good harpooner took care of his companions’ lives as well as the catching of whales. Whales, once firmly struck, went through all the antics of a hooked fish on a more dangerous scale. If they sounded, there was always a risk that the 200-fathom line might not be long enough. Then, unable to get rid of its assailant by plunging to the ocean depths, the harpooned whale would make for the horizon with all the

speed its wounded condition allowed, Whalers, who had already rowed four or five miles out to sight their quarry, now had the disheartening prospect of an even longer row home. The whale that was towing* them they would in turn have to tow all the way back to land when they had killed it. The oarsmen now hauled up nearer to the whale hand over hand, until, when it had wearied and weakened enough, it was safe to finish its agony with an adroit thrust of the unbarbed steel lance. The death flurry of the mighty creature was a terrible and hazardous climax to the most exciting form of hunting the world has ever known (if one excepts seal-hunting from an Eskimo kayak). It thrashed the water with its tail—unless the hunters had got near enough to cut its back sinews —and filled sea and air with its blood.

Whaling in 1838 on the New Zealand coast was on a truly international footing. American, French, English and Australian ships jostled each other in none too courteous competition for a fluctuating supply of right or sperm whales. Ships had the advantage over shore stations, because the quality of the oil from a whale that had been “tried out” immediately after killing was superior to that from carcasses towed for weary hours by a couple of small boats. A ship had its try-pots aboard, and the whole crew would turn to and keep at work until the whole carcass had been rendered down and safely casked, an operation that averaged about 40 hours. The shore stations had the advantages of smaller capital requirements and a more comfortable life ashore. All ships, of course, had plentiful intercourse with the shore, welcoming the chance of fresh food after the long voyage out. STRONG COMPETITION If there was fierce competition in New Zealand’s first organized industry, there was also at times sincere co-operation. Overseas ships especially enlisted the services of white beachcombers to act as go-betweens in traffic with the Maoris. These men were called “tonguers” not because they interpreted, but because they usually received the whale’s tongue as part of their fee. Ships often “mated” together, pooling their resources in pursuit of the elusive whales. Hempieman, the famous Peraki whaler, actually mated with French ships. In Cook Strait some enterprising Maoris had developed a

curious branch of the industry; they harpooned but did not kill whales and then sold their catches to the Cloudy Bay whalers for as much as £2O. Maoris were constantly employed by the whalers. Naturally the contact of two races with such different cultures did not take place without friction, liie marvellous goods of the white man were a source of continuous wonder, delight and cupidity to the Maoris. These eminently reasonable men soon realized that it was easier to acquire them by working for the rough but straightforward whaling skippers than by raiding their settlements. Even in those days the tribes desired foreign credits to purchase armaments. Work for the white man as sailor, blubber cutter or supplier of food could be paid for in muskets. The white man for his part, though he regarded the natives as treacherous, found it paid him to keep on good terms with his Maori neighbours and behaved himself, submitting even to demands for tribute or rent of sites occupied. Moreover, he frequently became the son-in-law of his hosts. , It is interesting to know that whaling is still carried on from Tory Channel, from a spot very near to John Guard’s Te Awaite, where he took up his abode in 1827. But the Tory Channel whalers in their fleet little 35-foot launches attack humpbacks and occasional stray finbacks (the stock in trade of Antarctic whaling). They have a modified form of the Sven Foyn harpoon gun, a weapon that flings a veritable small shell into their quarry. The old-time whalers with only a hand-flung harpoon met the whale on more even terms, and the swift humpbacks and tinners caught by modern whalemen would have been beyond their powers The sperm and right whales were their habitual prey. The sperm whale which today has retired to the Indian Ocean, was ocean-going. Ships, which would lower their boats, if necessary, in the middle of the Pacific, caught these more valuable and dangerous creatures (a sperm whale glone has a mouth that can bite). Shore stations usually had to be content with the less profitable right whale, a species of coastal habit. But both species were threatened with extinction and with them the whaling industry when, in 1866, Sven Foyn’s harpoon gun allowed swifter and bigger species to be taken. OIL AGAIN VALUABLE Coincident with the dwindling number of whales, whale oil had lost economic importance, thanks largely to the invention of gas, electricity and mineral oil fuels, like kerosene. Whale oil is again valuable today because modem science, which first displaced it, has now revived its value, discovering fresh uses for it in the manufacture of soap, margarine and in industrial processes. The value of whale oil always affected the quality of the personnel engaged at an old-time whaling station. The whaler did not receive wages but a “lay,” or share, in the voyage or season’s work. An unlucky voyage always meant numerous desertions to the shore or to other more skilful ships. Whalers, in spite of the care-free manners that men so far from Europe would tend to fall into, were in the halcyon days of high oil prices men of a fine stamp—not the blackguards and roysterers , of popular imagination. Though the missionary Bumby and the strait-laced Captain Chetwode of H.M.S. Pelorous expressed disapproval of the morals of the Cloudy Bay whalers of 1838-39, another missionary, the Rev. Henry Williams, perhaps more a man of the world, visited them about the same time and gave a far more favourable account of them. Indeed the worst conduct was always to be expected from ships from Europe or America who might commit acts of meanness or bad faith secure in the knowledge

that not they, but the next white visitors, would suffer for them. The fate of a ship like the French Jean Bart, whose crew was massacred at the Chatham Islands in 1838, shows how unwise it was to commit atrocities against the Maoris and still remain within their reach. The whalers settled in New Zealand did the country a real service, whatever their individual character might have been. They advertised its amenities to the outside world and proved that the Maoris could, if properly approached, be good neighbours. By this means they hastened settlement in New Zealand, themselves blazing the trail, not without hardship and danger.