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Wild Whalers Ahoy!

© Philippa Jane Ballantine

So we are at the moment where two cultures meet- where two ancient cultures size each other up and decide what to make of each other. On one hand is the Maori culture, tribal, and proud, who are confronted in their own lands by people from across the ocean. These new comers have different skin colour, and an alien, different culture.

So who are the first emissaries of this distant place? The tough and unrefined, those with more desires and dreams than the others, those that perhaps do not fit in with the rest of European society; they're the missionaries and the whalers who first meet the Maori. Whalers and missionaries make unlikely partners, but these were the first people who had regular contact with the inhabitants of the Land of the Long White Cloud. They set up lives with the indigenous people, living sometimes nervously side by side with them. They married local women, made enemies and friends.

So while missionaries came seeking souls, the whalers came seeking a profit, but both had a profound effect on the Maori. This essay is for the whalers; next month will be for the missionaries.

For it was the whalers that came first. They arrived in the earliest days of contact, hot on the heels of the explorers, for they had reported copious numbers of animals to hunt in these new Southern Oceans. In 1792 the first whaling ship arrived, William and Ann.

To our modern way of thinking, whaling is an abhorrent activity, pillaging the sea of its greatest mammal, but in those early days, whales were merely another fish of the sea- and little or no thought was given to conservation.

The seas of the Southern Ocean were in those days teeming with whales, so perhaps to them it seemed like there could be no end to the supply. The whales supplied baleen and oil, and seemed a veritable resource just waiting to be plundered. The oil was burnt in the lamps of cities all over the world, while the bones held the women of the time tightly into their corsets. We can only be grateful that this has all stopped now, but the whalers still have a place in the history of New Zealand. And we should only feel sorry for them, for they did lead a tough and mostly unpleasant life- usually shortened by their experiences at sea or in the wild ports which catered to them. The South Pacific was at the end of the eighteenth century a wild, lawless place- where merchants and whalers fought to make the most of this status, get all the profit they could from the area. The portside towns that sprang up to cater to the whalers and sailors needs were mostly like early Russell in the Bay of Islands, which was referred to as "The Hell Hole of the Pacific."