I have had just two encounters with whales. Once, while I was sailing in the Hauraki Gulf off Great Barrier Island, a humpback surfaced a few hundred metres astern of the boat and wallowed in the waves, lazily blowing vapour. When it had had its fill of air it flexed and sank back effortlessly into the deep.

On the second occasion I was drifting becalmed in a small yacht off Whangarei Heads when, not two arm spans from where I sat, the glassy surface was sliced by a waist-high blade—the dorsal fin of a killer whale. Almost before I had seen it, the black fin arced and went under, leaving nothing more than a patch of disturbed water to mark its passage.

In the silence that followed, my heart beat such a tat­too in my chest I thought it would dislodge itself. I barely breathed, thinking how vulnerable I was floating on the restless sea in a glorified plywood dinghy while some­where down below was an eight-tonne battering ram the size of a truck.

It was the undeniable solidity and muscled horsepower of the thing, the unexpectedness of its appearance and its unreadable intentions, which had got me rattled. Gradu­ally, as time passed and nothing else happened, it became clear that the orca had merely sidled up alongside to satisfy its curiosity before plunging off to attend to business elsewhere.

I relaxed my grip on the helm. The boat lifted and dropped in the glassy swell as before, and I was left to my thoughts. Left to contemplate Leviathan.

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Those old images, still crisp, still evocative, played in my mind once more as I drove from Blenheim airport to Picton. Despite my discomfort with the mass slaughter of wild creatures, I had welcomed the chance to meet two former whalers—the last of a breed—who half a century ago had hunted whales with small boats and harpoons in the unforgiving waters of Cook Strait.

I wanted to know what had driven the men to this dan­gerous, primeval work, and what feelings they harboured now, 40 or so years after the last harpoon was fired from a pitching deck and the last rope snapped taut behind a gigantic, heaving quarry.

Joe Heberley and Tom Norton were waiting for me on Picton’s waterfront. Heberley had offered to show me around historic Tory Channel, the cradle of New Zea­land shore whaling, and had that morning travelled the 30 km stretch of water from his home at the far end of Arapawa Island.

He and Norton greeted me warmly, and I grasped the big, meaty hands of men who had known a lifetime’s labour. I felt dependability in their handshakes, and saw in their gaze the steadiness and directness that comes from having faced fear, from having summoned time and again the inner resources to survive, to overcome.

They were as geographically rooted (anchored, I should say) as it is possible for Europeans to be in this young country. Heberley, 59, and Norton, 71, are both fifth-generation whalers. As far as anyone knows, Heberley’s mother is the only woman, anywhere, to have driven a chaser in successful pursuit of a whale.

Heberley himself started out as the youngest harpooner in the southern hemisphere. Norton carries the distinction of having shot the last southern right whale to be killed in New Zealand waters. On December 21, 1964, his cousin, Trevor Norton, enacted the industry’s swan song when he shot a bull sperm whale off the Kaikoura coast, the last whale killed from a New Zealand boat.

I was in good company, then, as we climbed aboard the small runabout Heberley uses in place of a car and veered out past the looming flank of the inter-island ferry into Queen Charlotte Sound. Heberley had a mind to show me the chaser Balena II, from whose deck he had despatched his last whale. It was not anchored where he expected it to be, so we poked about in a few wooded bays in Tory Channel, coming across another much altered chaser, Sea Raider, moored to a private wharf.

“Bit of a dud, that one,” said Heberley as he gunned the runabout out of the bay. “It has an 80-horse Ford. Could do 13 knots, I suppose, with a clean bum.”

In their prime, the 11 m chasers—unadorned boats with V-shaped planing hulls and 300–400 hp engines­ could do almost three times that speed. Norton said he would like to get his hands on Surprise. He had crewed on it up at Great Barrier for a while, and it was a beautiful boat. Ideal, he said, for getting about the Sounds.

We made for Arapawa Island’s Fishing Bay, near the entrance to Tory Channel. On one arm of the small bay stood the rusting remains of the country’s last whaling station. Built by the Peranos, Italian immigrants who, from 1911, made their living from whaling, it was once the country’s biggest commercial station. In the record winter season of 1960 no fewer than 226 whales, almost all humpbacks, were processed there. So many were cap­tured—78 in just 16 days in June—that a halt was called while the factory caught up.

The bay in those days was full of birds, sharks and blind eels, attracted by the offal and the rivers of blood that mingled with the tide. Further out there were tuna, cray­fish, groper, and moki “like that”—Heberley stretched his arms. “You could catch whatever you wanted.”

Corrugated-iron huts once stood at the mouth of the bay and up the hillside, the homes of 50 or so seasonal workers—shearers and freezing workers—who brought their families with them for the hunting season. The whales passed through Cook Strait between May and Au­gust on their way from Antarctica to the tropics to breed (see New Zealand Geographic, Issue 30).

We climbed up onto the wharf and wandered about. There was the steam-powered winch that hauled the carcasses tail first up a ramp to the flensing deck; a steam saw with its crosscut blade; the huge digester—really an oversized pressure cooker—for rendering down blubber. (Humpbacks yielded up to 5 t of oil each, right whales as much as 20 t.)

It was filthy, dangerous work. The cables hauling the 50 t whales were under enormous strain. The residue of the coal-fired cookers stayed boiling hot for days. Cut­ting tools were razor-sharp. The men worked long hours, seven days a week and in all weathers, with no union to look out for them. There were no safety guards on the machinery, no smoko room, toilets or showers. They la­boured on a slippery cutting deck ashore and more than once fought off a frenzied white pointer in the water. Somehow, they came to terms with both the rigours of the chase and the crushing boredom of days and weeks spent fruitlessly scouring the ocean for spouts.

One worker met an agonising death when he fell into the scalding cooker residue. Heberley’s late father, Char­lie, also a whaler, recalled the incident: “I was on the boat taking him to town, and when I pulled off his gumboot his whole foot came away from the bone. It was a godsend when he died.”

In all, four Perano whalemen lost their lives. The only one to die at sea was killed when his harpoon gun broke open, firing the charge back into his face. Deaths in the whaling industry were always messy and agonising.

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Across the water, West Head rises up above the entrance to Tory Channel in a staircase of rock. Perched on the highest crest, 91 m above sea level, was the whalers’ lookout, now little more than a pile of broken timber and iron. During the season this vantage point, which affords a sweeping panorama from Cape Campbell in the south to Plimmerton on the Kapiti coast, was occupied from dawn till dusk.

The men made chairs from old benzine packing boxes, reversing them so that their binoculars could be clamped to the back rests in front of them. From their hilltop lookout they methodically scanned the ocean. There was incentive enough to make a good job of it—each man earned £2 17s 6d when a whale was caught, and the first to sight it earned a bonus of 11s. In his first season, Char­lie Heberley earned £150, although considering the hours worked, that equated to a mere ninepence an hour.

Year by year the lookouts would carve their tallies into the wood, preserving a history of the industry for anyone able to decipher the marks. “You could read Charlie’s chair like a book,” Heberley told me.

Later, in Picton Community Museum, I was to see just such a chair, along with other industry detritus: try pots, harpoons, spades, a gun post and what may well be the oldest surviving piece of New Zealand-made furniture—a whale-vertebra stool from an early whaler’s hut.

The moment a whale was sighted the watchers sprang into action. A Union Jack was run up the flag pole, letting the crew of the mother ship, Tuatea, in nearby Okukari Bay, know that a chase was under way, and signalling factory workers to get up steam in the boiler. Grabbing their lunch tins, the chase crews then ran down to their boats, flung off the mooring lines and made with all speed for the open sea.

To Heberley, it was more like a sport than a job. Once contact was made and the pur­suit was on, there was, he said, an adrenalin rush “like the All Blacks going onto the field at a test match.”

Out from land, the chasers were guided originally by tussock fires at the lookout: smoke to the left of the main fire meantbear left; a fire extinguished, keep on course. Eventually, and much to the relief of the lookouts, the eye-watering smoke signals gave way to a radio-telephone.

On the water, the ensuing fight was less uneven than might be imagined—that is, when a whale tumbled to the fact that a fight was on. Weighing 10 times more than the boats that hunted them (roughly three tonnes per metre), right whales and hump­backs were capable of doing great damage, and were known to have lifted chasers clean out of the sea. Right whales were the more aggressive. Big ani­mals they were, said Heberley, “as agile as a cat.”

In later years, while Heberley was helping his father run a sta­tion on Great Barrier Island, a wounded bull whale charged one chaser, then turned its attention to the second, ram­ming it in the port bow and driving its head through the hull into the crew’s quarters. As the whale backed off, the crew were dismayed to see bits of bedding draped over the animal and splintered wood on the water. “It frightened the hell out of me,” said Heberley. Fortunately there was little wind and only a slight sea, and the damaged chaser made harbour with its catch.

Such conditions were ex­ceptional. Usually, the winter weather was far from benign. For the gunner, there was the added difficulty of standing at his post while travelling at maybe 30 knots in a lumpy sea. “I never went over the side,” Norton told me with a grin. “But I’ve been round the rail once or twice.”

Heberley’s father, Charlie, did go over once, and it almost killed him. He had been leaning out to fix a tow wire to what he thought was a dead whale when the animal lashed out, knocking him overboard. A second kick of the flukes struck him across the shoulders, pushing him deep. After taking a couple more smacks, he came up to the sur­face, face down and limp. The other crew used a boat hook to get him aboard. He refused sug­gestions that he be taken back to base to recover—there were still four whales in the pod to be caught. Rummaging through a bag of engine rags, Charlie found an old dress, and for the rest of the day he manned the harpoon gun clad in that and a jersey, with his legs through its arms. He got three more whales that day, but his battered head and jaw took months to heal. Not for nothing did whalers in days past call the tail, which could dash a boat to pieces and send men to eternity, “the hand of God.”

Another time, Charlie’s boot became tangled in a rope that was fast to a running whale. Thrown to the deck, he had the presence of mind to fling his arms round the gun post and pulled his foot free just as the rope tore the boot through the fairlead at the bow.

The technology of whale slaughter is not for the squeamish. Killing something as big, as unstoppable, as a whale calls for extreme measures. The harpoon guns used by the Tory Channel whalers were improvised from the cut-down barrels of anti-aircraft guns. A gunner prepared his cartridges while the boat was under way, using deto­nators, time fuses, gelignite and blasting powder stored in a wooden chest. Once a cartridge was in the breech, a wad of paper (“Five pages of the Weekly News was perfect,” said Heberley) was rammed down the barrel, followed by the harpoon.

The gun had no system to absorb the recoil. The lami­nated gun post took the entire shock, and often broke. The harpoon had an explosive head with a delay fuse that was activated by the concussion of the firing cartridge. The pounding of the hull could also set it off. If a harpoon began to smoke it was fired seaward “pretty smartly.”

The barbed explosive har­poon slowed a whale, but to kill the animal a pipe bomb filled with electrically detonated gelignite was driven in. To keep the dead whale afloat, air was pumped into it through an air spear fed by compressor.

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Such method, built around harpoon and line, were not far removed from those employed at the outset of bay whaling in New Zealand—something first at­tempted, as it happened, in Tory Channel. On our way out from Picton, Heberley had slowed the runabout a headland or two short of the Peranos’ fac­tory to show me Te Awaiti Bay. As we drifted with the motor cut, Norton took a long look at the bay. There, beyond a line of try pots, five generations of his family lie buried.

Heberley reached into the boat for an old photograph and held it up. Taken from almost the same spot where we floated, it showed two immaculately maintained whaleboats, steered by snappily dressed men, strik­ing out from the beach, har­pooners posing awkwardly in the bows. (Later, I came across one of the whaleboats, the Hobart-built Swiftsure, in the Canterbury Museum, its Huon pine planking none the worse for wear more than a century on.) In the back­ground stood sheds and thatch-roofed cottages ringed by fences with whale-rib posts.

The photograph dates from the 1890s, when whaling at Te Awaiti—“Tar’white” to the whalers—was already 70 years old. The whole novel enterprise was kicked off by Australian convict and sealer-turned-whaler Jacky Guard, who had been shipped out from London to the New South Wales penal colony in 1815. Like many in the whaling game, Guard had been knocked about by life and knocked back with equal vigour, earning a reputation as a tough, sometimes ruthless, man.

It was said that Guard had been forced into Tory Channel in 1827 while passing through Cook Strait in the teeth of a violent storm. Dropping anchor in Te Awaiti, a sheltered, stream-fed bay 3 km from the channel en­trance, he realised he had found an ideal base from which to catch the humpbacks often sighted in the Strait.

Setting up a station at Tar’white soon after, he was at first limited to shipping out whalebone. Once he had laid his hands on some casks, however, he and his party began freighting oil, landing two tuns (2290 litres) in Sydney as early as 1830.

In that year, Joe Heberley’s forebear, James “Worser” Heberley, arrived at Tar’white aboard Guard’s schooner, Waterloo, to work at the station. His timing was unfor­tunate: Te Rauparaha’s warriors were just then causing mayhem on the Kaikoura coast, and almost immediately Heberley stumbled on bodies from a recent fight.

Worse was to come. “On May 10 the natives returned from Kaiapoi,” he wrote in his memoirs. “The party numbered 2000 all told, including the women and chil­dren, and they brought about 500 prisoners with them. Altogether there must have been sixty or seventy canoes; the bow of each was decorated with dead men’s hands and heads. They landed on Te Awaiti and stayed on the beach about nine days.” Such gruesome goings-on must have made the visceral nature of the whalers’ trade seem unexceptional.

Maori–Pakeha relations were scarcely cordial, either. Waterloo was ransacked and burned by Maori after it ran aground on Waikanae beach in 1833. The following year there were two kidnappings, the most serious when Har­riet, carrying Guard, his wife and children, was wrecked off the Taranaki coast. Twelve of the crew were killed by Maori, and others on board held prisoner until Guard could collect the ransom demanded.

It was a mark of Worser Heberley’s prudence that soon after his arrival at Tar’white he formed a relationship with Te Wai Nahi, a high-born Maori woman whose uncle, Ropoama Te One, paramount chief of Ngati Awa, had allied himself with Te Rauparaha’s Ngati Toa to drive out other tribes from the Sounds. The couple, married in 1841 by the missionary Samuel Ironside, had two daugh­ters and six sons.

Charlie Heberley, born at Oyster Bay in 1918, was proud of his whakapapa. Okukari, where Joe and his two fishing sons still earn a living from the sea, was “the place where my tupuna first set foot in the South Island,” said Charlie. His wife, Ruby, was a direct descendant of Jacky Guard.

That’s how it was in the Sounds. The names of old whaling families—the Heberleys and Guards, the Toms, Jacksons, Nortons, Peranos and others—recur as a leit­motif in local histor, evidence of increasing ties between Pakeha and local Maori, a drawing-together through shared toil and kinship.

The shakedown between tangata whenua and the new arrivals was to continue for dec­ades, but common ground, or at least mutual accommodation, was found early on between Eu­ropean and Maori in the pursuit of the whale.

While working for the New Zealand Company, the German naturalist and surgeon Ernst Dieffenbach visited Tar’white in September 1839, finding that the settlement had grown to become the South Island’s first real town, with 700 people living and working there (this at a time when Port Nichol­son—now Wellington—barely existed). Going ashore, Dieffen­bach noticed several whale car­casses lying under water, while the beach itself was covered with “skulls, vertebrae, huge shoulder blades and fins; and the blubber, in pieces a square foot in size, was still boiling in large pots.”

The try-pot fires’ wreathing smoke by day and hellish glare by night were signatures of the shore stations, as were the stench from piles of putrid whale flesh and the equally offensive smell of arrack rum, an evil concoc­tion that only men stranded on the untamed rim of the world would willingly have endured. The whalers themselves, often unshaven and coated with whale oil, soot and sweat, toiled in the midst of offal and blood, the sand at their feet saturated with the residue of seasons past.

Yet the place was not entirely devoid of refinement. Dieffenbach had good things to say about Tar’white’s houses. Some were substantial and made of wood, al­though most were modest clay-floored buildings thatched all over with reeds and rushes, or with walls of wattle and daub. They were, said Dieffenbach, “not inferior to those of villages in many parts of Europe.”

At the time of Dieffenbach’s visit, 40 whalers were working at three whaling stations at Tar’white and in nearby Jacksons Bay, all of them living with Maori wom­en. Over the summer months, the whalers drifted off to other corners of the Sounds, occasionally trading pigs and potatoes with passing ships, but on the whole doing little.

Journalist Samuel Martin was more critical of condi­tions in Queen Charlotte Sound, saying the notoriously debauched Kororareka, in the Bay of Islands, was a para­dise compared with Cloudy Bay, “where crimes of every description flourish as in their native soil.” If there were a formula for creating pandemo­nium on earth, he thundered, it was to settle whaling gangs in the midst of a native popula­tion.

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Whaling had certainly con­tributed to drunkenness and prostitution in Kororareka. Henry Williams spoke of the difficulty of keeping any girls at the missionary establishments there because of what he coyly termed “the influence of ship­ping,” and Samuel Marsden described the port in 1837 as a place where “Satan maintains his dominion without molesta­tion.” However, it seems that the Tar’white whalers did little to earn the fulminations of the likes of Samuel Martin beyond swigging their arrack rum a little too fondly and cohabiting with Maori “wives.”

Drink was the more beset­ting evil. Johnny Jones, of Waikouaiti station lost so much business through his lookouts being too inebriated to sight whales that he locked up the grog. Undeterred, his hard-bitten gang set about distilling liquor from potatoes, grain and whatever else was to hand. The resulting brew was so much worse than even standard-issue arrack that Jones was obliged to unlock his supplies.

By contrast, the avuncu­lar Bishop Selwyn, who once rebuked a Maori chief for selling rum to whalers—“a vile practice into which he has been led by his English companions”—found much to admire in the whalers’ character, notably their love for their children. “They were most earnest for schools, and offered to pay con­siderable sums for their children’s education,” he wrote. “Their care of orphans also won my heart . . . xthe children of the dead have always found protectors in the friends of their fathers.”

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Shore whaling threw up more than its share of flamboyant characters, and one of the most eccentric was Tommy Evans. Known to one and all as the “Old Man,” Evans presided over the most efficient and successful whaling operation on the Kapiti coast, which he ran from Tokomapuna Island. Uniquely, his crews sported a uniform: a red or blue shirt edged with white, white trousers and sou’westers.

Evans’ own boat, Saucy Jack, was painted a flesh colour with a red nose, which bore as an em­blem the feathers of the Prince of Wales. (Evans was either harking back to the land of his fathers or, more likely, indulg­ing in a wry pun.) The decora­tive effect was more in keeping with a man-of-war’s fancy gig than a no-nonsense whaleboat.

More importantly for morale, Evans did not charge crews for their food and paid them fairly for their labours, so that, unlike at stations elsewhere, they were unlikely to end a season actually in debt to their employer.

In return for such considera­tion, Evans insisted on unwaver­ing discipline. Boats were han­dled with naval precision, and when whales were scarce the crews were sent as far as Horo­whenua, 25 km away, to look for them. They weren’t permitted to rest until they had reached the whaling ground, when the headman allowed the oars to be peaked and pipes lit.

The young adventurer Ed­ward Jerningham Wakefield, whose travels through New Zealand overlapped those of Dieffenbach, recorded an incident which reveals Evans’ strongmindedness. In October 1839, a brig was sighted trying vainly to reach shelter in the teeth of a strong nor’wester. Evans rowed out with his men and tried to get aboard the brig to help bring it in, but through poor seamanship on the part of the brig’s captain he had to abandon the attempt. For two hours the whalers pulled for home, pinned where they were by the storm and a spring tide. At length the tide slackened and they made shore, by which time the brig was 15 km off and the gale blowing harder than ever.

“One of the men muttered as he walked to his house that ‘he had not been signed to pull after Sydney brigs.’ The ‘old man’ turned round and said with a string of oaths, ‘you grumble, do you? I shall pull out to her again. Launch my boat!’ and it was with great difficulty that he was dissuaded from the enterprise, which would probably have been his last.”

Then there was the cockney Dicky Barrett, “perfectly round all over” and dressed in blue dungaree trousers, a white jacket and a broad straw hat, who ran Tar’white after Guard had gone. He turned publican, building the original Barrett’s Hotel in Wellington, but was not averse, even then, to taking a whale in the Strait when the opportunity presented itself. Barrett Reef, which claimed the Union Steam Ship Company’s ferry Wahine in 1968, is named after him.

Paddy Gilroy, whom Eng­lish writer Frank Bullen de­clared to be “unsurpassed as a whale-fisher or a seaman by any Yankee that ever sailed from Martha’s Vineyard,” cut a pass­able living in Foveaux Strait on his scruffy barque Chance and had a reputation for catching whales in almost impossible conditions.

Other whalers shone for their adventurousness. Jimmy Jackson, a solidly built Lon­doner, “all florid fatness, jollity and juice,” was said to have cir­cumnavigated the South Island in an open sealing boat. He was also reputed to have built the first ship in New Zealand big enough to trade with Australia and to have been the country’s first cattle importer.

Worser Heberley accom­panied Dieffenbach on the first European ascent of Mt Egmont/Taranaki (which the whaler was keen to name Mt Victoria) and, if his own account is to be believed, was the first to set his foot on the summit. He later became Wellington’s first harbour pilot.

These were just some of the whalemen going about their trade in the young country, marrying locals, venturing inland, finding new ways to turn a quid and rejoicing in (or hiding behind) their so­briquets. There were others: Flash Bill, Black Pete, Long Bob, Butcher Nott, Horse Lewis, Gypsy Smith, Geordie Bolts. By and large they did poorly out of shore whaling. In the early days, at least, the enterprises were often con­trolled from Sydney, with the local men little more than cogs in a money-making machine.

Worser Heberley, for one, was unhappy with the sys­tem: “We could not get any money for our work, instead of money we had to take spirits, soap, sugar, clothing etc . . . The agent would give an order on the merchant in Sydney. The merchant sent down their order for the produce of the place and gave orders to the captain not to give anyone a passage to Sydney without charging an enormous price . . . That was done so they could keep us there. We paid high prices for everything that we got, about eight hundred per cent . . . we got robbed.”

Heberley was bridling at what was, in effect, the sweat­shop underbelly of the world’s first truly global industry. To understand how New Zealand became subject to the economic vicissitudes of distant markets, we must go back another century or more, to the dawn of commer­cial whaling.

The Dutch and others in Europe had indulged in active whaling (as opposed to scavenging stranded car­casses) since the 17th century, killing the animals in shallow waters and beaching them to strip off their blub­ber. Later, as the number of whales fell—or the animals learned to stay away—whalers took to the high seas, eventually mounting expeditions to Greenland and be­yond, and to make the voyages longer and more lucrative began the risky practice of rendering down the blubber on board ship.

For years, baleen whales—the ones which sieve planktonic food through bony, comb-like structures in their jaws—were the favoured target, especially the northern right whale. Aside from the commercially important baleen—used to make, among other items, corset stays, umbrella ribs and buggy whips—the northern right had the virtues of swimming slowly, yielding a good amount of oil and usually remaining afloat once dead. In every way it was the “right” whale to hunt, hence the name (see New Zealand Geographic, Issue 40 ).

In or about the year 1712 a singular event transformed the industry. An American whaler by the name of Chris­topher Hussey was carried well out into the Atlantic by a storm while searching for right whales. Seeing a large, toothed whale, he killed it and brought it in. In its head cavity was found oil of a much higher quality than the “black” oil extracted from the blubber of baleen whales.

A white, waxy substance found in large quantities in the creature’s head cavity lent the creature the name Sperma cetus: the sperm whale. Candles made with this substance burned with such brilliance that they came to define artificial illumination, candle-power being a measure of luminosity based on the light emitted by a spermaceti candle. The chance finding of a secretion in the intestines called ambergris, used in the manufacture of perfume, more than offset the lack of baleen.

The sperm whale’s liking for temperate waters soon lured northern-hemisphere whalers into the Pacific. Among the most productive of the new whaling grounds was the Tasman Sea. In 1791, Britannia, a ship belonging to the British firm of Samuel Enderby and Sons, reached Port Jackson with the usual cargo of convicts and supplies. On landing, its master, Thomas Melville, fired off an eager letter to his employer, reporting that: “Within three leagues of the shore we saw sperm whales in great plenty: we sailed through different shoals of them from twelve o’clock in the day till after sunset, all around the horizon as far as I could see from the masthead . . .”

It was impossible to keep such news under wraps, and soon the port was astir, with five out of the 10 transport ships at anchor there setting sail in pursuit of the whales. What followed was indicative of the part chance played in the game of ocean whaling. Britannia and William and Ann (the latter, in 1792, became the first whaling ship to enter New Zealand waters) each brought back a sperm whale. They had killed seven, but bad weather had robbed them of the remainder. Mary Ann did not see a single spout, while Salamander reported seeing an estimated 15,000 whales in less than two weeks. Heavy seas had prevented it and Matilda from lowering boats for the chase.

Buoyed by the prices fetched in Europe (which was increasingly illuminated, and its machinery lubricated, by whale oil), the whalers persevered, opening up new grounds in a series of oil rushes across the Pacific.

New Zealand was long considered one of the more dangerous places to practise the trade. As early as 1823, Samuel Enderby pressed for annexation of the islands to protect British whalers and forestall American competi­tors. No doubt the burning of the transport ship Boyd and the massacre of its crew and most of its passengers by Maori in Whangaroa in 1809 gave weight to his argu­ment, along with several other brutal episodes, including that involving Guard’s Harriet 11 years later.

As a result of such incidents, some ocean whalers became decidedly jumpy. George Bayly detailed the pre and low-cost provisions. Whalers tended to hunt closer to the equator during the winter, returning to New Zealand over summer to refit and restock their ships and top up their cargo of oil by chasing right and humpback whales inshore and sperm whales off the continental shelf. Maori, valued for their harpoon and boat-handling skills, were increasingly prominent among the crews.

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Ocean whaling differed little in technique from bay whaling, but the sheer scale of its canvas and the epic sweep of its unfolding dra­ma have made it an icon of human endeavour. There is the whale—a sperm bull—breaking a flimsy whaleboat across its back or splintering the thin cedar planking with its massive jaw. An iron (or harpoon) is fast to the whale, but the monster cannot be restrained. Steersman, headman and crew are thrown into the water amid trailing cordage, oars and cautions taken aboard his ship as it approached the Firth of Thames in 1825: “An arm-chest was hoisted into each top, containing half a dozen muskets, as many pistols, cutlasses, [and] boarding-pikes, and a good supply of ammunition. The two carronades were hauled into the roundhouse [and] loaded with charges of musketballs and slugs. Inside the roundhouse, the bulkheads were fitted with racks for firearms, cutlasses, axes, and so on . . .”

Despite the risks, visits by whalers increased, and dur­ing December 1827 and January 1828 as many as 14 whal­ing ships lay at anchor in the Bay of Islands, attracted by freedom from duties (at least until annexation by Britain) mast.

Herman Melville, himself a one-time whaler, elevated the drama of the whale hunt to the status of myth with the publication in 1851 of Moby-Dick. The fate of the ficti­tious Pequod, rammed and sunk by a gigantic white sperm whale, mirrors the end of the real Nantucket whaler Essex, which was destroyed in exactly the same way in Novem­ber 1820. “The ship brought up suddenly and violently as if she had struck a rock, and trembled for a few seconds like a leaf,” said the aptly named first mate Owen Chase of the initial impact.

Another notorious fighter was “New Zealand Tom,” a sperm whale said to have destroyed a great number of ships’ boats. When finally caught by Adonis in 1804, he was found to be carrying irons with the identifying marks of several whaling ships.

The danger of whale attack always ran high. The 19­ year-old American John Burr Osborn, aboard Amazon, left a rare record of a whale hunt on the Solander Ground, west of Stewart Island, in 1845: “. . . the second day out we raised a school of sperm whales and, lowering our boats, we pulled directly for the school. There were about fifty in the school, and my boat fastened to an old bull. As soon as fastened he ran his under jaw across the stern sheets of the boat. His junk [the lower part of the massive head] was laid back as if he was getting ready to smash things. He turned the after oar man and myself across under his jaw, and all the crew were in the water, the after oar man and myself being badly mixed up with the line as it had rolled out of the tubs when the boat capsized . . .

“Our boys all crawled on the bottom of the boat. The harpoon had done its work, for about this time the old bull went into his death ‘flurry,’ when he lashed the sea into a foam of blood and water all about us. We could not move our boat because of its being bottom up. At one time we left the boat because the whale was coming directly at us and with great force, but he shut his mouth just before getting to it, and seemed to change his mind. The sharks were getting thick on account of the blood, and we crawled back on the boat again, and there we re­mained eight long hours . . .”

The crew of Amazon eventually got the whales along­side and cut the blubber overnight. The next day they sailed to Jacobs River, near Bluff, where the chunks of blubber—the “blanket pieces”—were tried out (melted to extract the oil) in kettles on shore.

Bigger ships usually tried out the blubber at sea, fires being lit for the purpose under copper boilers set in brick frames on deck. The blubber was cut into strips called horsepieces, which were minced and fed into the boilers. The resulting oil was then cooled and casked. The work went on day and night until it was finished, the fires often casting an eerie glow over the whale grounds.

Lighting fires on wooden boats was risky. Deck plank­ing sometimes caught fire and collapsed, sending both cauldron and burning timbers down into the bowels of the oil-laden ship, inevitably sealing its fate.

The French doctor Felix Maynard witnessed such a calamity from the decks of Asia, as it tried out at night off the New Zealand coast in March 1846. Another ship was in flames 25 km to windward, its trying fire having become an uncontrollable blaze.

“The horizon was illuminated, and at the bottom of the flames one perceived, through the telescope, an ignited mass, a colossal coal . . . which fed the conflagration and gave to the disaster the recurring radiance of an immense intermittent lighthouse . . . Suddenly a more vivid light was diffused over the ocean; then the flames lessened in intensity little by little, and we perceived the colossal coal diminishing in size and becoming extinguished as it sank beneath the sea.” Sunrise revealed little more than a few pieces of charred timber floating on the surface.

Given such a scenario, it is not surprising that crews welcomed the prospect of cutting up a carcass and trying it in harbour. There was also the possibility of outside help. Frank Bullen, aboard Splendid, told of one occasion when the ship ran in to Port William, on Stewart Island, with a catch to escape bad weather. Just as the crew were about to start work, a gang of Maori rowed up and asked what the captain intended doing with the carcass, which at sea was always jettisoned. A deal was quickly struck, whereby the Maori took the remains of the whale, agreeing to sell back at a favourable rate any oil they recovered.

Bullen later went ashore and found them “working as I have never seen men work . . . They attacked the carcass furiously . . . chopping through the massive bones and rending off huge lumps of the flesh with marvellous speed. They had already laid open the enormous cavity of the abdomen, and were stripping the interminable intestines of their rich coating of fat. In the maw there were, besides a large quantity of dismembered squid of great size, a number of fish, such as rock cod, barracouta, schnapper, and the like, whose presence there was a revelation to me. . . . Every part of the animal yielded oil. Even the bones, broken up into pieces capable of entering the pot, were boiled.”

It was a good season for Splendid, and with a hold full of potatoes, firewood and freshly casked water for the months-long journey round the Horn to distant New Bedford, the old barque was soon ready to shake out its sails and weigh anchor. With rigging tarred and hull freshly painted, whaling gear carefully oiled and stowed and several of the boats taken inboard and secured aft, it began to take on the appearance of an ordinary mer­chantman with an urge to reach market. Once out at sea, the bricks and mortar of the trying station were heaved overboard, and the transformation was complete.

The year was 1876, and, despite Splendid’s full hold, whaling was by then in terminal decline. The previous year, The Official Handbook of New Zealand had rated oil and whalebone, “which in the early days of the Colony were regarded as its staple product,” as “too insignificant to mention.”

As early as 1843, Dieffenbach had predicted such an outcome, warning that by killing mothers and calves indiscriminately, shore whalers had “felled the tree to obtain the fruit.”

By the 1850s, shore whaling was dead. Pelagic whaling lingered on, but if sperm whales proved more difficult to annihilate than had other species, their oil was vulnerable to competing products such as petroleum-based fuels for lighting and, in more recent times, oil from the jojoba plant for lubrication.

Splendid was dismantled at Port Albert, in Kaipara Harbour, in 1890. Paddy Gilroy’s Chance, which Bul­len had seen in harbour at Stewart Island in 1876, was even then the sole survivor of the local whaling indus­try—“carelessly rigged, and vilely unkempt as to her gear, while outside she did not seem to have had a coat of paint for a generation.” The old warhorse ended its whaling days soon after, only to linger ignominiously as a beached hulk at Bluff before being broken up in 1903.

Which brings us full circle to Joe Heberley and Tom Norton and to the third phase of whaling in New Zea­land: the use of fast, motorised chasers to catch whales for processing ashore—a development that briefly resuscitated the industry, first in Cook Strait, then in the Hau­raki Gulf.

Thus did the grisly business of whale hunting flare and fade in the dawn of nationhood. From the shaky, short-lived enterprises of restless outsiders to the long-estab­lished factories of family dynasties, whaling helped propel the country’s slow drift to colonisation. As with pioneering activities the world over, it was an extractive industry, built on the exploitation of a limited re­source. As the machinery of harvest became more efficient, it outstripped the ability of the resource to regen­erate itself, so dooming both whales and whalers.

The 21st century is a far different world. It is easy for us to look back on our whaling heritage with repug­nance born of the amnesia comfort creates. The early whalers lived in a brutal world of inequality, hardship and bloodshed. We can hardly expect Worser Heberley at Tar’white in 1830 to have looked down from the human remains fixed to the prows of Maori waka and felt a twinge of conscience over whale entrails at his feet. At a time when petty criminals were being deported from Britain to Australia by the shipload, the plight of mere “fish” was unlikely to have raised much concern.

“Most of the old whalers wouldn’t kill a whale these days,” Joe Heberley told me. His father, Charlie, ended his days an avowed conservationist. But that shouldn’t blind us to the very different reality under which he and his forebears once laboured.

The industry’s candle may have guttered, but the courage, resource­fulness and hardihood of the whalers live on.

So too, if there is a grain of justice in the world, will Leviathan.

The enduring whaleboat

The whale boat was central to the evolution of whaling. To the ocean-roving whaling ship or the shore-based whaling station it was what we might today call the “weapons delivery system,” a vital tool in the pursuit, despatching and recovery of whales.

To modern eyes, the whaleboat may seem a low-tech, old-fashioned vessel, but it was, in fact, a craft of the most exquisite refinement, in which form had been superbly moulded by function over a period of time stretching back to the Neolithic.

Early whaleboats used by Basque whalers off Newfoundland over 400 years ago were not dissimilar in configuration to the boats used in New Zealand waters in the 1800s. They were double-ended for sea-kindliness and to allow rapid reversing once a harpoon had been planted in a whale. There was one oarsman to a thwart, sitting on the side opposite his oarlock to maximise his purchase on the water.

By the time the whales around New Zealand began to be exploited, the predominant whaling fleets were American, mainly from Connecticut and Massachusetts, with Nantucket and, later, New Bedford the main ports. A typical American whaler carried five whaleboats, slung out on davits when the hunt was on. Each boat was crewed by five oarsmen, using unequal-length oars, and a “headsman,” steering with a long stern oar. In late American practice, a rudder, tiller and centreplate were also provided, for use when under sail.

English and American whaleboats, though very similar, differed in some particulars. The English had a logger­head, or bollard, forward to secure the harpoon line; the American had it aft. The English had its heavy load of up to 2000 m of line coiled meticulously in two tubs to spread the load; the Ameri­can had one huge tub.

By the mid-19th century, American boat builders such as the Beetle Boat Co. of New Bedford were using mass-production techniques, prefabricating components from patterns, then erect­ing the boats upside down over moulds.

The boats were generally between 8 and 10 m long, with a greatest beam of 1.5 to 2 m, giving a length-to-beam ratio of 5 to 1.

The Americans used a variety of timbers, each chosen for its particular characteristics. The planking was usu­ally cedar—light and rot resistant—the keel oak, the floors pine, the thwarts spruce. The components which took the greatest friction from the line were made from hardwoods: hickory for the loggerhead and lignum vitae for the bow chocks. Oars were made of ash.

While the bare hulls were remark­ably light—around 275 kg—they had to be very strong, not only to carry up to another 1000 kg of line, harpoons, sails, spars and men, but also to cope with the huge stresses of the “Nantucket sleigh ride,” when a harpooned whale towed a whaleboat at speeds of 20 knots or more. They also had to be capable of handling any sea condition for days at a time, while boats used by bay whalers had to be able to tow a carcass back to shore.

Many of the American boats were built following the ribband carvel principle, the 12 mm hull planks butting smoothly one against the next, each seam covered by a strip of wood, or ribband, 30 mm by 6 mm, running the length of the boat on the inside. This style of construction was more adapt­able to mass production and made for quieter running when approaching a whale from behind, but boats built this way were not as strong, durable or as easy to repair as those that employed the time-honoured clinker, or lapstrake, method, with the planks overlapping one another from the gunwale down. Many American boat builders used a variety of planking, mixing the two forms—part carvel, part lapstrake—according to the preference of the master of the whale ship. Whalers themselves were said to prefer lapstrake as it gave a better handhold if a whale overturned the boat, as so often happened.

These American whaleboats were highly efficient. “A trained crew in smooth water could pull five miles the first hour and four the second. Pulling to windward, they could make four knots; a green crew not over three,” states Willits D. Ansel, an authority on US whaleboats. The boats were well cared for, often extravagantly painted up and maintained in a manner befitting their importance in the whale-catching process.

Despite the very best of attention, however, so rugged was the work that the normal life of an American whale­boat was only three years. It is estimated that some 60,000 whaleboats were built in the US from 1720 to 1920, the bulk during the first half of the 19th century. Many thousands more were built in Brit­ain, the whaling nations of Europe, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and in Tasmania, where the convicts of Port Arthur alone built more than 50.

In New Zealand, the main source of whaleboats was American whalers re­turning home with a full cargo of oil and baleen, who traded their old whaleboats for supplies for the long voyage ahead. These cast-offs were repaired locally, as every whaling station had a boat builder or shipwright or two.

Soon, these tradesmen were building whaleboats from scratch, using indig­enous timbers. Kauri—light, strong and durable—took over most of the roles of the American and Tasmanian softwoods, although South Island builders also used kahikatea and kaikawaka for planking. Totara took the place of the hardwoods used elsewhere, while beech, kowhai and mangeao were used for ribbing and puriri or pohutukawa for knees.

From the 1870s, the leading boat builders of the colony, notably Charles Bailey Sr, Hewson and Melville, Robert Logan and James Clare, all of Auckland, produced very fine whaleboats in the American style.

Tasmanian builders were also active. New Zealand’s most successful and long-lived working whaleboats came from the Liardet yard in Hobart. Among them were Swiftsure and Alabama, owned by Jimmy Jackson of Te Awaiti. Built around 1860, they were still chasing whales off Kaikoura around 1910. Swift-sure survives in the Canterbury Museum. Apart from her Huon pine planking and other Tasmanian timbers, she is practi­cally identical to an American whaleboat of the time, but with a little more sheer.

There are other whaleboat survivors in the country. Kawhia has four racing whaleboats built in the period 1885 to 1890, although their exact provenance has become clouded with time. Three of these five-oared kauri vessels are the centrepiece of the New Year’s Day Kawhia Regatta and another annual race across the harbour at Te Waitere.

They are exceptionally light craft (each weighs less than 100 kg), and their construction, using techniques pioneered by Charles Bailey Sr on Waitemata, in 1884, owes more to racing skiffs of the time than to the working whaleboat. They are the only survivors of a craze for whaleboat racing which dominated the Auckland boating scene for seven years from 1884 to 1891, an enthusiasm that abated only when bookmakers took control. Professional­ism (crews were paid handsomely) and fouls and fisticuffs on the water killed the sport.

Kawhia’s whaleboats are joined at the annual regatta by three faithful replicas built by Ron Hackett, of Totara North. Hackett used 8 mm kauri for hull planking (full-length planks are out of the question these days, so there are scarfs), puriri for the knees and a mixture of American white oak, chestnut and black locust for the ribs.

The top Te Waitere crew reckon their Hackett boat can attain 8 kn, outpacing most of the small outboard craft follow­ing them. It lifts well up in the water dur­ing the stroke, comfortably exceeding its theoretical maximum speed.

To visit the beach at Kawhia around high tide on New Year’s Day and to witness the racing of these graceful craft is to experience a time warp back to the days when Pakeha first came to Aotearoa. The Nantucket sleigh ride may be lost to history, but the boats which made it possible are with us still.

Harold Kidd

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From harpoon to pontoon—our changing attitude to whales

In 1960, a record 361 humpback whales were killed in New Zealand waters—135 by the newly established Gulf Whaling Industries on Great Barrier Island and 226 by the Peranos in Tory Channel. It was a bonanza made possible by fast boats and highly evolved hunting methods.

The next year’s catch was unexpectedly low—just 80. In 1962 the number fell even further, to 32, prompting Gulf Whaling to end its season a month early. Only eight whales had been caught in the Hauraki Gulf that year, with none sighted after June 18, and in the face of such scant numbers the company was forced to close down. After battling the odds for a further two years, the Tory Channel company followed suit in 1964, bringing to an end a 140-year-old New Zealand industry.

The late Charlie Heberley, manager of Gulf Whaling Industries and a former Perano gunner, was in no doubt over what caused the drastic decline in whale numbers: Antarctic whaling. In the same year he and others took 361 whales in local waters, Japanese, Russian and Norwegian vessels—floating factories 150 m or more long and collectively capable of processing up to 740 whales a day—took 42,000 “blue whale units” in the seas around Antarctica. (A blue whale unit is a measure of the approximate yield of oil from a baleen whale. According to this measure, one blue whale is equivalent to two fin whales, 2.5 humpback whales or six sei whales.) Many of those whales were probably humpbacks, so perhaps 70,000 or 80,000 animals were actually taken. To put those figures in perspective, fewer than 6000 whales were caught in 54 years of motorised whaling in New Zealand. In 1961, there were 21 factory ships and 268 steel-hulled chasers operating in the Antarctic.

New Zealand was peripherally involved in Antarctic whaling in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1924, a year after New Zealand began administering the Ross Dependency, the government granted the Norwegian whaling company Rosshavet a licence to hunt whales in the Ross Sea, and the company set up a base in Paterson Inlet, on Stewart Island. Huge catches in 1930/31, coupled with diminishing demand as the Depression deepened, led to a collapse in the price of whale oil. As a result, no whaling took place in 1931/32, and although 1932/33 was a successful season the Norwegians did not return, and their licence was revoked in 1935.

Whales being a valuable resource, whalers and whaling nations were concerned at their depletion long before the 1960s. In 1931, the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling was signed in Geneva, binding signatories to a set of rules which included a ban on the taking of right whales (considered to be on the brink of extinction everywhere) and suckling baleen whales or their mothers, regardless of species. Full details of all whales killed had to be kept, and carcasses to be completely utilised. A similar agreement was signed in June 1937. The stated purpose of these agreements was “to secure the prosperity of the whaling industry and, for that purpose, to maintain the stock of whales.”

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) was formed in 1946 with the same objective: ensuring the sustainability of commercial whaling. The IWC immediately established a whale sanctuary in part of the South Pacific, but pressure from whaling nations saw this abolished in 1955. Over the two ensuing decades the IWC continued to allow a sizeable whale quota, although by the end of the 1970s this had fallen to 14,000 whales a year from 46,000 in the middle of that decade.

In the early 1970s, anti-whaling campaigns by the environmental-action group Friends of the Earth and Project Jonah New Zealand, a non-political trust dedicated to the protection of marine mammals, started to put pressure on the New Zealand government to rejoin the IWC (which New Zealand had left once whaling here ceased) and to change its pro-whaling stance.

Soon, political lobbying was accompanied by publicity campaigning. In 1973, Paul Spong, a New Zealander working with orca at the Vancouver Public Aquarium, suggested to the anti-nuclear organisation Greenpeace that it broaden its focus and campaign for an end to commercial whaling. Greenpeace’s “Save the Whales” campaign was launched in Vancouver in 1975 and soon spread worldwide.

Campaigns by these organisations began to rouse sympathy for whales. One whale was being slaughtered every 12 minutes somewhere in the world, the public was told. These were not domesticated farm animals bred for their meat but creatures that epitomised nature’s wild splendour. Large-brained and long-lived, they breast-fed, like humans, and some species, such as humpbacks, gave voice to mysterious, vaguely harmonic “songs.”

In 1976, following a public letter-writing campaign to the government orchestrated by Project Jonah, New Zealand rejoined the IWC. Two years later, a mass stranding of false killer whales on Auckland’s back doorstep, at Waiau Pa, on the Manukau Harbour, heightened the growing wave of concern for the well-being of whales.

Greenpeace, meanwhile, took its protest to the high seas. Its brand of direct action—using Zodiac inflatables to confront the factory ships, getting between the hunters and their quarry—appealed to New Zealanders, who, characteristically, have always shown a preference for practical action over armchair theorising on matters of conscience.

By 1979, the New Zealand position on the IWC had switched from pro-whaling to pro-whales, and in 1982 a moratorium on commercial whaling (the official word used by the IWC was “pause,” implying subsequent resumption) was voted in by a majority of members. The moratorium came into effect in 1986 and remains in place today despite agitation from a few countries—led by Japan and Norway­ to abolish it.

In May 2002, some IWC member nations, New Zealand among them, proposed new whale sanctuaries, including one in the South Pacific, but were blocked by pro-whaling countries. Norway continues to kill some 500 minke whales in the North Atlantic every year. Aboriginal hunting, sanctioned by the IWC in the Arctic and West Indies, involves up to 386 kills a year.

In 2002, as part of its “scientific whaling” programme, Japan will take about 400 minke whales from Antarctica. The IWC places no limit on the number of whales that can be killed for research purposes, and no species, however threatened, is exempt.

The Japanese programme has been criticised as commercial whaling in disguise because the government sells the whale meat so obtained to restaurants and supermarkets to help fund its research. It should be noted, however, that the IWC rules stipulate that whales killed for research must not be wasted.

One objective of Japanese research is to assess the degree to which whales affect fish stocks. The Japanese pro-whaling lobby blames sei whales, in particular, for a 50 per cent reduction in fish catches in Japanese coastal waters over the past 20 years. Shigeko Misaki, an adviser to the Japan Whaling Association and co-author of The Truth Behind the Whaling Dispute, claims most whale species have increased in numbers over the past 16 years, and that in some places whales need to be culled.

Scientific whaling is an emotive issue, hedged about with politicking and semantic niceties, yet the reality is that although some species are slowly recovering from centuries of whaling, others remain in a critical state. Antarctic blue whales, for example, thought to number 250,000 before commercial hunting, hover at about 1000 despite being protected since the 1960s.

Work by University of Auckland researcher Nathalie Patenaude (see New Zealand Geographic, Issue 40) suggests that the southern right whales which calve in the waters of the subantarctic Auckland Islands remain at under five per cent of their pre-exploitation numbers, despite 65 years of protection. That population is estimated to have once numbered 18,000 animals, but at present includes only 330 reproducing females. Worldwide, southern right whales number about 8000. “Even without further hunting it will take hundreds of years for the population to recover,” says Patenaude.

Nor is the sperm whale safe, despite its relatively large numbers. Its wide distribution and pelagic habits, which in centuries past helped ensure its survival, are no defence against the latest threat: military sonar. The United States navy is said to be running trials of a powerful low-frequency system to track potentially hostile submarines. Whale strandings in which post-mortems of victims showed physical damage to the animals’ eardrums have already been tied to test sonar deployments.

Having survived harpoons, pollution, fishing nets and collisions with ships, whales, it seems, will have to endure the increasingly amplified sound of humankind’s insecurity.

Vaughan Yarwood

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