Transcript
TRANSCRIPT
WILLIAM: When you imagine the first Europeans Māori ever saw, you probably imagine people like James Cook or Jean François Marie de Surville… Explorers on official missions dressed in fancy naval uniforms.
MĀNI: But actually, for most Māori, first contact didn’t look anything like that.
WILLIAM: The first Pākehā most Māori saw would have had sunburned and wind scorched faces.
MĀNI: Their clothes would have been crusted with salt and sometimes stained with blood.
WILLIAM: If you saw them today, you might assume they were victims of a shipwreck .
MĀNI: That might have been what some Māori thought too!
WILLIAM: But these guys weren’t castaways, and they weren’t explorers or colonists either.
MĀNI: They also weren’t all Europeans. They came from all kinds of places - Asia, the Pacific Islands, America and Australia.
WILLIAM: And they came to Aotearoa to hunt the seals and whales which swarmed around our coasts.
MĀNI: At first there were only a handful, but by the early 1800s whalers and sealers were arriving in their hundreds.
WILLIAM: They brought new technology, new diseases, and new knowledge of the outside world.
MĀNI: It was a revolutionary moment in New Zealand history.
Whaling in particular was a driving force behind the Musket Wars, the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the colonisation of Aotearoa.
STING
WILLIAM: Seals and whales played vital roles in our history long before the first non-Māori people turned up.
MĀNI: Māori have a lot of stories about whales.
Like Paikea, who was rescued by a whale when his brother tried to drown him and travelled to Aoteaora on its back.
WILLIAM: This story might actually be a metaphor for the arrival of Māori ancestors in Aotearoa.
MĀNI: Yea, it’s thought one of the ways some of our tīpuna discovered these islands was by following migrating whales.
WILLIAM: There’s no evidence Māori hunted whales before Europeans turned up. But they did harvest the meat, teeth and bones of stranded animals.
MĀNI: Whalebone was used to make weapons and jewellery - rei-puta, pendants made from the teeth of sperm whales were especially prized.
WILLIAM: Many hapū still harvest stranded whales today.
MĀNI: Seals were a totally different story. The first ancestors of Māori to arrive here hunted seals big time. People all over the world had relied on seals for food and clothing for thousands of years and they were no different.
WILLIAM: Before humans arrived in these islands about 750 years ago, it’s estimated there were up to three-million fur seals living around Aotearoa.
MĀNI: About 500 years later when Europeans showed up there were roughly 1.8 million - about a 40 percent reduction.
WILLIAM: Then, within 50 years of European contact New Zealand’s fur seal population collapsed to just 10 thousand animals. That’s about 0.3 per cent of the pre-human population.
MĀNI: The first European seal hunters were probably James Cook and his crew.
Cook wrote quite a lot about hunting fur seals, especially while anchored in Dusky Sound/Tamatea, in the southwest of the South Island, during his second voyage to Aotearoa in 1773.
“...we saw many seals, fourteen of which we killed and brought away with us; and might have got many more, would the surf have permitted us to land with safety …. the skins we made use of for our rigging; the fat gave oil for our lamps; and the flesh we ate.” - James Cook, March, 1773
WILLIAM: When Cook’s journals were published back in the UK, his descriptions of fur seal colonies got a lot of attention.
MĀNI: Fur seals, as you might have guessed, are furry. Like William.
WILLIAM: But unlike me they have a dense undercoat protected by long guard hairs, which act kinda like a natural wetsuit.
MĀNI: Moriori and some southern Māori wore waterproof sealskin clothing to stay warm and dry in bad weather.
WILLIAM: In the mid 18th century, the Chinese invented a method of separating the guard hairs from the soft underfur - which was highly valued for clothing.
MĀNI: James Cook reported seal skins could be sold in Chinese ports for astonishing profits.
WILLIAM: This triggered a kind of gold rush for seal skins in the Pacific…
MĀNI: And it only got more intense when the British invented their own method of processing seal skins in 1796 to make shoes and hats.
WILLIAM: By the 1830s an estimated seven million skins had been sent to England and China from the Southern Hemisphere - and at least 20 percent of those skins came from New Zealand.
MĀNI: The first commercial sealing voyage to Aotearoa happened in 1792. A ship called the Britannia delivered a load of convicts to New South Wales, then crossed the Tasman to drop a gang of 11 sealers in Tamatea/Dusky Sound.
WILLIAM: While they get stuck into the job of hunting seals, they also spent a fair bit of their time building a new ship to sail back to Australia, just in case the Britannia never returned to pick them up.
MĀNI: That might seem like an overreaction. I mean, the Britannia did return ten months later. But the fact is, sealers often did end up stranded when their ship sank, or abandoned them.
WILLIAM: In 1813 a ship called Perseverance discovered five sealers living on Solander Island in the middle of Foveaux strait. They’d apparently been stranded there for four and a half years.
A Sydney newspaper reported:
“They were cloathed in seal skins, of which their bedding also was composed, and their food had been entirely made up from the flesh of the seal, a few fish occasionally caught, and a few sea birds that now and then frequent the island” - Sydney Gazette July 24, 1813
MĀNI: The Britannia expedition was a bit of a false start for sealing in Aotearoa, they only caught four and a half thousand seals - which was seen as a poor return on investment.
WILLIAM: But the trade soon took off. Between 1804 and 1809 about 1.5 million seal skins were taken from our shores - mostly by ships operating out of Sydney.
But, as historian Rhys Richards explains, we don’t have many written records of how and where this happened.
“...captains tried hard to ensure that on their return to New South Wales each newly discovered sealing ground or rookery would be a most carefully guarded secret not to be divulged to other sealing gangs … there are few eyewitness accounts by sealers ... for few sealers were educated and no romance was attached at the time to their hard and often brutal trade.”
MĀNI: And it really was hard and brutal work. Sealers would navigate their boats up to the jagged rocks in heaving surf, then clamber all over them chasing seals.
WILLIAM: They worked in all weather, and often at night. Many men drowned or broke bones.
MĀNI: When they weren’t working they lived in caves, under upturned boats or in rudimentary huts - sometimes for months at a time.
WILLIAM: Plus, killing thousands of seals was a pretty gruesome job - and sometimes the seals fought back. Male fur seals grow to 180 kilograms - and they bite.
MĀNI: Sealers also hunted elephant seals and those can weigh more than two tonnes.
Back in the year 2000 this big guy made international headlines after smashing up a bunch of cars on a boat ramp in Gisborne.
WILLIAM: French scientist Jules de Blosseville (PRON: Juul Duh Bloh-seh-veal) visited the Bay of Islands in 1824 and spoke to sealers. He wrote:
“How powerful must be the love of [money] when it can induce men to support the fatigues and privations which fall to the lot of the seal fishers.” - Jules de Blosseville, 1826
MĀNI: Although they didn’t always have much of a choice…. Many sealers were current or former convicts who had little say in where they were sent to work.
WILLIAM: Some were actually stowaways who jumped aboard sealing ships to escape convict settlements.
MĀNI: Sealers mostly operated in remote areas, but many came into contact with Māori.
There are several records of sealers trading for food and dressed flax with hapū in Southern parts of Te Waipounamu/The South Island and Rākiura/Stewart Island.
WILLIAM: In 1814 six Indian sealers deserted from a ship called the Matilda.
Several of those men were killed by Māori, but thirty years later it was reported one of them was living with southern Ngāi Tahu and had received a facial moko.
MĀNI: During the early 19th century dozens of sealers, whalers, traders, and escaped convicts joined Māori communities.
WILLIAM: These men often married Māori women and joined their wife’s hapū - becoming what we call Pākehā Māori.
MĀNI: Some Pākehā Māori were considered little more than slaves or curiosities - possessions, in either case. But others, like Barnet Burns, were given chiefly status and wore mataora -full facial moko.
WILLIAM: Pākehā Māori were extremely useful to their hapū. They could act as translators and opened up opportunities for trade with other non-Māori arrivals.
MĀNI: But relations weren't always harmonious. Between 1810 and 1821 there were a series of violent conflicts between sealers and southern Ngāi Tahu that some refer to as the Sealers’ War.
Possibly 74 people were killed, and a Ngāi Tahu settlement near modern day Dunedin was burned to the ground.
WILLIAM: Some sources suggest violence was triggered by the mistreatment of Māori women, or by theft from one side or the other, but the details are uncertain.
MĀNI: There were other downsides to contact with sealers. The destruction of seal colonies deprived Māori and Moriori of a traditional source of food and clothing.
There were only ever a handful of sealers in Aotearoa at any one time in the early 1800s, but they had a massive impact.
WILLIAM: Earlier visits from European explorers had been extremely brief - usually a few days at most.
Sealers on the other hand stuck around for months. Those who deserted sealing gangs to become Pākehā-Māori might live among Māori for decades.
MĀNI: This gave many Southern hapū a chance to gain in-depth knowledge of European culture and technology.
WILLIAM: But the New Zealand sealing boom went bust within 5 years.
MĀNI: After 1809 the market for seal skins collapsed, although it was revived later on in the 19th century.
WILLIAM: Meanwhile, in more Northerly parts of Aotearoa, Māori were coming into contact with Pākehā hunting a different kind of sea mammal - the parāoa or sperm whale.
MĀNI: Unfortunately for these whales, they had a lot of valuable stuff inside them.
WILLIAM: Their heads were filled with an oily substance called spermaceti (PRON: sperm-uh-setty).
MĀNI: It’s thought this organ helps the whales echo-locate …. but early whalers thought spermaceti looked a bit like semen,
WILLIAM: Which is how these animals got the name “Sperm Whale”. Real mature guys.
MĀNI: It might have looked gross but spermaceti was useful.
It could be processed into a lubricant for high precision instruments, or made into fancy candles which burned without smoke.
WILLIAM: The intestines of sperm whales often contain a material called ambergris (PRON: am-buh-grease).
MĀNI: Scientists think this is a side effect of swallowing the beaks of giant squid, but nobody’s quite sure.
WILLIAM: Ambergris was - and still is - insanely valuable. It is used in the manufacture of perfumes, and also as an aphrodisiac… Because there’s nothing sexier than congealed giant squid gunk.
MĀNI: But spermaceti and ambergris were just the icing on the cake - the bit which gave sperm whales the bulk of their value was blubber - the thick layer of fat which keeps whales and other marine mammals warm in cold oceans.
WILLIAM: Blubber was boiled up in big cauldrons called trypots and then refined down into a substance called whale oil.
MĀNI: Whale oil was a good lubricant and could be burned in lamps - that was very helpful in the early 19th century because synthetic lubricants and electric lights hadn't been invented yet.
In those days whale oil lit millions of homes, businesses, and public buildings.
WILLIAM: The factories of Britain and Europe would have ground to a halt without whale oil. It literally greased the gears of the industrial revolution.
MĀNI: But to get all this valuable stuff you first had to catch a whale... And that was pretty tricky.
WILLIAM: The first kind of whalers in the Pacific were called ‘ship’ or ‘pelagic whalers’, operating on large sailing vessels far out to sea.
MĀNI: Men would climb way up to the top of the mast, scanning for the telltale spouts of whales breathing.
When they spotted one, they’d shout down to the rest of the crew and the chase was on!
WILLIAM: When they got close, small boats would be launched. A man would lean over the side and spear the whale with a harpoon attached to the boat with a long rope.
MĀNI: Then the whale would take off dragging the whaleboat behind it, in what sailors called the “Nantucket sleighride”.
WILLIAM: This was the most deadly part of the job. Lots of boats were destroyed and whalers killed.
MĀNI: But, all going well, the exhausted animal would be dragged alongside the ship. If it wasn’t already dead it would be killed with a long lance.
WILLIAM: Next was the dirty and dangerous job of heating the blubber to release the oil. The tripods belched thick, greasy smoke - and burning oil sometimes set whole ships ablaze.
MĀNI: By the late 1700s more and more ship whalers were voyaging into the Pacific.
WILLIAM: The first recorded to reach New Zealand was the famous British-American whaler Eber Bunker aboard the William and Ann, which had transported convicts to New South Wales.. He anchored in Doubtless Bay in 1791.
MĀNI: Visits became increasingly common in the early 1800s as wealthy ship-owning merchants set up shop in New South Wales and Tasmania.
WILLIAM: Increasing numbers of whalers made contact with Māori communities, trading for supplies and recruiting locals as sailors.
MĀNI: Fun fact. The famous whaling novel Moby Dick has a major character called Queequeg.
That guy is thought to be based on Te Pēhi Kupe, a Ngāti Toa Rangatira who jumped aboard a British ship in 1824, and sailed with it back to England.
WILLIAM: As with sealing gangs, whaling ship crews were incredibly diverse - along with Europeans and Māori there were Pacific Islanders, African and Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Chinese people. More than a few women went to sea as well.
MĀNI: Whaling was a truly global industry - and it transformed the Pacific.
WILLIAM: New Zealand, along with places like Australia, Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti, and Hawaii were key hubs for the trade.
MĀNI: Settlements like Hobart, Kororāreka, Apia and Honolulu exploded into bustling ports where people from all over the world gathered.
WILLIAM: Imperial Powers like Britain, Germany, France and the United States were all keen to grab a slice of the growing Pacific whale trade.
Conflicts between these powers had a big impact on the industry.
MĀNI: For example, part of the reason British whaling dramatically increased in the Pacific at the start of the 19th century is because of the Napoleonic War.
French warships were attacking British whalers in the Atlantic, so they came to the Pacific instead.
WILLIAM: Then, the 1810s saw a downturn in British whalers when the Brits and Americans started fighting the War of 1812.
MĀNI: From the 1830s the Pacific whaling trade became dominated by ships sailing out of Massachusetts in the United States.
WILLIAM: By that point, there were a lot of whalers sailing around the coasts of Aotearoa.
Historian Alexander Mclintock estimated that by 1839 about 200 whaling ships were passing through our waters every year.
MĀNI: Partly that was because of a sealer called Jacky Guard who reported seeing a bunch of whales near to shore in Te-Moana-O-Raukawa/Cook Strait in either 1827 or 1829.
WILLIAM: As historian Alfred Reed put it…
"It was a lucky day for Guard but a very unlucky day for the whales.” - A.H. Reed, The Story of Otago, 1947.
MĀNI: The whales Jacky Guard saw were Tohoraha - Southern Right Whales.
WILLIAM: And the reason they were called right whales is because they were “the right whale to hunt”.
MĀNI: Sperm whales might have had cool stuff like ambergris and spermaceti inside them, but they were hard to catch. They were fast swimmers and mostly lived far out to sea.
WILLIAM: Right whales on the other hand were pretty slow and gathered in sheltered bays to raise their calves. They also tended to float after they were killed - most other whales sank.
MĀNI: That made right whales easy targets, not just for ship whalers but for so-called “shore whalers" too.
WILLIAM: These shore whalers hunted using large boats they rowed out from shore.
German scientist Ernst Dieffenbach watched shore whalers at work in the Bay of Islands in 1839 and gave this fairly graphic description.
“Gasping in the agonies of death, the tortured animal throws up jets of blood, dyeing the sea all around; . . . beating about with its tail; but it at length dies . . . exhausted from the many wounds inflicted” - Ernst Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, 1843.
MĀNI: Then the dead whale had to be hauled back to a whaling station to do the processing that other whalers did on board ships.
These stations weren't exactly pleasant places. Historian Brad Patterson describes your average whaling station as…
“A huge open air slaughterhouse: The beach was ‘covered with the remains of whales – skulls, vertebrae, large shoulder blades and fins’. The sands were stained with blood and fat. Chunks of rotting flesh lay about … the small complex was overhung with clouds of oily black smoke. The stench was intense.” - That Glorious Stinking Stuff, Brad Patterson, 2002
WILLIAM: But while it was messy, shore whaling was extremely profitable - and extremely popular.
MĀNI: In 1841 Henry Petre [PRON: Peter] wrote that there was…
“scarcely a harbour in Cook’s Strait, and on the eastern coast of the southern island, in which there are not whaling establishments.” - An Account of the Settlements of the New Zealand Company by Henry Petre, 1841
WILLIAM: Some historians today think that was a bit of an exaggeration. But in any case, there were a lot.
And they were only possible thanks to close collaboration with local Māori who provided food, firewood and labour.
MĀNI: Almost all shore whaling stations employed Māori crew on their boats - men and women.
As Historian Ryan Tucker Jones writes.
“By the 1840s, at least, Māori women were even leaping off whaleboats into the ocean to spear small porpoises by hand.” - A Whale of a Difference by Ryan Tucker Jones, Environment and History, 2019
MĀNI: Unlike sealers or ship whalers, shore whalers didn’t just periodically trade with Māori. They set up permanent or at least long term settlements - often within or next door to kainga Māori - which required a whole lot of mutual trust and cooperation.
WILLIAM: Contact with shore whalers had an especially big impact in Te Waipounamu. In 1844, it was estimated two thirds of Ngāi Tahu women between Horomaka/Banks Peninsula and Aparima/Riverton were married to whalers.
Similar levels of interracial marriage probably weren’t seen in the North Island until a hundred years later.
MĀNI: The names of Pākehā whalers still live on in many Ngāi Tahu whānau: Anglem, Gilroy, Spencer, Haberfield, Acker and Howell, to name just a few.
The poupou on Bluff’s Te Rau Aroha Marae depict these marriages and the children born from them.
WILLIAM: Many Māori communities look back fondly to this pre-colonial whaling era, compared with the battle for sovereignty and land that defined the colonial frontier.
MĀNI: Some Māori communities continued shore whaling into the 20th century, long after most whaling stations had closed.
WILLIAM: But contact with whalers could be harmful for Māori - for one thing, they often introduced new diseases.
MĀNI: In 1835 Ngāi Tahu suffered a deadly outbreak of measles, followed by a devastating influenza epidemic, both of which killed large numbers of people, particularly around Foveaux Strait and at Ōtākou..
WILLIAM: Interactions could also be violent. In 1809 the trading ship Boyd anchored in Whangaroa harbour to pick up some timber spars from Ngāti Uru.
MĀNI: But then Ngāti Uru found out the Boyd’s captain had flogged and starved a young rangatira who’d sailed with the ship from Sydney.
They attacked and killed most of the Boyd’s crew - about 70 people.
WILLIAM: Later, the ship's gunpowder store was accidentally ignited, setting off a massive explosion which killed several Māori and destroyed the ship
MĀNI: A group of whalers mistakenly thought the Ngāpuhi chief Te Pahi was to blame.
So, in March 1810 the crews of five whaling ships attacked Te Pahi’s pā on an island in Wairoa Bay.
WILLIAM: Up to 60 people were killed and the pā was destroyed.
MĀNI: That event triggered a wider war among Māori in the area. Te Pahi was killed in the fighting and visits from European ships reduced dramatically for a few years because of fears of conflict.
WILLIAM: Whaling was also closely linked to the Musket Wars. Visiting ships often traded muskets and ammunition for food and other supplies. And Whaling ships sometimes carried Māori war parties to attack enemies or conquer territory.
MĀNI: One of the main reasons Ngāti Toa Rangatira seized control of Kāpiti Island in 1824 is because Te Pēhi Kupe and Te Rauparaha knew it was an excellent location for whaling ships to visit.
Controlling the island meant better access to muskets and other valuable trade goods.
WILLIAM: But by the late 1830s some Māori were getting increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of whalers.
Kororāreka, later renamed Russell, was a major hub for the trade and it became infamous for drunkenness, fights, and prostitution. In fact, some famously called it “the hellhole of the Pacific.”
MĀNI: A Missionary called William Colenso said Kororāreka was
‘...notorious for containing a greater number of rogues than any other spot of equal size in the universe.’ - William Colenso, 1839
WILLIAM: Concern about these rowdy sailors was a major factor in the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
MĀNI: Māori and Missionaries both hoped the new British Governor would help control Pākehā in places like Kororāreka.
WILLIAM: After the Treaty was signed in 1840 far fewer whaling ships visited our shores - that’s mostly because of new taxes and port duties introduced by Governor William Hobson.
MĀNI: But by the 1850s, the entire Pacific whaling industry was collapsing. Hunting was so intense that Right Whales and Sperm Whales were nearing extinction.
WILLIAM: One side effect of this was that a lot of ship captains in the Pacific suddenly had to find new work.
MĀNI: Many became traders. Historian Scott Hamilton suggests former American Whalers played an important role selling guns and ammunition to Māori during the New Zealand Wars.
WILLIAM: Others entered a notorious trade known as Blackbirding where thousands of indentured or enslaved Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal Australians were transported to work in places like Queensland, Vanuatu and Peru.
Some victims of blackbirding were brought to New Zealand and some local ship captains participated in the trade, although it's not clear how many.
MĀNI: But while many whalers had to switch professions in the 1850s and 60s, commercial whaling didn’t actually end for another hundred years.
WILLIAM: New technologies like steam engines and harpoon guns made it profitable to hunt species like humpback and blue whales, which were often too fast or aggressive for whalers on sailing ships.
MĀNI: At Whangamumu, south of the Bay of Islands, a pair of brothers used steel nets and a steam powered launch to hunt humpback whales. By 1915 they were catching 70 animals a year.
WILLIAM: Another whaling station at Tory Channel was even more successful, taking up to 200 whales a year in the early 1960s.
MĀNI: But eventually there just weren’t enough whales left to support the industry - especially given that demand for whale oil fell dramatically in the 20th century thanks to the invention of synthetic lubricants and electric lights.
WILLIAM: In 1964 commercial whaling in the waters of New Zealand finally ended… although it wouldn’t be officially outlawed till the 1970s.
MĀNI: By that point there was a big global anti-whaling protest movement.
WILLIAM: But you might be surprised to know the first efforts at conserving whales didn’t have anything to do with public protest - they came from the industry itself.
MĀNI: New Zealand was a founding member of the International Whaling Commission in 1946.
The Commission enforced moratoriums and catch limits. These were aimed at allowing populations to recover so that whaling could continue, but on a sustainable basis.
WILLIAM: But in the 1970s public attitudes changed in many parts of the Western world.
Thanks to technology like underwater cameras and microphones, people could now see and hear marine animals in their natural environment.
MĀNI: Whales and dolphins were increasingly understood as intelligent, emotionally complex animals. They became symbols of the rising environmental movement.
WILLIAM: Activist organisations like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd took direct action to protest whaling - including in Aotearoa. As a country, New Zealand became a leader of the anti-whaling movement.
MĀNI: All around the world protections on whales and seals steadily increased.
In 1978 New Zealand passed the Marine Mammals Protection Act - it became illegal to kill dolphins, seals or whales in our waters.
WILLIAM: But it was almost too late. Especially for the Tohoraha, Southern Right Whale.
It’s estimated the local population crashed from 10 thousand before 1800, to just 250 in the 1990s.
MĀNI: The good news is that while some species, like Maui’s dolphin, are still threatened with extinction - most whale and seal populations are recovering.
The Department of Conservation estimates Tohoraha numbers are increasing by 7 percent a year.
WILLIAM: And with the recovery of these species some people, including here in New Zealand, have argued in favour of a return to commercial whaling and sealing - but this time sustainably.
MĀNI: Looking back over the last 230 years, it’s amazing to think how much of our national story is caught up in the history of these animals.
WILLIAM: Yea, as Historian Ryan Tucker Jones put it.
“Whales are the silent players at the centre of many historical dramas: they swim through histories of capitalism, science, diplomacy, Euroamerican imperialism, the Pacific, indigenous revival; and … the modern environmentalist movement.”
- A Whale of a Difference by Ryan Tucker Jones, Environment and History, 2019
MĀNI: That’s all from us this episode, hei kona!
