Wuhoo Timaru - Find Free Fun! - Season 2 Ep 9: Whaling & Sealing

For most Māori, early contact was not with naval explorers like James Cook, but with rugged sealers and whalers.
These first Pākehā often looked like shipwreck survivors: sunburned, weather-beaten, with salt-encrusted, bloodstained clothes.
They came from diverse places: Europe, Asia, the Pacific, America, and Australia.

Māori ancestors hunted seals extensively upon arrival (~750 years ago), reducing the population significantly before European contact.
By the late 1700s, there were still ~1.8 million fur seals, but within 50 years of European contact this dropped to ~10,000.
James Cook and his crew hunted seals in 1773, using skins for rigging, fat for oil, and meat for food.
Chinese and later British methods for processing seal fur made it highly valuable, driving a "seal skin rush".
Between 1804–1809, ~1.5 million seal skins were exported from NZ.
The first commercial sealing trip was by the Britannia in 1792, which dropped sealers in Dusky Sound.
Sealers often lived in harsh conditions, sometimes stranded for years.
Sealing was secretive and brutal work, with high physical risk and little written documentation.
Some sealers were former convicts or stowaways from Australia.

Sealers traded with southern Māori for food and flax; some joined Māori communities permanently.
The term Pākehā Māori refers to Europeans who lived with Māori—often marrying into iwi and gaining roles like translators or intermediaries.
Some Pākehā Māori gained high status, even receiving moko (e.g., Barnet Burns).
Not all relationships were peaceful: the Sealers' War (1810–1821) between southern Ngāi Tahu and sealers resulted in ~74 deaths and destruction of settlements.
Sealing disrupted Māori and Moriori access to traditional food and clothing resources.

Māori did not traditionally hunt whales but harvested meat and bone from stranded animals.
Whalebone was used for tools and ornaments (e.g., rei puta from sperm whale teeth).
Māori stories (e.g., Paikea) feature whales as ancestors or navigational guides.
Sperm whales were valued for spermaceti (used in lamps, lubricants) and ambergris (for perfume).
Whaling was dangerous and involved chasing whales from small boats (the “Nantucket sleighride”).
The industry was vital to the global economy—whale oil fueled the industrial revolution.

Ship/pelagic whalers operated offshore.
Shore whalers used longboats from coastal bases and processed whales on land.
The first whaler to reach NZ was Eber Bunker in 1791.
Jacky Guard identified rich whale waters in Cook Strait in the late 1820s.
Right whales were ideal for shore whalers—slow, buoyant, and calving close to land.
Whaling stations were foul-smelling, grisly sites often located next to or within Māori settlements.

Shore whaling relied heavily on Māori labor and logistical support—men and women worked on boats and at stations.
Historian Ryan Tucker Jones notes Māori women harpooned porpoises by hand.
By 1844, two-thirds of Ngāi Tahu women in parts of the South Island were married to whalers.
Names of Pākehā whalers remain in Ngāi Tahu whānau today (e.g., Anglem, Acker, Howell).
Many Māori communities remember this era positively, in contrast to later colonial land loss.

Whalers introduced diseases like measles and influenza—especially devastating around Foveaux Strait and Ōtākou.
Notable conflict: The Boyd incident (1809), retaliatory attacks on Māori by whalers in 1810.
Whalers traded muskets, contributing to the Musket Wars; some transported Māori war parties.
Te Rauparaha and Te Pēhi Kupe targeted Kāpiti Island partly to control whaling traffic and trade.

Kororāreka (Russell) became a notorious hub of whaling, known as “the hellhole of the Pacific”.
Whalers' behavior prompted Māori and missionaries to support the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840).
After the Treaty, new taxes discouraged whaling ships from visiting.
The industry collapsed due to overhunting and falling demand.

Steam and steel technology revived whaling in the late 1800s (e.g., Whangamumu station).
By 1964, commercial whaling in NZ ended (though officially banned later in the 1970s).
NZ joined the International Whaling Commission in 1946.
Environmental attitudes shifted in the 1970s; whales became symbols of conservation.
The Marine Mammals Protection Act (1978) outlawed killing whales, dolphins, and seals.
Southern right whale numbers are now slowly recovering (~7% annual increase).

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