The Enderby Settlement

by The Enderby Settlement (epub)

  From George Cook, the colonists’ interpreter, Enderby and Mackworth learnt of Matioro’s fearsome reputation, and of the massacre of the Moriori people on the Chathams some 15 years previously.

  Matioro’s first contact with the Chatham Islands had been in 1833, when he had caused dread among the peace-loving Moriori inhabitants with a fearsome war dance on the beach. Michael King, in his book on the Moriori people, records an account given by an eyewitness to Matioro’s arrival there.

  The excitement of the visitation turned very quickly to fear. For the ship brought a dancer, a prancer, who came ashore high stepping, rolling his eyes and flicking his tongue, a performance that stirred atavistic dread in the bowels of his fellow Polynesians. He was a New Zealand chief armed to the teeth. His hair, carefully combed and oiled, was tied up on the crown of his head, and surrounded by a fillet of white feathers, and from his ears protruded bunches of soft down. Evidently a man of power, accustomed to command … The future darkened as he walked the beach.40

  Two years later, 500 Taranaki Maori men, women and children of the Ngati Tama tribe, who had been told about the Chathams by Matioro, arrived on a chartered ship, with 78 tons of seed potatoes aboard – so they obviously intended to stay. They had endured an appallingly overcrowded voyage and were in a weak and exhausted state, but the Moriori inhabitants helped them to regain their strength and health.

  A second lot of Taranaki Maori landed two months later. After waiting a few days, they began to takahi, or take possession of the land and its Moriori villages by walking over it. They were armed with muskets, axes and clubs. The Moriori were traditionally against fighting apart from hand-to-hand combat, which had to stop as soon as blood was drawn, and so they put up no resistance. Within a few days, 300 of their men, women and children were massacred – a fifth of the population.

  Matioro claimed they took possession and killed or enslaved the Moriori in accordance with Maori custom. He said if someone had captured them, they would have expected the same treatment. In this case, though, there was never any contest: it was a massacre.41

  Hostilities then turned to tension between the two Maori tribes, as Ngati Tama, who had arrived first, had understandably claimed the best land. During some trading on a French whaler, the Jean Bart, its captain mistook an argument going on between the two groups as threatening behaviour against his own ship and crew. He managed to trick Matioro’s men and secure them below decks, driving the others off the ship, with the loss of about 30 Ngati Tama lives.

  After the Jean Bart had set sail, the French planned to kill Matioro’s men, who were still trapped below; but they had found guns and managed to break free. Apart from a few sailors who are thought to have escaped but were never heard of again, not one of the French survived, and after the ship ran onto the rocks Matioro looted and burned it. Soon afterwards another French whaler reported the incident to a French naval vessel, the Heroïne, which happened to be in the Bay of Islands. The Heroïne went down to the Chathams and destroyed three Maori settlements. This changed the balance of power between the tribes, and Matioro’s Ngati Mutunga successfully fought Ngati Tama for possession of Waitangi, which today is the Chatham Islands’ main settlement.42

  In 1840 the New Zealand Company purchased the Chathams, which until then had been outside New Zealand’s territorial limits. Shortly afterwards, in 1842, the first missionaries arrived, and soon the greater part of both tribes were converted to Christianity.43 It was the writing on the wall for the warlike Matioro, because fighting Ngati Tama was no longer acceptable. Neither did he want to give up his Moriori slaves, as slavery was forbidden under New Zealand law. He may also have feared the French might return. And so he decided to look for new challenges. He hired the brig Hannah to take his people – men, women, children and Moriori slaves – to the Auckland Islands towards the end of 1842. They had good supplies of tea, sugar, flour, biscuits, bacon and rum, and guns and ammunition from the Jean Bart. But two of the chiefs with him were so disillusioned by the climate and prospects they found there that, while Matioro was still surveying the land, they hurried back to the ship, which had sailed by the time he returned. Whether he liked it or not, he and his followers were marooned. In time, they came to accept their lot.44 By the time the Enderby settlers reached the Auckland Islands, Matioro was considerably less warlike. He was still an imposing man and a leader: he weighed 160 kilograms, was almost six feet tall and heavily tattooed.45

  The Toenga clash and the chilling saga of Matioro on the Chathams were of concern to the colonists. They were also worried by the visits of men from Ngatere’s pa at Ocean Point. Thomas Younger remembered in later years: ‘There were a great many Maoris there. They used to come in large numbers. One night so many came that we were under arms all night with flintlock Brown Besses. It passed off. There were fully 30 or 40 men came over that time. They had no guns.’ 46

  Apart from such alarms and misunderstandings, relationships between colonists and Maori were harmonious. The colony’s ‘greatest enemy in this difficult undertaking is the weather. Gales of wind and perpetual rain.’47 By 12 January the chief surgeon Mr Rodd and his wife, five married couples and eight single men were able to move temporarily into the first completed wing of the bachelors’ quarters, and two single cottages were nearly completed. Government House was taking recognisable shape, and work was almost ready to start on a large warehouse, tryworks and the beginnings of a jetty, as these would be needed when the Brisk returned from its whaling voyage.

  At last Mackworth was able to record in his diary: ‘Arranging the crew of the Brisk. Served out slops to them to day’48 – slops being sailors’ clothing and bedding issued from a ship’s stores. Captain Tapsell was in command, and he was to determine the correctness of a report that ‘there were a vast number of common [right] whales in the Antarctic Seas’.49 Mackworth records on Sunday 20 January: ‘The Brisk sailed this morning for the Southward. All well and in good spirits and the Ship in good trim.’

  Whaleboats being lowered from the mother ship after a whale has been sighted.

  Louis Le Breton. New Bedford Whaling Museum, Ref. 2001.100.7533

  CHAPTER TWO

  Whaling South

  Not only did the Brisk head ‘for the Southward’, it ventured even further south than James Weddell in 1823 (after whom the Weddell Sea is named), into the dangerous world of storms, pack ice and ice-blink.1 It was a world in which the elements were intensified or unfamiliar. In these high latitudes the aurora australis would play, with shimmering curtains of light reaching across the sky from the South Pole, swaying and interweaving, restless and ethereal. On still nights before a violent storm, the air could be so charged with electricity that from every point of mast and rigging pale flames would stream upwards, giving the ship the appearance of a huge candelabra with innumerable branches.2 R.H. Dana, in Two Years Before the Mast, tells of a ball of light which sailors call a corposant (corpus sancti) appearing upon the masthead: it was believed to be ‘a fatal sign to have its pale light thrown upon one’s face’. After disappearing and reappearing like a will-o’-the-wisp it was replaced by the flux of St Elmo’s fire: ‘the electric fluid ran over our anchors, topsail sheets and ties; yet no harm was done to us. – a moment more, and a terrific flash and peal broke simultaneously upon us, and [the storm broke] like a falling ocean.’3

  On other nights, the sleeping sea could be spangled with points of light as if to mirror unseen stars, due to countless plankton and protozoa glowing as fireflies do. At times, during such calms, through the planking of the hull might come the long haunting sounds, sighs and clicking of whales, some close, others as if from a great distance, magnified and carried by the sea.

  Whales favour these plankton-rich waters close to the subantarctic continent to feed and put on condition before heading north into warmer waters to give birth. As they are warm-blooded mammals, they need an enormous thickness of blubber to insulate them from the cold. In a sperm whale this can be 14 inches (36 cent
imetres), and a 70-ton whale can yield 30 tons of blubber, three-quarters of which is oil. Right, or common whales can be up to 59 feet (18 metres) in length. Sperm whales range from 36 feet (11 metres) for females to 65.5 feet (20 metres) for males; the squarish head and its huge ‘case’, which can hold 500 gallons (around 2000 litres) of oil, takes up a third of the animal’s total length. The blue whale, half as long again as a male sperm whale, is the world’s largest living creature, with a length of up to 100 feet (30 metres) and weighing 130 tons, the equivalent of 30 African elephants – or 1600 people!4

  Before the discovery of oil beneath the ground, whale oil was in demand for a wide range of purposes. The case oil found in the huge head or snout of sperm whales, which is in fact a liquid wax, burns brightly and cleanly and was the most prized, fetching the highest price. It was used as an illuminant, from lighthouse beacons to domestic lamps, and for the finest candles. Although the streets of London had been illuminated by gaslight for years, gas was still largely mistrusted for commercial and particularly domestic buildings, which still relied on oil lamps, lanterns and candles. Lesser quality oil from the body blubber of various whales was used to lubricate machinery and for many other purposes such as cooking, heating and soap making. The thin, flexible baleen from the jaws of right whales and other filter feeders such as fin, Greenland and humpback whales – known as the whalebone whales – was used for corset stays and umbrella ribs.5

  During the Brisk’s two-month voyage, Captain Tapsell sighted numerous whales, but in seas too rough to lower boats and chase them.6 As well as ice and storm, the Brisk weathered a hurricane, and ‘proved herself a remarkably strong and good ship in every respect’.7

  Whaling was a hard and dangerous life. The Southern Ocean, to which the settlers had come, is the wildest and loneliest on earth. Apart from the notoriously hazardous Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope at the southern extremities of South America and Africa, there were no substantial landmasses to temper the gales that came circling and spinning off the Antarctic continent, only islands in the path of the storm, such as Macquarie, Heard and Kerguelen, Campbell, the Antipodes and the Auckland islands.

  As Captain Tapsell discovered, whales were most frequently sighted near the Antarctic continent, but this advantage was often overridden by appalling conditions which made giving chase impossible: ice floating on the surface of the sea; bitter, ferocious gales; and sleet and hail which caused ice to build up on the deck, masts, yards and rigging. Ships tended to stay north of such hazards.

  Two whaleboats ‘lancing a sperm whale,’ with the mother ship in the background.

  Alexander Turnbull Library, File: Whaling: Lancing a Whale 81468

  Constant watch was kept from the masthead, and the lookout’s shout of ‘There she blows!’ would galvanise the crew. Boots pounded the deck, and up to four whaleboats would be lowered. The oarsmen would scramble onto the benches between the harpooner and the mate, and they would pull away with a will; for although danger lay ahead, so might an increase in each man’s share in the proceeds of the voyage. Between the aft thwarts of each whaleboat were the tubs containing 200 fathoms of meticulously coiled manila line, one end looped around within the boat and fixed to the harpoon, the other end draped free for attaching to another boat’s line should the whale sound deep.

  As soon as the whaleboat was in position, the harpooner would strike.8 In spite of experiments with harpoon guns, the traditional method was still widely preferred: the harpoon having been hurled, the first 15 fathoms of line which was coiled at the bow would be quickly taken up, and the rest of the rope, looped around the boat, would begin to streak after it, as dangerous as a snake, whisking within inches of the oarsmen’s hands until it reached the braking turn taken around the loggerhead. The line would scorch and smoke with the friction as the whale made its plunge.

  ‘The whale started off to windward with us at a tremendous rate’ (engraving, 1899). From Charles Nordhoff, Whaling and Fishing, the sequel to A Boy’s Voyages on Board a Man-of-War in the Merchant Service (1857).

  Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref. PUBL-0017-01

  Fred Bracegirdle, a 19-year-old apprentice on the Samuel Enderby, described an incident where things went wrong: ‘On one occasion in the ship’s boat, having harpooned a whale which was tearing along dragging the boat after it, the line suddenly jammed, causing the boat to fill and turn turtle, and all were hurled into the sea. By some means they managed to cut the line attached to the whale and were thus enabled to cling to their upturned boat until assistance was sent from their ship, which by this time was quite a few miles distant.’ 9

  Such incidents were common. Maddened with pain, whales could fight back, crushing a whaleboat in their jaws or smashing it with their powerful tails. The crew or survivors could find themselves struggling for their lives in the freezing water amongst oars, tubs, canvas and shattered pieces of timber. Captains sometimes left the ship in the care of an officer to take command of a whaleboat, no doubt to keep their hand and reputations in. In Melville’s tale, Moby Dick finally won the long battle with Ahab when the captain stooped to clear a fouled line in the boat and was caught by a flying turn around the neck and yanked to his death, never to be seen again. Shortly beforehand, the great white whale had fatally rammed the Pequod, breaching the starboard bow; and when the whaleboat’s crew turned from the horror of what they had just seen, they were confronted with an even greater catastrophe: ‘The ship? Great God, where is the ship?’10

  This was fiction, but there are numerous accounts of whaleboats being attacked and smashed to pieces. John Spears in The Story of New England Whalers tells of several attacks on mother ships, including two sunk by ‘whales that left off fighting the small boats to make a deliberate attack upon the ship from which they had come’. A third ship was sunk by a whale striking the ship head on, while a fourth ship, leaking badly after being attacked by a wounded whale, managed to make port.11

  Once a whale was dead, it would be secured alongside the ship with hawsers, chains and tackle. A sperm whale might yield more than 20 tons of oil.12 The cutting stage – a platform suspended about 1.25 metres above the water – would be lowered and, if it was a sperm whale, two or three of the ship’s officers, using razor-sharp flensing knives on long poles, would begin by cutting off the animal’s massive head, which would be floated astern until the blubber had been cut from the rest of the body. With long diagonal slashes of the flensing knives, the layer of blubber, or ‘blanket’, would be peeled off in a continuous strip and winched up to the deck.

  Next, the whale’s head, weighing several tons, would be winched aboard. A third of the whale’s length, it contained several tons of the highly prized spermaceti, or sperm oil, in the huge ‘case’ or cistern, which when cut open allowed a liquid as clear as water to be baled out into casks. As it cooled, it would congeal into wax.

  Whaling in the Southern Seas, 1840. Two whaleboats have been destroyed by the harpooned whale. Another whale is secured alongside the mother ship, but either the artist has falsely relied on memory, or the whale was very large indeed, as the usual method of stripping blubber was from a cutting-in stage.

  Louis le Breton. New Bedford Whaling Museum

  Once the blubber was on the deck of Enderby Settlement vessels, with their short voyages and quick turnaround, the Northern or Greenland method would be followed: the tough fibrous tissue would be cut into small pieces and packed tightly into casks with the least possible waste of space. And the work would be done.

  On other vessels with longer voyages – some up to three years – the oil had to be rendered out of the blubber as soon as possible to keep it sweet and prevent the blubber with its oil from going rancid. The blubber would be cut into pieces and rendered down in the two huge iron trypots of the tryworks – a rectangular 10 × 8 × 5 foot-high brick structure that was bolted to the deck. The furnace, with a reservoir of water beneath it to protect the deck, would be fed with crisp used blubber. The separated oil would be b
aled into the cooler, and then the wooden casks would be filled, sealed by the cooper and stored in the hold. The treacherous, slippery oil washing across the deck would finally be sponged up and saved, and the scuppers unplugged.

  As Enderby pointed out, in spite of the ‘hardship, danger and privation’ involved, British and American whaling crews were poorly paid, ‘individual earnings not averaging £1.9s per month, whilst the run of wages varies from £2.5s to £3.10s pr month, in vessels on trading voyages’. He added: ‘I have long contended that the crews of whaling ships have not been sufficiently remunerated; acting on which view, I have caused the matter to be to some extent remedied in the ships equipped by our firm.’ So those of the Enderby Settlement did better than most.13 John Spears tells of an American whaler, the Charles Phelps, whose captain in 1844 received only $4.36 a day, or $2544.59 for a voyage of just over a year and seven months. But this was riches compared with the $441.33 paid to a skilled man in charge of one of the whaleboats; a sailor’s $125.12; or the unbelievable pittance of $56.23 paid to a ship’s boy. ‘The total amount paid to [the captain and] the crew was $13,289.77.’ From the proceeds, ‘the owners took $28,120.33, or more than twice as much as the entire crew who did the work’. Nobody except the captain actually received the amount in cash set against his name: ‘Every man had been obliged to buy clothing out of the “slop chest”, a chest of goods carried by the captain for sale to the crew, and most of the men had had some money and an outfit advanced to them on entering the ship.’14 At sea, sailors yearned for land; but once ashore, with their hard-earned money gone, most would sign on for the next voyage, even though the ‘lay’ – the fractional share of the profits offered as a bonus for risking injury and death – was so meagre.