Kororāreka, the south’s biggest whaling port

Hapū, or sub-tribes, with Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Hine connections had long lived around the Bay of Islands, and its safe anchorage and large Māori population drew European ships early. Sperm whalers had used the sheltered northern harbours since the 1790s. From the early 1820s British and American whalers came in growing numbers, and Kororāreka, across the water from Paihia, became for a while the southern hemisphere's largest whaling port. Northern Māori moved to the coast, organised labour and grew crops for ships' crews, trading pork and potatoes for muskets, alcohol and other goods. Some Māori signed on as crew and crossed the Tasman regularly. The trade was worth fighting over. In March 1830 the so-called Girls' War, set off by a quarrel among young women of rank, among them wives of the whaler W.D. Brind, pitted northern Ngāpuhi under Ururoa against southern Ngāpuhi under Kiwikiwi. Casualties, dead and wounded, reached as many as 100. Samuel Marsden and Henry Williams, both missionaries, helped broker peace, and the northern alliance came out of it in control of the town.

American whalers multiplied through the 1830s. In 1838, 54 American ships visited the bay, with 18 French, 14 British and 10 from Sydney. Crews kept under strict discipline at sea looked for release on shore. Edward Markham heard in 1834 that between 30 and 35 whaleships might stay three weeks at a time, with 400 to 500 sailors aboard who had been a year at sea. Ashore they mixed with merchants, adventurers, deserters and convicts who had escaped from Australia. NZHistory describes prostitution as one of the bay's main industries, paying for goods that included muskets, and notes that short-term 'marriages' were often arranged.

Visitors reached for strong words. In the 1830s the town was called the 'hell-hole of the Pacific'. John Dunmore Lang called its inhabitants 'the veriest scum of civilised society', and William Colenso said it held more rogues than any other spot its size. The missionaries, who saw almost every other European as an agent of vice, were deeply troubled. Edward Jerningham Wakefield took a kinder view, admiring the whalers' hard-working life and 'many generous and noble qualities' while noting their drinking. Te Ara describes the town as a lawless trading centre: British law did not reach it, and the few hundred Europeans who settled in the north worked alongside Māori. During the 1830s some of them began asking for British law to be imposed.

The town's reputation fed the case for British intervention. In 1831 thirteen northern chiefs, with help from the Church Missionary Society, petitioned William IV for protection, including protection from lawless Europeans in the country. James Busby arrived as British Resident in 1833, but with no police and almost no budget. In January 1840 William Hobson read his proclamations at Christ Church in Kororāreka, but because of the town's reputation he placed his capital at Okiato, a few kilometres south, and named it Russell. When the capital moved to Auckland in 1841, the Ngāpuhi economy suffered badly, one cause of the Northern War, which began on 11 March 1845. That morning Hōne Heke's force cut down the flagstaff above the town for the fourth time, and in the fighting and bombardment that followed most of Kororāreka burned; on Heke's orders the churches were spared. The name Russell was later transferred to the town itself.