The southern sealing rush

Seals were hunted in New Zealand long before any European ship arrived. For the first two centuries of Māori settlement they were a more common quarry than moa, taken for meat and for teeth that made good fish hooks, and by the 1700s the surviving colonies had retreated to the far south. That is where James Cook found them in 1773, when his crew stopped at Dusky Sound and ate seal meat. Word of the colonies reached Sydney, whose merchants were looking for anything that could pay for imports. In November 1792 the Britannia left a gang at Dusky Sound for the London firm of Enderby. By the time they were collected ten months later, the men had taken 4,500 skins and had built the first sailing ship made in New Zealand.

The real rush began in 1803, once the Bass Strait colonies off Australia had been hunted out. Fur went into hats in Britain, the hides into shoes, and elephant-seal oil in particular burned cleanly, for lamps and for some industrial uses. Gangs worked Dusky Sound and the West Coast first, then the Antipodes Islands, where the toll reached about 140,000 animals in three years. They then moved on to Foveaux Strait and Stewart Island, and by 1810 to Campbell and Macquarie islands. Most voyages were organised from Sydney, often by firms founded by former convicts such as Simeon Lord. Captains kept their hunting grounds secret, partly from rivals and partly because the East India Company claimed a monopoly over trade in these waters.

The men themselves were left in gangs of six or eight on bare coasts and islands for months on end. They sheltered in caves or under upturned boats, ate seal meat, fish and dry bread, and suffered from cold, rats and scurvy. One party waited four and a half years on Solander Island in Foveaux Strait before anyone came back for them. They were paid a 'lay', usually a hundredth share of the season's skins and oil, which rarely added up to much. The killing was done mostly at breeding time and when the pups were young. Hunters crept up on a colony from downwind, then charged in swinging clubs of rātā wood, often at night and over reefs where a slip could mean drowning. Many wore flax sandals, which Māori called pāraerae, for grip on the wet rock.

More than 30 ships came to the far south during the trade, and for southern Māori it brought regular contact with Europeans and their goods. Most of that contact was peaceful, and some sealers, such as James Caddell, went on to live in Māori communities. It also broke down into a decade of raids and reprisals from 1810, sometimes called the Sealers' War, in which around 74 people died and the village of Ōtākou was burned. The accounts that survive come from the two sides, with no neutral witness. By then the colonies were already thinning. A brief revival in the 1820s faded, and by the 1830s most sealers had turned to trading or shore whaling. The gangs left a lasting pattern behind them: itinerant crews of hard-living men, a tradition later carried on by whalers, gold miners and bushmen.