We recently posted about the Wellerman and the Sea Shanty Boom on TikTok. We noted that of all the recent strangeness, the most pleasant and least expected has been the explosion of sea shanties on TikTok. It all began when Scottish postman and aspiring musician, Nathan Evanss, began posting shanties and sea songs on the video streaming service TikTok. 

Since then, there has been a bit of confusion in some quarters about what the song, the Wellerman is about. (This should not be a surprise, as there are often disagreements about sea shanties, including even what constitutes a sea shanty.) Some have taken the lyric, “Soon may the Wellerman come, to bring us sugar and tea and rum,” as a reference to the infamous Atlantic Triangle Trade which involved trading slaves, sugar, and rum.

Fortunately, the Wellerman has nothing whatsoever to do with the Atlantic slave trade.It is a New Zealand sea song about whaling, specifically, a whaling company established by the Weller brothers, whose employees and ships were called Wellermen. The Wellerman provides a glimpse into the remarkable cross-cultural whaling history of New Zealand in the early 1800s. 

Whereas American whalers sailed from the East Coast of North America to the Northern Pacific to hunt whales and processed the blubber and bone on shipboard, whalers on the South Island of  New Zealand hunted whales just off their shores and processed the whales at stations on land.

To establish a whaling station meant making arrangements with the local Māori people. The Sydney-based Weller brothers established their first whaling station at Ōtākou (Otago) on the South Island in 1831. It is not clear what terms, if any, were negotiated, but a few months later, the station and its whalers’ houses were been burned to the ground by a Māori raiding party.  Apparently, a subsequent agreement was reached, as the station was rebuilt in 1833 and would grow to become one of the largest whaling stations on the New Zealand coast.

The Weller whaling station and others like it would also benefit the Māori. Kate Stevens, Lecturer in History, at the University of Waikato, writes in the journal Conversations: 

Whaling connected Ngāi Tahu [the largest Māori tribe] to the global economy in the early 19th century, providing new and sometimes mana-enhancing opportunities for trade, employment, and travel…

At the same time, Ngāi Tahu communities sought to incorporate whaling men into the rights and responsibilities of whanaungatanga (relations, connectedness). Intimate relationships and marriage were key features of this process, as historian Angela Wanhalla has shown.

Over 140 men had married Māori women in southern New Zealand by 1840, with these couples producing over 500 children. Edward Weller himself married Paparu, daughter of Tahatu and Matua. After her early death, Weller remarried Nikuru, daughter of rangatira (chief) Taiaroa, but left New Zealand without his wife and daughters after the Otākou station’s closure in 1841…

As the whaling industry declined from the 1840s, some whalers (like Edward Weller) proved transient visitors. Many others, like Howell, remained with their families, though most were not as wealthy.

Former whalers turned to fisheries, agriculture and trade. Their mixed communities formed the basis for settlements around the southern region: Bluff, Riverton, Moeraki, Taieri, Waikouaiti.

These early and intense interactions had a lasting legacy in Ngāi Tahu’s whakapapa (genealogy) and collective identity. The sustained contact between Ngāi Tahu and whalers also complicates the myth of whaling as simply a transient and masculine pursuit.

Whaling was indeed a gendered industry; crew were almost exclusively male. But they were also diverse. Native American, Aboriginal Australian and Pacific Islanders all found opportunities aboard ship and in New Zealand alongside Māori and Europeans.

Many of them, we must assume, would have sung or heard shanties like Soon May the Wellerman Come — though none might have expected their descendants in the 21st century to be humming them too.

Thanks to Dick Kooyman for contributing to this post.