Whalers' Rhymes

These verses come from the shore whaling stations of the southern South Island in the early 1840s. The Dunedin Evening Star printed them in 1884 as “a few doggerel rhymes strung together as a song, the tune of which cannot now be recorded,” which “used to be sung by the whalers.” Later writers matched them to The King of the Cannibal Islands, a London comic song that the Australian parody The Beautiful Land of Australia had already borrowed. The melody here is the verse of that tune.

The song names real people. Captain Bruce commanded the Magnet, Johnny Jones’s supply ship on the Sydney run, which was lost on Banks Peninsula in 1844. “Bloody Jack” was the whalers’ name for Tūhawaiki, a leading Kāi Tahu chief, who drowned the same year. “Mr Wiltshire” was George Willsher, a storekeeper at the Molyneux, who the 1884 article says “was not so highly thought of—at least by the Maoris.” Peter Shavatt and John Hughes were whalers, and Hughes ran his own station at Moeraki. The third verse sneers at a Jewish storekeeper at Tautuku.

T. B. Kennard, who spent his boyhood at the whaling settlements of Waikouaiti and Moeraki, remembered the lines being recited “in a jocular manner.” He heard the Hughes line as “Old Jack Hughes had Maori shoes,” meaning sandals of flax or cabbage-tree leaf.

For the stations and the people behind the song, see Who Was the Wellerman? The Shore Whalers of Otago.