Famous Feet

Thomas Chaseland, half caste Aboriginal, sealer, whaler and pilot was a giant of a man.  His acts of brutality and bravery and his skills as a seaman are well documented but he is also remembered for a stumble on a beach which resulted in one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century.                            

Perhaps it was inevitable that the man who was considered to be the ‘best whaler in New Zealand’ should eventually be employed by Johnny Jones, (once) the richest man in Otago.  Jones once owned seven whaling stations and must have been willing to employ the legendary Tommy Chaseland.                                                                          

In the 1820’s and early thirties Tommy survived brutal skirmishes with Maori in Fiordland and had endured two (or possibly three) shipwrecks. On one occasion Chaseland and his wife Puna navigated a passage to Moeraki in an open whaleboat after having being shipwrecked in the Chatham Islands; on another he swam six miles in the freezing Southern Ocean to seek rescue after his whale destroyed his boat. In 1835 at Preservation inlet in Fiordland Chaseland and another man took eleven whales in seventeen days – an act that was described at the time as the “greatest feat of its kind ever performed in this country.”  It could also have been described as the most wasteful; at that time the station had no barrels; and with no means of storing the oil, none was harvested, whalebone alone was collected and mountains of blubber were left to rot.                                                      

Two years later Johnny Jones purchased this station from a man named Edwin Palmer whom Jones persuaded to stay on as station manager; Chaseland was promoted to ‘chief headsman.’  Among the whaling crew at the station was a young runaway sailor named Charles Denahan.  Denahan had been instructed to take care of one of the station’s whaleboats, but let it drift onto rocks where it was destroyed.  Chaseland gave the boy an initial beating, which was followed by a ‘ropes ending’ administered by Edwin Palmer.  The beatings must have been brutal – when Denahan died his body was described as being “black, yellow and blue from the ankles to the shoulders.” Chaseland escaped punishment but Palmer was eventually charged with manslaughter and tried in Sydney. Johnny Jones ‘fixed’ the matter by offering bribes to one crown witness and arranging for two others to be shipped out of Australia before they could be called to give evidence.  After an adjournment that lasted half an hour the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.  Jones had illustrated the lengths he was prepared to go to, to protect valued employees and they in turn, found ways to repay his loyalty.                                                                                   

In 1843 Chaseland signed an agreement to work at Jones’s station in Waikouaiti and on the 14^th of August that year his marriage to Puna was formalised by Waikouaiti’s resident missionary the Reverend James Watkin.                                       

Chaseland’s particularly acute eyesight was legendary – he was known to have sighted a whale that was invisible even with a telescope and was rumoured to be able to see a mile beneath the ocean. His near vision may not have been as good however, while walking on the beach near Waikouaiti he struck his foot on a bone projecting from the sand. It was identified as belonging to a Moa.        

                                                           

They were not the first Moa bones to be discovered (that find had occurred in 1837) but they were the first to be uncovered in an area that was once a swamp.  The whalers of the Waikouaiti station were well aware of the value of the bones and set about trying to discover more. Unfortunately, not being palaeontologists they chose to dig with a pickaxe creating “sad havoc.”  More bones were exposed with each receding tide and at some point Tommy Chaseland discovered (and carefully excavated) a perfectly preserved pair of Moa feet standing erect and about a yard apart.  He presented his prize to his employer Johnny Jones.                                           

Some years later Jones presented (or perhaps sold) these “splendid and unique fossils” to a visiting naturalist named Walter Mantell who examined the holes from which they had been dug and sketched the orientation of the feet. He also described the rough excavation and handling of the specimens as “hunnish behaviour.”

“Bones of the right foot of the moa, or extinct colossal ostrich-like bird of New Zealand.” Found at Waikouaiti by Walter Mantell.  –From a Pictorial Atlas of Fossil Remains (London, 1850) 

Mantell’s notes read: “This unlucky Moa, happily for science, must have been mired in the swamp and being unable to extricate himself, has perished on the spot.” 

“The location of this bed is in a little bay, on the side of the bar of sand that unites the headland called Island Point with the mainland at the entrance of the river Waikouaiti”         The bone-bed is an ancient swamp or morass, in which the New Zealand flax once grew luxuriantly; it is now covered by a layer of sand, and is submerged at high water being visible only when the tide has receded. 

                                                                                                                                              

Walter Mantell was not the first person to excavate bones from the site, but he made the largest collection of specimens there and provided the best description of the area in which they were found. His tactic seems to have been to harvest and remove as many specimens as quickly as possible.  Between 1847 and 1850 he collected “more than 1000 separate bones and also fragments of eggs, which shipped in bulk to the British Museum with little attempt made to document details of individual specimens.  The Waikouaiti Moa feet were unique in that they were perfectly intact, and their location and orientation were carefully recorded. This sketch of Mantell’s made in 1852 shows his party leaving a site in North Otago carrying enormous bundles of specimens.  He named the site ‘Awamoa’ – meaning moa stream.                                                                                                                           

The specimens provoked intense debate.  Evidence of Moa hunting was incontrovertible, but the central question remained – who were their hunters and when did their hunting occur?  In the absence of carbon dating great importance was given to traditional Maori Folklore.  Elaborate anecdotal accounts were recorded.  The Reverend Watkins reported fables about “immense birds which were formerly said to exist.” Unfortunately his report also referenced “an immense serpent of the water species."                                                         

Watkins’s son Edwin added to the debate. In 1892 he wrote a letter to the Otago Daily Times in hopes that his contribution “may be of interest to those scientific men who hold that it is not long since the Moa became extinct.” He wrote:  “I remember when a little boy seeing daily ‘Kawko’ the old chief, at Waikouaiti.  He had all the appearance of a very old man.  I judge that he was quite 70 years of age.  He told my father that when he was a very little boy he saw a live moa that was as tall as a horse.  Being afraid, he hid himself in the fern.”

A tall tale? Or a true account of an encounter with a tall bird?

Whale Tales

Before the discovery of gold, Otago’s wealth came from ‘black oil’ that was harvested from southern right whales.   All species of whales were regarded as fair game, but female right whales and their calves were (once) numerous and migrated in a predictable annual manner up the inshore waters of New Zealand’s east coast.                                                             The industry was lucrative.  In 1838, the year that Johnny Jones purchased the Waikouaiti whaling station, his men captured forty one whales, generating profits that repaid Jones’s investment twenty times over.  This level of productivity was never repeated; indiscriminate slaughter rapidly depleted breeding stock and whale numbers fell precipitously and predictably.                                                                                                                                                   In 1840, when Jones’s “steady farming families” arrived on the brig Magnet, approximately 28 whales were landed but by 1841 that number had fallen to nine and in 1842 only four whales were captured. But Jones was tenacious and had other income streams - his station remained open for eleven years, finally closing in 1849.                              

The Magnet’s first port of call after leaving Sydney was Bluff – where another of Jones’s whaling stations was located. Having experienced the sights, sounds and smells of the Bluff shore based whaling operation, the settlers must have been somewhat forewarned about the conditions they could expect to encounter at Waikouaiti.

Huriawa Peninsula, Karitane, the location of the Waikouaiti Whaling Station

In 1844 a surveyor travelling south described Waikouaiti as being typical of other whaling stations, “a picture of the most perfect neglect of anything like order or neatness.” He describes the smell: (“like a thousand filthy lamps”) and the sights (“the whole beach was strewn with gigantic fragments of the bones of whales”).  The wildlife was also depicted: (prowling, “savage looking pigs and an abundance of poultry”) as were the inhabitants (“dirty, half-dressed Native women with a proportionate number of half-cast children”). Unsurprisingly, Johnny Jones and his ‘steady farming families’ established their agricultural settlement at the opposite end of Waikouaiti bay.  The settlements resident missionary however, chose to live adjacent to the whaling station, its proximity allowing him to better attend to “the spiritual welfare of the aboriginal inhabitants” and to witness the distressing consequences of the whalers excessive drinking.      

                                                                                        

Whaling was a seasonal activity carried out during winter months, and as few whalers were disciplined enough to save their winter wages,  during warmer weather they were obliged to earn a living by fishing, farming or by any other means possible. When whale numbers and winter wages diminished, men who were highly skilled or adventurous signed onto American whaling ships and left New Zealand, while those who chose not to abandon their families stayed and took up alternative trades. Businesses that had provisioned foreign whaling vessels suffered. In 1851 an article in the Otago Witness rather pointlessly urged the Honolulu based newspaper the ‘Friend’ to recommend the port of Otago as a whaling destination, but the whaling ships had gone and never returned. The industry had irrevocably collapsed, but the remains of hundreds of dead whales that were the remnants of the trade remained evident for years.                                                                                                             

During the 1860’s gold rush, Waikouaiti was an important stopover point for prospectors.  In 1862 a special correspondent for the Otago Daily Times found ample evidence that Waikouaiti had originally been a whaling station.  On his arrival he was ferried ashore in whaleboats “owned and worked by a party of Maoris” and saw huge bones “strewn on the shore with here and there a portion of the spine or backbone of the whale of the thickness of the nave of a cartwheel.”                                                                                                                                

However, even discarded whale bones were considered to have some aesthetic or economic use.  Fyffe house, the oldest remaining dwelling in Kaikoura has foundations made from whale vertebrae and whalebones were even occasionally fashioned into furniture.                                      The bones littering Waikouaiti beach were carried off and used as garden ornaments (rib bone arches were popular), while others were collected (ground up?) and made into farm manure. In 1901 a correspondent to the Otago Witness wrote an ‘amusing account’ of the collection of whale bones on Waikouaiti beach.   It begins: “a man came down to the beach for a load of bones.” Having loaded his cart, he encounters a Maori who glances into the cart and notices that “there were more bones than belonged to whales.” Erosion had exposed ancient human remains that had been loaded onto the cart and mingled with the whale bones.  An argument ensued, but eventually the bones were sorted and the men parted company - each carrying bones intended for a different purpose.                                                                                                                                

Early in the 1870’s whales were once again sighted and attempts were made to revive the old industry.  Local Maori formed a cooperative and the Waikouaiti Whale Fishery Company was established.   Old whale boats were pressed into service and the company met with some initial success; in 1871 two whales were landed and numerous more were sighted – “the coast in places has been black with the monsters” (an exaggeration by the Otago Daily Times, July 1872).  Two new whale boats were commissioned and five or six whales were landed however the following season was disastrous.  In 1874 the whaling crews (having just returned from their seasonal work as shearers) landed a single seven ‘tun’ whale.  Its estimated value of £300 was reportedly “just sufficient to clear the crews expenses for tucker during the season.  The Whale Fishery Company’s shears and try pots rusted on the Karitane peninsula until the early 1900’s. Inoperable whaling boats moldered under a boatshed at Karitane until a single boat ‘Maori Girl’ was rescued and restored in the 1930’s.  It can be seen today in the Otago Settler’s Museum.                                                                                                                                                                                                                In the years that followed, whales were occasionally sighted but the equipment and expertise needed to capture, kill and process them had been lost.  In 1904 two fishermen named Challis and Clifford discovered the carcass of a right whale floating off the Waikouaiti coast.  After fastening it with ropes they set off towing the carcass to the nearest suitable harbour but soon discovered that “the little ten horsepower engine could hardly shift the great inert mass” It took them twelve hours to reach Moeraki- a distance of ten miles.  By 1904 whales (even dead ones) had become a tremendous curiosity.  Even though the animal’s death had not been recent (its smell was described as hardly resembling the “spices of Araby”) crowds of sightseers thronged the beach “wondering at its vast bulk and mighty flukes and speculating as to its probable value.” A few adventurous souls even climbed aboard and wandered around on top of the carcass.  Challis and Clifford were reportedly paid £20 for their catch which had to be carted away to a freezing works for processing.                                                                                                                                                  

In 1931 New Zealand became a signatory to an international convention designed to protect various whale species.  Prime Minister Forbes announced penalties and explained that the bill was an attempt to prevent wholesale slaughter and extinction.  He went on to add that although the extinction of the right whales was a thing to be deplored it would be difficult for New Zealand to regulate the taking of whales in the Antarctic and that it was yet to be determined whether the legislation would prove to be effective.   

How ‘right’ he was.