On the back of giants
New Zealand’s shore whaling industry lasted 137 years, centred on the Marlborough Sounds. Alice Angeloni talks to those involved, and hears how their views have changed.
John Norton was in choppy seas when he felt a great force come up beneath his boat, knocking him off balance.
The 23-year-old managed to grab hold of the rails as he flipped over the side into the Cook Strait.
The young whaler had been chasing a pair of humpbacks and was about to ‘‘bomb’’ one with an explosive spear, when the other rose from the depths right next to the boat.
Clinging desperately to the rails with his gumboots in the water, he swung himself over and used the back of the whale as a ‘‘stable step’’ to get back on board.
‘‘That was about the scariest moment I had,’’ said Norton, now 84.
He worked at the
Perano Whaling Station in the Marlborough
Sounds for five seasons
– from 1958 to 1962.
He shot 200 whales in his time and recalls other dramatic moments, including having a spout of blood blown into his face during a hunt.
‘‘It never got boring. I loved going out there.’’
Sixty years on, his eyes still light up when he remembers the thrill of being out on a whale chaser.
But his memories are also tinged with regret.
‘‘I think about it quite often actually. You can’t change the past. I feel guilty I suppose. You never had those thoughts at the time.’’ The whalers were not aware of ‘‘conservation’’. ‘‘At the time you never even thought about it. It was a job and that’s what we were trained to do. ‘‘Knowing what I know now, I would never touch them, but back in those days, it was second nature to have a go at them.’’
It was hard work, ‘‘a young man’s job’’, but the time he spent on the station earned him enough to build a house in Picton. It’s the same one he has lived in for 60 years.
Whaling provided a lifeblood for many men like Norton, and the Marlborough Sounds was at the centre of the birth and death of one of New Zealand’s first industries.
Whalers were once revered as heroes, ‘‘like the All Blacks’’ said one Picton man, trying to describe their fame.
Boatloads of tourists would roll past the Perano Whaling Station in the Tory Channel and watch whales being hunted, killed and hauled to a processing factory.
With handkerchiefs over their noses and cameras at the ready, they would eagerly watch as the water ran red, and the huge ocean mammals were winched up the slipway.
The job was dangerous, the money was good and as the Auckland Weekly News put it in 1925 – it was a ‘‘profitable industry that provides thrilling sport’’.
But four days before Christmas in 1964, the last whaling station in New Zealand made its final kill.
After a battle to keep the industry afloat in Marlborough, including Government help, the Tory Channel whalers conceded they had been operating in a way which was ‘‘far from economical’’.
A notorious gunner known for his sharp eye and celebrated for his accurate shot, harpooned the last whale, a bull sperm near Kaiko¯ ura. It brought an end to 137 years of commercial whaling in New Zealand. Records show more than 4000 whales were killed at the top of the south from 1911 to 1964. This included five blue whales, the biggest measuring 27 metres long, three killer whales and about 500 sperm whales. The bulk of whaling over this time targeted humpbacks. Revisiting the past
‘‘It’s not like it used to be,’’ Norton says, as he climbs off the boat and onto the slab holding up the skeletal remains of the Perano Whaling Station.
It’s unclear whether he’s talking about the station or himself.
It’s like the lines on his face have been etched in with sun and salt, and his eyes have turned bluer from years spent looking out to sea.
‘‘There’s a lot of history down here. A hell of a lot of memories.’’
Tucked in Fishing Bay in the outer Marlborough Sounds, prominent structures of the surviving whaling station still stand.
In a decent southerly, the sea washes up over the station, slowly corroding its base.
Weathered wood holds up rusting iron beams, and there are huge cookers and digesters, their weird, cylindrical shapes appear almost alien-like.
Norton points out the whale lookout, on a ridge opposite. It’s the highest point, looking out over the Cook Strait.
‘‘I was up there on that hill.’’ The search
From the lookout, with a view of the Cook Strait, and a hazy outline of the North Island in the distance, they kept watch for humpback whales on their annual migration.
The whales swam from the Antarctic, to the warmer waters of the Pacific, where their young would be born.
Norton would sit on top of the hill, searching the sea for the spout of a whale, using binoculars set on a swivel.
They worked nine hours a day, seven days a week during the season which ran from May to August.
When someone cried ‘‘there she blows’’, that was the signal for all hands on deck. They would race down the steep hillside path, to the whalechasers below. The chase
There were two men on board the whale chaser, the driver and the gunner.
They would follow the whale, sometimes to the other side of the Cook Strait.
‘‘We would go 20 miles if necessary,’’ Norton said.
Sometimes they would shepherd whales in, at other times, ‘‘we would just hit them when we could’’. The kill
They watched from the chaser and waited for the right moment, ‘‘you couldn’t do much until they came to the surface’’.
They had one minute to ‘‘get stuck in’’ before the whale would be under for another seven minutes.
Norton said the chasers would ‘‘hang back’’, gauging the whales’ pattern, to understand when they would come up for a breath.
Then at the right moment, the harpoon gun was fired, ‘‘and then you hung on’’ as the whale dived down taking out a line with it.
When it came up for breath, another whale chaser would go alongside and throw an explosive bomb into the whale.
The process became ‘‘quite methodical,’’ he said.
‘‘I never had a job like it before, or ever since, it was just like hunting I suppose.’’ Back to the station
After being harpooned, the dead whale was inflated with air, so it would float, and then hooked onto the side of the mother-ship.
The whale was dragged back to the whaling station, and unloaded from the mother-ship onto the slipway.
It was winched up the slipway, and then stripped of its 10 centimetre thick layer of blubber.
They would cut the blubber into slabs and render it down in big vats.
It took about four hours to render a whale and in the middle of the season, the factory would run 24 hours a day.
The extracted oil had different uses over the years, originally hailed as ‘‘odourless lighting’’ but later used as an engine lubricant, and in products like soap, paint and rope.
It was used in cosmetic creams, ointments and margarine. The meat was processed, canned and exported for both human and animal consumption.
How shore-based whaling came to be in Marlborough
Whaling was New Zealand’s first European-style industry attracting whalers and sealers from 1791, but whaling from shore-based stations was born where it died – in Marlborough’s Tory Channel.
It started in 1827, when a
shipwrecked mariner and exconvict from Australia called John Guard was driven into Te Awaiti Bay by a gale and began whaling in rowboats with muffled oars and hand-thrown harpoons. But by 1860, the southern right whale industry had collapsed through overhunting, in what was to become a familiar pattern.
In 1911, the Perano family introduced steam-powered chaser boats, which rapidly improved their efficiency and speed.
In the 1950s and 60s, the Perano Whaling Station generated more power than Picton itself. They employed about 40 people and were a hive of activity, marked by the cluster of corrugated iron-roofed huts, tucked into the hill.
The ‘‘golden year’’ for whaling in the Marlborough Sounds was 1960. At the Perano whaling station, 78 whales were killed in 16 days.
That season, they harpooned 226 humpback whales at the top of the South Island.
Following their peak season, tallies started to dwindle. In 1961 they caught 55 whales, in 1962 it was ‘‘disastrously low’’ catch of 27.
‘‘Humpbacks almost disappeared from the sea’’, an
Evening Post article said.
In 1963, the first sperm whales were caught and at first the industry looked promising. That year, they had a catch of 119.
In March 1964, eight Russian ships were reported off the coast of Kaiko¯ ura. Aerial observation revealed factory ships ‘‘devouring’’ whales by the dozen.
‘‘We are very perturbed at this Russian whaling fleet operating on the edge of our area. They could put us out of business overnight,’’ director Gilbert Perano said.
‘‘They could catch in a day, what we could catch in a month or more.’’
A Government bid to save whaling industry
The Minister for Marine said they would pay a guaranteed price for sperm whale oil. But in spite of this, the demand for the product had diminished.
The price dropped from 68 pounds a tonne in 1961, to 45 pounds a tonne in 1964 and the
Peranos were operating at a loss.
On January 4, 1965, Gilbert Perano, announced they would close.
‘‘That’s just the way it was in that day and age’’
Gilbert Perano’s son Adrian grew up one bay over from the whaling station.
His mother would send him to the station with a big satchel. ‘‘Go get some whale meat for the chooks.’’
As a young boy, he would climb over the hill, and would be sent clambering back, weighed down by a big bag of whale meat.
He worked at the station for one year when he was 17-yearsold. The year that it closed.
He had just finished college and drove winches for the first half of the season, and then spent the second half helping the chief engineer with cooking and rendering the blubber.
‘‘Yeah, it was a bit barbaric, but that’s the way it was,’’ he said.
‘‘It was probably going to finish at some stage, whether the whales were there or not.’’
Whale counting
Forty years after whaling ceased, the Department of Conservation started a survey to assess humpback whale recovery.
For 12 years, the trained eyes of old whalers returned to spot the animals they once hunted, to help establish how the populations were faring since commercial whaling stopped in New Zealand waters.
While DOC has no plans for further humpback whale surveys in the Cook Strait, their research showed humpback whale numbers were slowly increasing in New Zealand waters.
Whale heritage site
Now there may be another whale-related industry in the Sounds, focusing on the history woven into the fabric of the port town of Picton.
Its local museum already has displays of whale bones, vials of whale oil, and even the embryo of a blue whale.
A local conservation group, Guardians of the Sounds, is spearheading a project to turn the Sounds into New Zealand’s first international whale heritage site.
Their proposal includes a 15-metre replica of a humpback whale to be built at the restored Perano Whaling Station. DOC is considering the proposal.