Seal hunters led a tough, rugged life

While a huge range of individuals have helped form the New Zealand character it is our many industries which have built the nation we know today. In the very early days of European contact with New Zealand those industries exploited finite resources in a

At about the same time that European whalers began hunting in New Zealand waters seal hunters had set up shore based operations in around Fiordland.

It was the second of our early export industries based on finite resources and followed the same boom and bust cycle as whaling.

They were not the first people to hunt seals as early Maori had hunted them extensively for about the first two centuries of settlement.

Archaeological evidence suggests these early Maori groups killed and ate far more seals than moa and perhaps should have been referred to as seal hunter Maori.

As well as hunting seals for food early Maori also cut and stitched seal skins together for clothing and other uses but little is known about how they cured the skins.

It is thought that they had developed a system for tanning or air drying as they had with bird and dog skin, which were also used in clothing. Seal skin is much heavier and thicker and there is no reliable information how they were prepared.

By the time of European arrival in the 1790s there were a few uncured seal skin loin aprons worn in the Marlborough Sounds but no seal skin clothing with intricate cut patterns and fine stitching found in 300 year old archaeological sites.

Evidence has been found of extensive sealing in the far north, Coromandel, Taranaki, Cook Strait, the Canterbury coast and the south from Waitaki to Fiordland.

By the 1700s, when Cook arrived, large seal colonies were confined to the far south although remnant populations existed elsewhere.

Unlike whaling however seal hunters did not initially require large ships, row boats or shore based boiling down works as they were only after the skins although some oil was taken in the latter stages of the industry.

The first record of Europeans killing seals in New Zealand came from Captain Cook in 1773 when he spent some time in Dusky Sound.

His crew were sent ashore where they shot or clubbed a number of fur seals for food.

They also used seal skins to replace the worn out cow hide which was used to reduce wear between masts and spars on sailing ships.

They also rendered down a number of seal bodies to extract oil for lamps.

By 1788 merchants in the New South Wales convict colony were looking for something to trade for European commodities.

The London firm of Sam Enderby and Sons, who owned convict ships, obtained a licence from the East India Company to obtain seal skins.

They dropped a sealing gang in Dusky Sound in November 1792 who were to take and cure seal skins for Chinese merchants in exchange for tea which would then be sold in Britain.

When the men were picked up almost a year later they had collected 4500 skins. Fearing that they had been abandoned they had also felled trees, cut them into timber and started building a sailing ship.

Two years later, in 1795, the halffinished ship was found by a group of marooned sailors.

They finished building the ship, called it the Providence and sailed it to Norfolk Island.

It was the first sailing ship built in New Zealand

Other sealing gangs did not fare so well and many died in the harsh conditions of southern New Zealand winters or were killed in conflicts with Maori. Many of these seal hunters were in fact escaped convicts from New South Wales and were easily exploited by unscrupulous ship owners and traders. They would be dropped off on a remote inhospitable coast or an offshore island from where there was no escape.

With little in the way of provisions or tools beyond their knives and fishing lines and promises of freedom when the ship returned, they survived harsher conditions than the penal colony they had escaped from.

They often lived in caves or under boats, and were always cold and wet. They survived on hard biscuits, while they lasted, seal meat and fish.

Scurvy and malnutrition were a common, and often fatal, consequence.

The work was dangerous as the men would hunt at night, and many slipped on the rocks and drowned.

Using clubs, they would quickly kill all the seals in a group.

Then they would take off the skins and hang them out to dry.

Ship owners, knowing the penalties for assisting escaped convicts, kept few records of the men they employed or even where they put them ashore.

It is more than likely that some groups were never picked up, particularly if their ship met some disaster or the captain died.

These men either starved to death or perished at sea trying to return to civilisation in hand built sealskin boats.

By the 1840s New Zealand seal populations had been so reduced by hunting that only a few sealers remained in the business.

Also at about this time huge numbers of seals were discovered in Bass Strait, which was closer to the New South Wales colony and conditions were not as harsh as southern New Zealand. Predictably this colony did not last very long and New Zealand sealing revived in about 1800 when the Bass Strait populations all but disappeared.

Ship owners, knowing the penalties for assisting escaped convicts, kept few records of the men they employed or even where they put them ashore.