given. These
were the men who settled at various points on the coast, chiefly from
Cook's Straits southward to Foveaux Straits, and engaged in what
is known as shore-whaling. In schooners, or in their fast-sailing,
seaworthy whale boats, they put out from land in chase of the whales
which for so many years frequented the New Zealand shores in shoals.
Remarkable were some of the catches they made. At Jacob's River eleven
whales were once taken in seventeen days. For a generation this
shore-whaling was a regular and very profitable industry. Only the
senseless slaughter of the "cows" and their "calves" ruined it.

Carried on at first independently by little bands of adventurers, it
in time fell into the hands of Sydney merchants, who found the capital
and controlled and organized whaling-stations. At these they erected
boiling-down works, shears for hoisting the huge whales' carcasses out
of the water, stores, and jetties. As late as 1843 men were busy at
more than thirty of these stations. More than five hundred men were
employed, and the oil and whalebone they sent away in the year were
worth at least L50,000. Sometimes the profits were considerable. A
certain merchant, who bought the plant of a bankrupt station for L225
at a Sydney auction, took away therefrom L1,500 worth of oil in the
next season. But then he was an uncommon merchant. He had been a
sealer himself, and finally abandoned mercantile life in Sydney to
return to his old haunts, where he managed his own establishment,
joined farming to whaling, endowed a mission station,[1] and amazed
the land by importing a black-coated tutor and a piano for his
children. Moreover, the harpooners and oarsmen were not paid wages or
paid in cash, but merely had a percentage of the value of a catch, and
were given that chiefly in goods and rum. For this their employers
charged them, perhaps, five times the prices current in Sydney, and
Sydney prices in convict times were not low. Under this truck system
the employers made profits both ways. The so-called rum was often
inferior arrack--deadliest of spirits--with which the Sydney of those
days poisoned the Pacific. The men usually began each season with a
debauch and ended it with another. A cask's head would be knocked out
on the beach, and all invited to dip a can into the liquor. They were
commonly in debt and occasionally in delirium. Yet they deserved to
work under a better system, for they were often fine fellows, darin