Last year a Te Papa curator approached the library team with an intriguing question. Could we help them find more information about the story that in the 19th century whales in the Wellington Harbour were so noisy that they kept people awake at night? The curator couldn’t find any first-hand contemporary accounts, known as primary sources, from the 1800s to confirm the tale and hoped the library team might be able to help. Cataloguing and Acquisitions Librarian Kim McClintock talks about her discoveries.
A search online showed that the story has been widely told. There’s a mention in Te Ara about Southern right whales keeping settlers awake in the 1840s, and the Department of Conservation newsletter mentions a visitor complaining about whale noises in the 1800s. There is even a mention of the story in another Te Papa blog post. None of the articles or books that mention whale noises refer to primary sources, though, and details of the story vary.
The next step was to look to Papers Past, the New Zealand archive of digitised publications, including newspapers, to see if there were any references in 19th-century newspapers. The references found in this search seemed to indicate that whales were not as prevalent in Wellington Harbour as the stories would have you believe. Most of the articles mention excited settlers hunting Southern right whales that entered the harbour, as shown in this article from the New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian in 1854:
The articles all frame the appearance of a whale as a unique event, and there are no references to whale noise or complaints in any of the newspaper articles that have been digitised. This left me with the question if the story is likely just that, a story, where did it originate from?
A general google search using the keywords “whales awake Wellington harbour” resulted in a strange reference popping up from Lonely Planet Tasmania. It mentioned a familiar story, that in the 1830s whales were so noisy in the Derwent River that they kept people awake. So, if the story wasn’t about whales in Wellington Harbour, maybe the story was about whales somewhere else.
Using this as a jumping off point, I investigated whales in Tasmania in the 19th century. Since visiting Australia to search for primary sources was out of scope, I had to rely on digitised sources. Searching Trove, the Australian version of Papers Past, I found references from the 20th century about stories of whales in the Derwent River in the early 19th century being so numerous that shipping was affected. An example is this article from Sun News-Pictorial in 1931:
And this article from the Maryborough Chronicle in 1952 mentions whales keeping the Lieutenant Governor awake at night:
Reverend Robert Knopwood was a clergyman and diarist who immigrated to Australia in 1804. Luckily his diary from 1805–1808 has been digitised, and searching it shows he kept track of whales in front of his house on the Derwent River. The diary includes this entry on 31 July 1807:
“at 8 the morning very cold ½ past I see many whales opposite my House. making a great noise at 12 calld upon Mr Bowden who informd me that at 8 this morn there were 17 whales counted at the same time”.
The diary also showed that he knew Lieutenant Governor Collins.
David Collins was a British officer who was appointed the founding Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, later renamed Tasmania. Letters he sent to Joseph Banks the naturalist and botanist have been digitised, including a letter sent on 20 July 1804, which mentions the Derwent being “full of the Whales, called by the Whalers, the Right”:
While neither of these primary sources refer explicitly to the story of people complaining about whale noise, they do show that whales, Southern right in particular, were prevalent enough in the Derwent River for the noise to be noted and for a busy whaling industry to be supported. Though this whaling industry resulted in the decimation of the Southern right whale population in Tasmania by the 1890s.[1]
Through this research, it now seems likely that the stories told today about whales in Wellington Harbour keeping people awake in the 1800s originated in the Derwent River, Australia. At some point, likely with the movement of people from Australia to New Zealand in the mid-1800s, the truth drifted over the Tasman Sea, to become a story retold over 200 years.
[1] Whales in the Derwent on MercuryNIE
Kia Ora Kim. Pre-whaling distributions and abundances of Tohorā around Wellington are difficult to estimate. There were whaling stations around Porirua and Mana Island, and Te Kopi in Palliser Bay, and it’s not hard to imagine Wellington Harbour was also a habitat.
As Jean-Claude pointed, depletions of whale stocks were already notable back then. For example, the famous Weller Brothers likely shut down their station (the biggest shore station in NZ) in Otago Harbour in 1840 because of small catches.
I study Right Whales. Similarly, lot about pre-whaling distributions and abundances in North Pacific and North Atlantic are unclear presumably due to depletions of whale stocks happened before detailed recordings or major colonizations by Europeans.
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/04/how-do-you-study-one-of-the-worlds-rarest-whales/
Kia ora Kim, I suggest that the story could have been related to the first Wellington settlers as recollections by the local iwis. Whaling and presumably whale depletion was already well underway when the first settlers arrived in 1840, as several whaling stations around Cook Strait were mentioned by Ernst Dieffenbach who also arrived in 1840.
Kia ora Jean-Claude, I agree that it is likely recollections from iwi probably also played a part in the story becoming embedded in Wellington. The presence of the whaling stations around Wellington certainly point to the fact that Southern right whales were more prevalent in the area. Hopefully there are some references in manuscripts somewhere that get digitised or catalogued that contain more information!
Kia ora Kim. I enjoyed this blog. We’ve deleted the reference to sleep-disrupting southern rights in the Te Ara entry on Whales, as you’ve shown that this story is apocryphal.