Jillett’s Whaling Station, Kāpiti Island
The well-known view of Gillett's station is not a nineteenth-century photograph. T. Lindsay Buick reproduced it in An Old New Zealander (1911) as a watercolour copy made in 1907 from an 1844 sketch.
The historical record
The station image
Source: T. Lindsay Buick, An Old New Zealander (1911), illustration caption.
An image that travelled through time
The familiar illustration of Gillett’s whaling station has its own history. The scene derives from an 1844 sketch, but the version reproduced by T. Lindsay Buick in 1911 was a watercolour copy made in 1907. Those three dates matter: the picture can illuminate the appearance of a nineteenth-century station, but the surviving published reproduction is not a photograph taken at the station.
Reading the scene
The station belonged to a maritime economy in which crews launched small boats from exposed shores, brought whales alongside, and rendered blubber into oil for export. The image is most revealing when read with the archaeological evidence for shore stations and the contemporary production returns, rather than treated as a complete inventory of buildings or workers. Source: T. Lindsay Buick, An Old New Zealander (1911), illustration and caption; Nigel Prickett, The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling (2002), Kāpiti chapter.
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