Did shore whaling rapidly reduce southern right whale numbers?
The historical record
Whaling around Kāpiti changed sharply during the nineteenth century. Contemporary returns give 23 boats and 466 tuns of black oil for the Kāpiti–Mana district in 1839, but only three boats and 29 tuns in 1847.
These records help explain why a once-busy network of shore stations survives largely through documents, place names and archaeological remains. The much later history of whale protection and whale watching belongs to a different period, but it can be read against this earlier commercial exploitation.
Sources: Nigel Prickett, The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling (2002), pp. 83–97.
Yes. A peer-reviewed study documents severe depletion across New Zealand and eastern Australia during intense nineteenth-century whaling. Its regional estimates should not be presented as Kāpiti-specific figures.
The hunt and the breeding grounds
Southern right whales were especially vulnerable to shore-based hunting because their coastal movements brought them close to whaleboat launching places. The Kāpiti–Mana returns show large quantities of oil produced in the 1830s, but oil volumes cannot be converted into an exact local whale death toll without reliable yield information.
From historical catches to population history
The 2014 study Two Intense Decades of 19th Century Whaling Precipitated Rapid Decline of Right Whales around New Zealand and East Australia places individual nineteenth-century records within a much wider reconstruction of hunting pressure. Read the regional station figures alongside that population study: one describes commercial production, the other interprets the ecological consequences across a much larger area.