The Old Whaling Days
Robert McNab’s The Old Whaling Days (1913) belongs to an early generation of historical works that assembled records of New Zealand’s maritime contact period. Such a book is valuable as a guide to vessels, stations and documentary leads, but it is also an interpretation produced long after many of the events it describes.
The historical record
The Old Whaling Days — Robert McNab — 1913
Robert McNab and the historian’s task
For Kāpiti, the most productive use of McNab is to connect the local story with the wider whaling world while maintaining clear attribution. His book should be treated as a historical publication with its own author, date and method, not as an eyewitness account of every event it records.
The working world behind the old accounts
Nineteenth-century shore whaling brought together lookout work, whaleboat crews, processing sites, stores and coastal shipping. Kāpiti and Mana formed a connected operating area rather than a single station. The 1839 return of six establishments and 23 boats shows the scale of coordinated labour required in one season.
A dramatic change in a few years
Later snapshots show the industry contracting: seven boats at two stations in 1844, and three boats at two stations producing 29 tuns of oil in 1847. These figures come from different returns and do not count every station that ever existed. Nigel Prickett (2002), pp.83–97, assembles the underlying Dieffenbach and Wakefield references.