Alexander Fraser 1840 station accounts
A station account in pounds and provisions
Alexander Fraser’s Kāpiti station account for 1840 records £394 in pork and £436 in flour. It also records supplies to local Māori: 25 pairs of blankets, two kegs of tobacco and a hogshead of spirits, valued at more than £88. These entries show how the station operated as a trading place as well as a whaling enterprise.
Source: Kāpiti – Blood, Oil and Bone, page 11, drawing on the Fraser station accounts.
What the station accounts reveal
The figures in Alexander Fraser’s 1840 station account put the scale of provisioning into view: £394 recorded for pork and £436 for flour. The same record includes 25 pairs of blankets, two kegs of tobacco and a hogshead of spirits supplied to local Māori, together valued at more than £88.
These were not simply incidental purchases. A shore-whaling station depended on food, labour, boats, storage and trading relationships. Account books preserve the everyday transactions that are often absent from dramatic descriptions of whale hunts. The entries also place Māori within the documented economy of the station.
The account book belongs beside Fraser’s other records and the archaeological evidence from Long Point. Each tells a different part of the story: the financial transactions, the people involved and the physical traces left on the coast.
Source: Whale Song, Kāpiti – Blood, Oil and Bone (2025), p. 11, citing the Fraser station accounts.
Whale Song reports that Fraser’s Kāpiti station account for 1840 lists £394 pork, £436 flour, and supplies to local Māori of 25 blanket pairs, two kegs tobacco and a hogshead of spirits, valued at more than £88.
Pork, flour and a coastal supply economy
Alexander Fraser’s 1840 accounts, as presented in Kāpiti – Blood, Oil and Bone (2025), p.11, record £394 for pork and £436 for flour. These are striking figures because they reveal the scale of provisioning required to keep whaling boats and their associated settlements operating.
Goods moving in more than one direction
The same account lists 25 pairs of blankets, two kegs of tobacco and a hogshead of spirits supplied to Māori, valued together at more than £88. The record shows trade and exchange; it does not identify the individual Māori recipients. The financial entries should be read alongside the separate records of Fraser’s Long Point whaling production.
What the yearly returns reveal
Alexander Fraser’s Long Point station accounts preserve a rare sequence of production figures. The 1840 return recorded five boats, forty-four tuns of oil and fifty-seven hundredweight of bone. In 1841, six boats were associated with 172 tuns of oil and eight tons of bone. In 1842, the figures fell to seven tuns of oil and seven hundredweight of bone. The contrast shows how a whaling station’s fortunes could change rapidly, but it should not be read as a complete account of every household or worker connected with the station.
Further reading: Nigel Prickett, The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling (2002), Kāpiti–Mana section, pp. 83–97.
Explore connected books
Explore connected history
- Alexander Fraser testifies about Kāpiti whaling contracts
- Fraser’s Long Point accounts reveal workforce turnover
- Fraser brothers remembered in Wellington street-name history
- Fraser brothers’ later property transactions
- Fraser’s Long Point station: an account book opens a lost world
- A whaling boom and a sudden collapse at Long Point
- Kāpiti — Blood, Oil and Bone
Follow this history into other books
Continue with these connected accounts. Each opens a separate book with its own evidence and perspective.
