Heaphy recalls the Cook Strait whaling network
Charles Heaphy, writing in 1879 about his September 1839 arrival aboard the Tory, remembered prosperous whaling stations at Port Underwood, Tory Channel and Kāpiti. He described boats and shore crews watching winter breeding-season whales, and the use of tides to tow captured whales to vessels or shore stations. This is a later first-person recollection, not a contemporaneous 1839 publication.
Heaphy and the whaling coast
Charles Heaphy’s recollections belong to the documentary world of visiting observers who saw the Cook Strait settlements during rapid change. Such accounts can preserve details of movement and maritime work absent from production returns.
A witness, not a complete inventory
An observer’s description of stations or boats records what that person saw or later remembered; it does not by itself count every operation on Kāpiti and Mana.
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