The changing names of the whaling islands
A May 1840 letter distinguishes Motungarara as Lewis’s Island, another island associated with Mayhew, and Evans’s Island. It describes sheltered anchorages, six whaleboats fitted out at Evans’s, four at Lewis’s and a store on Mayhew’s island. It also estimates fourteen or fifteen more boats preparing at stations on Kāpiti itself. These figures are the correspondent’s observations and expectations, not a verified census.
A landscape with several sets of names
The small islands around Kāpiti appear in Māori histories, colonial journals, navigational charts and archaeological reports, sometimes under different spellings or labels. A historical name may refer to an island, a point of land, a landing place or a station rather than a fixed modern administrative unit. Matching those references requires the neighbouring features and the date of the source. Motungarara, Tahoramaurea and Tokomapuna are especially important because their physical remains connect names on paper with the sites where whalers worked.
Explore connected books
Explore connected history
- A visitor describes the three small islands and their whaling crews
- Four Europeans reported drowned off Mana
- Te Wai-o-Rongomai and Te Puna-o-Rongomai
- Waikanae naming traditions
- Whale Song, Kāpiti — Blood, Oil and Bone (2025)
- Puketapu ki Paraparaumu — History and Living Connections
- Modern whaling and whale watching
- Six stations, twenty-three boats and the whaling boom
- Fraser’s Long Point station: an account book opens a lost world
- A whaling boom and a sudden collapse at Long Point
- Kāpiti whaling on credit: Antonio and Fitzherbert in court