Whaling remains at Te Kahu-o-te-rangi and Rangatira Point
DOC identifies Te Kahu-o-te-rangi on Kāpiti Island as a historic whaling-station site and records nineteenth-century trypots at Rangatira Point. These places connect the historical record with surviving physical evidence. They should be linked to the detailed archaeological work of Nigel Prickett and to Whale Song’s historic station map.
Stone evidence on two working shores
At Te Kahuoterangi, Te Kahuoterangi Simcox recorded approximately twenty hearths in 1910; Nigel Prickett identified nine surviving examples during his 1982 investigation. A two-bay trypot stand, with spaces around 900 and 1,200 millimetres across, is particularly tangible evidence of whale-oil processing. Rangatira or Long Point offers a complementary picture: a station known through Fraser’s accounts and changing production figures. Together the sites show how written economic records and surviving stonework illuminate different parts of the same industry.
What the surviving stonework tells us
The shore-whaling landscape contains different kinds of evidence: stone tryworks, huts, landing places and the documentary records of vessels and crews. At Te Kahuoterangi, Te Kahuoterangi Simcox counted twenty hearths in 1910, whereas Nigel Prickett documented nine surviving examples in 1982. The comparison does not mean the station employed twenty boats or twenty crews; a hearth is an archaeological feature, not a direct census of workers. Prickett also described a two-bay try-pot stand, with bays approximately 900 and 1,200 millimetres across. Such features help reconstruct how oil was rendered, even where names and dates remain uncertain.
Further reading: Nigel Prickett, The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling (2002), Kāpiti–Mana section, pp. 83–97.
Explore connected books
Explore connected history
- Te Kahu-o-te-rangi: surviving tryworks and settlement traces
- A whaling boom and a sudden collapse at Long Point
- Archaeologist Nigel Prickett surveys Kāpiti whaling remains
- Fraser’s Long Point accounts reveal workforce turnover
- Tokomapuna: the physical remains of Tommy Evans’s station
- Puketapu ki Paraparaumu — History and Living Connections
- The archaeology of New Zealand shore whaling
- Waikanae: Report on Te Ātiawa/Ngāti Awa Claims
- Three sperm whales at Paekākāriki, 1996
Follow this history into other books
Continue with these connected accounts. Each opens a separate book with its own evidence and perspective.