Fraser’s Long Point accounts reveal workforce turnover
Catch figures can make the shore-whaling era seem like a story of oil and bone alone. Fraser’s surviving Long Point accounts reveal a working community: headsmen, pulling hands, tonguers, coopers, carpenters and clerks, recorded by name in the source discussed by archaeologist Nigel Prickett.
The people inside the account book
The changing workforce matters because output at the station rose sharply in 1841 and fell in 1842. Prickett proposes that the movement of experienced workers, possibly towards Waiorua and Robert Jellit, may be part of the explanation. The material reviewed here does not establish a definitive roster of transferred workers.
For the wider chronology and production totals, visit the connected Long Point books. The complete original discussion, including all its historical details and references, remains available below.
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Nigel Prickett reports that the surviving Long Point account book lists named headsmen, pulling hands, tonguers, coopers, carpenters and clerks. Production changed from 44 tuns of oil in 1840 to 172 in 1841 and seven in 1842. Prickett associates the shifts with changes in personnel and suggests that Robert Jellit may have moved experienced workers to Waiorua. These are powerful clues for reconstructing working lives, but the proposed transfer of workers is an interpretation, not a documented roster in the material examined here.
The story
Long Point was the whaling station at Rangatira Point, a low triangular projection on the eastern side of Kāpiti Island. Charles Heaphy’s 1839 coastal profile names Long Point and marks a station at nearby Tokomapuna, but not yet at Long Point.
Alexander Fraser’s account book records the Long Point operation from 1840 to 1842. It describes the cost of establishing the station, shipping goods to and from Sydney, and payments to headsmen, pulling hands, tonguers, coopers, carpenters and clerks.
The station’s six boats produced 172 tuns of oil and eight tons of whalebone in 1841. In 1842, with new headsmen and a changed workforce, production dropped to seven tuns of oil and seven hundredweight of whalebone. These figures reveal the rapid fortunes of a shore-whaling enterprise.
Historical source: Nigel Prickett, The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling (2002), Kāpiti chapter, pp. 83–97; drawing on Dieffenbach, Wakefield, contemporary station records and archaeological surveys.
The account book and its changing crews
Fraser’s Long Point records document a remarkable swing: five boats and 44 tuns of oil in 1840; six boats and 172 tuns in 1841; then only seven tuns in 1842. The 1840 return also lists 57 hundredweight of baleen, and the 1841 return eight tons. These are not merely abstract figures: the increased boat count implies changes in equipment, labour and station demands. The collapse the following year warns against treating one successful season as a permanent measure of the site’s output.
The accounts and their limits
Fraser’s Long Point records identify changes in boats, catches and personnel. The possibility that Robert “Jellit” subsequently worked at Waiorua is a scholarly inference, not an established transfer documented in a surviving employment contract.
Source: Nigel Prickett, “The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling” (2002), pp. 83–97.
Explore connected books
Explore connected history
- A whaling boom and a sudden collapse at Long Point
- Long Point: a workforce and a shifting economy
- Fraser’s Long Point station: an account book opens a lost world
- Prickett national archaeological inventory
- Captain Charles Bayley Whaling Master 1813 1875
- Eleven ships off Kāpiti in 1837
- Alexander Fraser 1840 station accounts
- Wallaby crew absconded at Kāpiti
- Wallaby travelled between Kāpiti and southern ports
- Wallaby 1842 right-whale catch
- Fortitude 1843 return
- Charles Bayley and Wallaby at Kāpiti in 1842
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Continue with these connected accounts. Each opens a separate book with its own evidence and perspective.
