Long Point: a workforce and a shifting economy
Long Point was part of a wider commercial network, not an isolated camp. Fraser’s records connect the station’s working crews to equipment, stores and shipping associated with Sydney, as well as the local business of processing whales on Kāpiti Island.
A shore station connected to a wider economy
The account book follows three contrasting seasons between 1840 and 1842. Its details are valuable not just for production figures but for the people and supplies that made the operation possible. The proposed movement of workers to Waiorua remains a hypothesis, not an established fact.
Explore the original full account below for the detailed figures, named roles, distinctions between sources and historical qualifications.
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Fraser’s Long Point station accounts record named headsmen, pulling hands, tonguers, coopers, carpenters and clerks, as well as equipment, Sydney shipping and stores. Production: 1840 five boats, 44 tuns oil and 57 cwt bone; 1841 six boats, 172 tuns oil and eight tons bone; 1842 seven tuns oil and seven cwt bone. Thomas Evans is identified as a headsman in 1841; Robert Jellit appears in the earlier workforce. Suggested movement of workers to Waiorua is a hypothesis until the ledger is examined.
Long Point: three seasons of dramatic change
Rangatira Point, on the eastern side of Kāpiti Island, was known to nineteenth-century whalers as Long Point. Charles Heaphy’s 1839 coastal profile named Long Point but marked a station at nearby Tokomapuna rather than on the point itself. Nigel Prickett uses that distinction to suggest the Long Point operation had not yet begun when Heaphy made his drawing.
Alexander Fraser’s account book covers the 1840, 1841 and 1842 seasons. It is exceptional because it records much more than the catch: shipping costs between the station and Sydney, equipment and stores, and payments to named headsmen, pulling hands, tonguers, coopers, carpenters and clerks. The surviving record makes the station a window into the everyday economics and labour of early shore whaling.
In 1840 five boats produced 44 tuns of oil and 57 hundredweight of whalebone. In 1841 six boats produced 172 tuns of oil and eight tons of whalebone. The 1841 accounts also introduce new headsmen, including Thomas Evans. Prickett suggests this may reflect the closure of Evans’s Tokomapuna station and a movement of skilled labour between neighbouring operations.
The third season was a sharp reversal. All three headsmen were new in 1842, and production fell to seven tuns of oil and seven hundredweight of whalebone. Robert “Jellit” had departed; Prickett proposes he may have taken experienced men to Waiorua, which became Kāpiti’s leading station later in the decade. That workforce transfer remains an interpretation, not a documented roster of departures.
When James Cowan visited in 1905, he referred to old whaling-station remains at Rangatira Point without describing them. Prickett’s 1982 inspection noted vegetation obscuring the site and Māori occupation pits; the two trypots near the north corner might have been moved from Tokomapuna. Source: Prickett (2002), p. 86; Fraser account-book manuscript and other sources cited there.
Long Point: three seasons in sharp contrast
Alexander Fraser’s Sydney-linked operation at Long Point connected the island to wider trade. In 1840 five boats produced 44 tuns of oil and 57 hundredweight of baleen. In 1841 six boats produced 172 tuns of oil and eight tons of baleen. The 1842 return fell to seven tuns of oil and seven hundredweight of baleen. These dated snapshots do not explain the decline by themselves, but they show why a station’s fortunes cannot be represented by a single annual total.
Explore connected books
Explore connected history
- Fraser’s Long Point accounts reveal workforce turnover
- A whaling boom and a sudden collapse at Long Point
- Fraser’s Long Point station: an account book opens a lost world
- Four vessels at Long Point and the loss of John Dunscombe
- Prickett national archaeological inventory
- Early offshore whaling at Kāpiti
- Korohiwa: a drowning, a proposed transfer and Wilson’s crew
- Tokomapuna: Evans’s station and an unresolved date conflict
- Waiorua: a large working settlement in decline
- Taepiro: whaling attribution withdrawn by its original researcher
- Wharekohu: Mayhew’s landholding is not proof of a whaling station
- Waiorua’s earlier land claim remains ambiguous
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Continue with these connected accounts. Each opens a separate book with its own evidence and perspective.