Waiorua: a large working settlement in decline
Gilfillan’s 1844 drawing, later copied by Bowring, depicts a shore settlement extending roughly 200 metres and up to 150 metres inland with as many as 35 buildings. Prickett reports owner Gillett in contemporary whaling statistics: 1844 five boats, 40 men, 140 tuns oil, five tons bone; 1845 four boats, 43 men, 90 tuns, three tons bone; 1846 four boats, 40 men, 50 tuns, approximately 2½ tons bone; 1847 two boats, 16 men, 19 tuns, one ton bone. August 1846 observer Power estimated 50–60 Europeans. These are different measurements at different dates, not an exact population census.
Waiorua and the changing centre of whaling
Waiorua, at the northern end of Kāpiti Island, became the district’s leading producer after the strong 1841 season at Long Point. Nigel Prickett identifies Robert “Jellit” as running the foremost Kāpiti station in the mid-1840s, and suggests experienced men may have followed him from Long Point.
This is a story of movement between stations as well as declining whale numbers. Skilled headsmen and boat crews could shift to a more promising station, leaving another operation with boats and equipment but much reduced output. The proposed Long Point–Waiorua transfer remains Prickett’s interpretation rather than a complete contemporary crew list. Source: Prickett (2002), pp. 84, 86.
Waiorua: a settlement visible in an 1844 drawing
Waiorua lay at the north-eastern end of Kāpiti Island. In an 1844 drawing by J. A. Gilfillan, the whaling settlement extends roughly 200 metres along the shore and as much as 150 metres inland on both sides of a stream. Prickett counts as many as 35 huts and other buildings in the image. Sheerlegs are shown on the southern part of the beach, evidence of the equipment used to handle heavy material.
Prickett cautions that later farming and holiday houses had destroyed or obscured much of the site by the time of archaeological recording. The absence of a visible feature today therefore does not establish that it never existed. A try-pot was recorded by Wellington Archaeological Society visitors in 1972; Prickett visited in 1982.
The image and the archaeology illuminate different periods in the site’s history. The drawing documents the working settlement in 1844; the later survey records what remained or could still be recognised. This is why historical pictures should be captioned as drawings rather than presented as contemporary photographs.
Source: Nigel Prickett, The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling (2002), chapter 9, pp. 83–96; see the relevant station section and its cited contemporary records. Interpretations are attributed above.
Waiorua and the changing station economy
Waiorua belongs to the later history of Kāpiti whaling and the movement of station personnel and resources. Prickett’s synthesis distinguishes its documented whaling use from earlier land-claim evidence that is harder to interpret. As with Long Point and Tokomapuna, the task is to connect particular dated sources to the site, rather than projecting the most productive years of the wider fishery onto every station. Surviving trypot evidence helps make the activity tangible.
Evidence of a working settlement
At Waiorua, Te Kahuoterangi Simcox recorded about twenty hearths in 1910, while Prickett’s 1982 investigation identified nine surviving remains. Among the features discussed was a two-bay try-pot stand with openings of approximately 900 and 1,200 millimetres. Differences between the counts reflect different observations at different times; they should not be treated as a precise population or production census.
Waiorua and the later returns
Prickett describes Waiorua as important later in the shore-whaling period, after Tokomapuna’s prominence in 1839 and Long Point’s in 1841. That sequence is comparative; it should not be mistaken for evidence that only one station operated in each year.
Source: Nigel Prickett, “The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling” (2002), pp. 83–97.
Explore connected books
Explore connected history
- Waiorua’s earlier land claim remains ambiguous
- A whaling boom and a sudden collapse at Long Point
- Fraser’s Long Point accounts reveal workforce turnover
- Prickett national archaeological inventory
- Early offshore whaling at Kāpiti
- Korohiwa: a drowning, a proposed transfer and Wilson’s crew
- Long Point: a workforce and a shifting economy
- Tokomapuna: Evans’s station and an unresolved date conflict
- Taepiro: whaling attribution withdrawn by its original researcher
- Wharekohu: Mayhew’s landholding is not proof of a whaling station
- The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling — Nigel Prickett (2002)
Follow this history into other books
Continue with these connected accounts. Each opens a separate book with its own evidence and perspective.
Inside the record: Waiorua, 1844–1847
On the north-eastern shore of Kāpiti Island, Waiorua was not simply a beach where boats landed. It was a settlement with buildings, work areas, a shore-based processing operation and an economy tied to the seasonal pursuit of whales. An 1844 drawing by J. A. Gilfillan, described by archaeologist Nigel Prickett, shows a community spread along the shoreline. The later archaeological record is more fragmentary: subsequent land use has obscured or removed much of what once stood here.
Prickett reproduces annual returns published in The New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Straits Guardian. These figures are unusually useful because they put labour, equipment and output alongside one another. They do not, however, name every worker or give the number of whales killed.
| Season | Boats | Men | Oil (tuns) | Whalebone (tons) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1844 | 5 | 40 | 140 | 5 |
| 1845 | 4 | 43 | 90 | 3 |
| 1846 | 4 | 40 | 50 | 2½ |
| 1847 | 2 | 16 | 19 | 1 |
The decline is visible across all four measures, but not at the same pace. Between 1844 and 1847, reported oil production fell by approximately 86.4%; the boat complement fell from five to two, and the recorded workforce from forty to sixteen. These are station returns, not a count of whales or a census of the whole settlement.
Who ran the station?
The published returns identify the station owner as Gillett. Prickett also discusses Robert Jellit, recorded as a headsman at Fraser’s Long Point in 1840 and 1841 but absent from that station’s 1842 headsmen list. Prickett suggests that departures from Long Point may have involved a move to Waiorua. This is a historical hypothesis, not a documented list of transferred men; the similarity of the names Gillett and Jellit must not be treated as proof of identity.
The people behind the numbers
A report of a visit in August 1846 described fifty or sixty Europeans at Waiorua and called it the largest station in New Zealand at the time (Power 1849, cited by Prickett). The annual table records forty men for that year. The figures may describe different populations or counting methods. Neither can be used to erase Māori labour, trade, land relationships or the presence of families, whose histories require evidence beyond a colonial industrial return.
What the record does not tell us
Oil yields varied between individual whales. The surviving figures record production rather than a complete catch-by-catch account, vessel cargo ledger or crew roll; they also leave Waiorua’s closing date uncertain.
Source and status: Nigel Prickett, The Archaeology of New Zealand Shore Whaling (2002), pp. 95–97, especially Table 23, drawing on contemporary newspaper returns and Power (1849). Table values checked against the supplied PDF; original nineteenth-century newspaper pages remain to be independently collated.