xiv SOUTHERN WHALE FISHERIES 205 



knowledge of these animals, very few specimens 1 having been 

 preserved in museums, and still fewer accurate descriptions 

 and drawings have been made of recently killed individuals, 

 notwithstanding the hundreds of thousands which have been 

 slaughtered from British and American ships during the present 

 century. Just as its northern representative approached the 

 coasts during the winter, and left for the open seas in the 

 summer months, so these southern whales resorted to the bays 

 and inlets of the Cape of Good Hope, Australia, and New 

 Zealand during the southern winter (May to October), and 

 departed for higher latitudes during the remainder of the 

 year. 



Though certain numbers of the southern right whales were 

 caught in the open sea by American or Colonial ships engaged 

 mainly in the sperm whale fishery, the principal fishery at 

 one time, as remunerative to those who pursued it as it was 

 destructive to the whales, was carried on from the shore, at 

 first at the Cape, then in Australia and Tasmania, and more 

 recently in New Zealand. Of the latter we have very detailed 

 accounts in many contemporary works, Wakefield, Dieffenbach, 

 and others, and a good epitome of its history will be found in 

 Sherrin's Handbook of the Fishery of New Zealand (1886). 

 Whaling vessels from America and England were in the habit 

 of visiting the New Zealand seas for the purposes of their 

 trade ever since the beginning of the century, but the first 

 shore station was established in 1 8 2 7 at Preservation Inlet, near 

 the south end of the Middle Island, and in a few years there 

 were twelve stations between that place and Banks Peninsula. 

 In 1833 Messrs. G-. and E. Weller, merchants, of Sydney, 

 founded a whaling establishment at Otago, which was for a 

 short time the most successful and important of any on the coast. 

 In 1834 the whales caught yielded 310 tons of oil, besides 

 bone, and for several years there were on this station from 

 seventy-five to eighty Europeans constantly employed. In 1 8 4 

 the oil fell off to fourteen tons, and the fishery was abandoned. 

 The value of "black oil" at this time was 8 to 12 a ton 



1 The skeleton is almost the only part of a whale which can be satisfactorily 

 preserved, but life-sized models of the principal species will soon be exhibited in 

 the British Natural History Museum. 



