98 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[July 21, 1906. 
WANG AMU MU WHALING STATION. 
A New Zealand Fish Story. 
BY ALLEN KELLY. 
If I did not have photographs to offer as 
proof, I might hesitate to put upon a fairly well- 
established reputation for veracity the strain of 
standing for the assertion that the business of 
catching whales—not baby whales, but big 
sixty-foot right whales—in nets is carried on 
in the South Pacific. 
The biggest fish stories ever told may be 
heard by the wanderer in southern seas, and 
some of the most amazing of them are literally 
true. This whale-netting yarn is not strictly a 
fish story, because a whale is not really a fish, 
and it is not the most startling of the collection 
in my South Sea note-book; but let it go as 
a fish story, and after I have compelled belief 
in it, I may have courage to tell the others. 
Maori lore is full of strange legends, in 
which myth and truth are so interwoven that no 
man can unravel them, and one of them is 
curiously suggestive of this most modern de¬ 
velopment of whale fishery. Many of these 
Maori legends have to do with a monster called 
“Taniwha,” which is usually described as a gi¬ 
gantic crocodile, although it has been many 
centuries since any of the Polynesian race can 
have had direct knowledge of the existence of 
such an animal. The Taniwha of Maori legend, 
however, is not a fixed type, but may be any 
sort of monstrous beast, reptile or marine 
creature of ferocious disposition and terrifying 
aspect, superstitiously feared and often half 
worshipped by the imaginative Polynesian. 
This is the tale of two Taniwahs, which were 
guardian monsters of two Maori tribes, one on 
the east coast and one on the west coast of the 
North Island of New Zealand, in ancient times. 
The Taniwha, living in the Bay of Islands, once 
went a-roving to see a bit of the world, and 
swam around the North Cape to the west coast, 
where he met the other Taniwha and had a fine 
time. The wandering Taniwha professed to be 
very grateful for the hospitality and kind at¬ 
tention shown to him, and when the time for 
him to return home arrived, he pressed the 
other to accompany him, promising to show 
him many interesting things and to make his 
visit a “continuous round of pleasure,” or per¬ 
haps “one grand sweet song.” The guileless 
and amiable West Coast Taniwha accepted the 
invitation, and away the two friends swam 
around the North Cape and down the east coast 
to the Bay of Islands. 
But the wandering Taniwha was a treacherous 
villain. He lured his unsuspecting guest to a 
place where the Maoris had spread a great net, 
SETTING THE WHALE NET. 
and the visitor was caught, pulled ashore and 
killed by the people, who made a great feast 
of his carcass. The most contemptuous insult 
a Maori could put upon an enemy was to bake 
and eat him, and of course the eating of a 
guardian Taniwha was a monstrous insult to his 
people. War ensued, and I believe the tribes 
ate each other up and passed out of history. 
Now whether that legend of the Taniwhas is 
as old as it is said to be, or is of recent origin 
and based upon some Maori story-teller’s ob¬ 
servation of the whale fishing at Wangamumu, 
is matter for speculation. If it is really an 
ancient tale as it stands, and not a modern evo¬ 
lution of folk lore, it is a strangely prophetic 
product of Maori imagination, for right where 
the Taniwha was caught in a net, the white man 
to-day nets whales on their way around the 
North Cape during the mating season. 
Wangamumu is a little bay on the east coast, 
a few miles south of a prominent cape, which 
juts out to the northeast and might easily be 
mistaken for the northeastern extremity of the 
iNorth Island. During May and June the 
Antarctic whale migrates north into warmer 
waters, and it seems probable that there is some 
set of currents around the headland of Wanga- 
mumu which deceives him into seeking a passage 
to the Tasman Sea by boring into the shore 
at that point. Whatever may be the cause, the 
fact is that schools of whales hug the shore and 
pass very close to a great jutting rock at 
Wangamumu. 
Straight out into the sea from the point of 
rocks is stretched the whale net, made of three- 
quarter inch wire rope in six-foot mesh, each 
mesh being formed of separate sections of rope 
attached to iron corner rings, taking the places 
of knots. The top edge of the net is held close 
to the surface by barrels serving as buoys. A 
whale cruising along the shore gets his head 
through a mesh, and instead of attempting to 
back out, he rushes forward and entangles him¬ 
self hopelessly in the net. One of the photo¬ 
graphs shows a whale rushing into the net and 
dragging the shoreward buoy through the water 
with much commotion. Close to the shore can 
be see 1 the disturbance of the surface caused 
by the dragging under of the shore end of the 
upper wire rope. 
From a lookout station on the top of the 
headland a watcher signals the approach of 
whales, and the boats then put off and lie in 
wait. An entangled whale carries away the net 
with his rush, but the great weight of the wire 
rope and the drag of a long line of buoys im¬ 
pede him, and instead of heading out to sea and 
going away at great speed with the whole out¬ 
fit, he thrashes about and soon gets fins and 
flukes entangled, when the boat approaches and 
the whalers finish the business with harpoon 
and lance, as in the old days. 
For this work the old-style whale boat is 
used, but besides netting whales close to shore, 
the men of Wangamumu hunt them in the open 
sea, and in that branch of their business they 
use power launches and harpoon guns, although 
they do not hesitate to put off in open boats, 
when a school of whales is sighted, attack with 
hand-harpoons in the old way, and take a tow 
to sea at the end of a hundred fathoms of line, 
as did the men of New Bedford and Nantucket 
in the days that have gone. 
The rest of this fish story has to do with the 
towing ashore of the kill, the cutting up and- 
trying out, and the reduction of bone and refuse 
to fertilizer and fuel. That is the prosaic part 
of the Wangamumu whale fishery, and it is ac- 
ENTANGLED WHALE DIVING. 
