Whaling Stations.

The whalers seem to have come to the Bay in the late 'thirties, and when they arrived they found the bulk of the natives settled round the northern shores, between the Wairoa River and Mahia, whither they had migrated after some rather disastrous raids at the Heretaunga by Taupo and Waikato tribes. Whaling stations were established at Mahia, Waikokopu, Cape Kidnappers, Wairoa, and other places. In 1847 there were seventeen five-oared boats in the Bay, employing over 120 men. In that year £3000 worth of oil and £700 worth of whalebone was taken by these Bay stations. These fellows lived a care-free, devil-may-care life, drinking and gambling, without any check whatever, and it is said that more died from the effects of drink than from the accidents of their calling, hazardous as it was.

These whalers were naturally a wild lot, just as they were at half a dozen other places round the coast. "The New Zealand Spectator," writing in 1850 about a murderer who had escaped said, "He is trying to escape to Hawke's Bay, on the East Coast, which seems the Alsatia of the colony, where all disorderly and desperate characters resort to be out of reach of the law." We read that in 1847 a coastal trading vessel "was plundered near Waikokopu of goods and money by white men connected with the whaling stations." Other disreputable doings are also on record and the missionary Colenso seems to have had a busy time trying to keep his native flock from being utterly contaminated by this white flotsam.