Soon May the Wellerman Come
On September 25, 1831, the barque Lucy Ann sailed from Sydney under the command of Captain Owen, bound for Otago Harbour, New Zealand. She carried the supplies for the Weller brothers’ new whaling establishment, and her cargo combined “the arts of peace and war to a charming degree”: 6 cases of muskets, 10 barrels and 104 half barrels of gunpowder, iron boilers, casks of beef, whaling gear and line, a pipe of gin, 2 puncheons of rum, 5 kegs of tobacco, and stores. The ammunition was probably for trade with the Maori; the alcohol was for the whalers.
The Weller brothers, George, Edward, and Joseph Brooks, ran their company from Sydney. Their Otago station would become a major operation, but not without setbacks. In early 1832, a fire destroyed about 80 houses and the entire whaling establishment, with a quantity of gunpowder exploding in the blaze. Someone even attempted to burn the Lucy Ann herself while she sat in Sydney Cove that May. It was not until November 1833 that the Lucy Ann brought back the first whale oil from Otago: 130 tuns, with 7 tons of whalebone. Captain Worth reported that whales were so plentiful that twice the cargo could have been taken, had the ship only had enough casks.
The Weller brothers and their provisions ships are remembered in Soon May The Wellerman Come, where the crew of the Billy o’ Tea waits for the “Wellerman” to bring “sugar and tea and rum.” The firm’s fortunes declined with the whale population, and George Weller filed for bankruptcy in Sydney in February 1841. The details above are drawn from Robert McNab’s extraordinarily thorough The Old Whaling Days: A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830 to 1840 (1913).
