Seals of friendship

Far from the rogues depicted by history, the sealers who arrived in southern New Zealand two centuries ago integrated well with tangata whenua.

- SALLY BLUNDELL

It was a romantic story, a fairy tale - a captain and a Māori princess living on a mystical faraway island.

“It’s a well-known trope,” says Ngāi Tahu researcher Helen Brown. “I mean, everyone's tangata pora were captains and everyone's tipuna Māori were princesses.”

But in this case it was true. Brown's tangata pora (boat people) ancestor was Robert Brown, born in Sydney to a convict mother who died when he was young. Recent research suggests he was apprenticed into a shipyard and moved up the ranks to a mariner position. In New Zealand, as captain of the sealing ship Glory, he formed a relationship with Te Wharerimu (Kāi Te Atawhuia, Kāi Tahu), the daughter of rangatira Tāpui and Pitoetoe. From the 1820s, the couple lived together on Whenua Hou/Codfish Island, off the west coast of Rakiura/Stewart Island.

These early Māori-Pākehā relationships were strategic. Sealers had recognisable skills, such as boatbuilding and carpentry, as well as access to European goods and technology. And intermarriage even before the arrival of Europeans had long been used by Ngāi Tahu as a way of creating and consolidating political ties.

For the sealers, intermarriage offered protection and access to land through their Māori wives.

And love? “The evidence suggests love may have been a factor, absolutely,” says Brown. “Wharerimu and Robert had five children and stayed together until he died from drowning - that speaks to me of commitment. And there’s a waiata aroha, a love song and lament, written by Wharerimu, presumably after he died. It’s in old te reo, so it's tricky to translate with certainty, but in it she expresses her pain and the agony of his loss.”

Romance does not feature highly in the stories of the estimated 750 young men who arrived in the southern South Island between 1780 and 1848 to procure seal skins for a growing global trade.