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OK, hands up who has been listening to sea shanties? Specifically this one? Cos I was intrigued by the line about the Wellerman bringing sugar, tea and rum to the whalers. It rang instant TRIANGULAR TRADE alarm bells, so I did not expect what I found... https://twitter.com/ProfGemmell/status/1347670632280977411
I thought I might be looking for a specific ship called the Wellerman, but a v quick Google told me that there was a company out of Sydney, Aus called the Weller Company, and any company rep was thus called a Wellerman. So I looked up the company, and it was run by the Weller
brothers, who were from a wealthy British family. Edward and Joseph went to Sydney in 1829, and most of the family moved out to Sydney, over a period of years. In 1831 the Weller brothers Edward & Joseph moved from Sydney to Otago and ran a whaling, timber, flax etc trading co.
throughout NZ. But they first landed on Otago Peninsula, at Te Umu Kuri, a place now know as Weller's Rock. This all got a lot more local than I expected! They built a village of 80-odd huts that eventually merged with the Māori village to become present-day Otakou.
When Joseph died of TB in 1835 he was shipped back to Sydney in a "puncheon of rum" (that's a 500 litre barrel, I'm told). Weller's Rock was undergoing protection from degradation last year https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/wellers-rock-be-protected
So the Wellers are considered to have founded Otago (Otakou) harbour 17 years before the Scottish settlers got here. And the whalers on our ship in the sea shanty, waiting for the resupply of slave-trade goods were probably floating around in the Southern Ocean somewhere.
Intriguingly, there is shipwreck in Australia of the Joseph Weller, wrecked in 1837 in New South Wales. It's not a publicly accessible database though so I can't tell for sure if it's named after our Joseph Weller. Bet it was though eh.
I'm bored, so I'm continuing down this rabbit hole. When Edward Weller found things getting too difficult in Otakou, he went back to Oz, leaving his whaling interests in the hands of Charles Schultze & Octavius Harwood. Harwood had been an employee of Weller. Who was Charles?
He was married, as it turns out, to Ann Weller, sister of Edward, George and Joseph. If someone would like to change the Wikipedia page title to Weller family I kinda think she deserves a mention...
He may be the same Charles Schultze as owned a flour mill in Kaiwharawhara Wellington, and was a Liberal candidate in 1854. The Turnbull library have his dates as 1818–1879. Whereas the Hocken Collections have Charles Schultze & Harwood's partnership agreement attached to...
Schultze 1813–1879. Both entries have middle name William. Do we think they are the same person and someone misread a 3 for an 8, or vice versa?
Oh, just realised this 1966 encyclopedia entry refers to the Wellers' ships the Dublin Packet, the Joseph Weller and the Lucy Ann https://teara.govt.nz/en/1966/weller-brothers-edward-george-and-joseph although I realise that the brother's father was also Joseph, so it is possible it was named after him.
OMG I hope you stuck with me. I thought I'd look the ships up in the Turnbull catalogue. Nothing for Dublin Packet, nothing for Joseph Weller, but Lucy Ann has an entry mentioning mutiny in Tahiti. Hmm...
So I find Lucy Ann has her own Wikipedia page. She was built in Canada in 1810 and brought to Oz in 1827. She was bought by the govt and transported descendants of the Bounty mutineers from Pitcairn Island to Tahiti in 1830. She was sold to the Wellers in 1831, who made 11
deep-sea whaling voyages from Sydney between 1835 and 1852. One of the crewmen who served aboard, in 1842, was American seaman Herman Melville, who later "wrote about his time aboard". So there you have it. From a sea shanty to Moby Dick via New Zealand! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Ann_(1810_ship)
Someone else looked into the “tonguing” part so I didn’t have to 
https://twitter.com/saniac/status/1347831250816434176?s=21 https://twitter.com/saniac/status/1347831250816434176
https://twitter.com/saniac/status/1347831250816434176?s=21 https://twitter.com/saniac/status/1347831250816434176
Continues because I don't know when to stop. https://twitter.com/KnitMeAThneed/status/1348090132323127297?s=20
AND AGAIN clearly I have no life https://twitter.com/KnitMeAThneed/status/1350262350113239045?s=20
