Kōrero: Whaling

This watercolour by Alfred John Cooper shows whalers hauling the blubber off a beached whale at Mōhaka Beach, which is 20 kilometres south-west of Wairoa. During the 1840s shore-based whaling spread up the east coast of the North and South islands, and continued fitfully in Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne until the 1860s.