“Soon May the Wellerman Come“, also known as “Wellerman” or “The Wellerman“, is a folk song in ballad style first published in New Zealand in the 1970s. The song refers to the “wellermen”, pointing to supply ships owned by the Weller brothers, who were amongst the earliest European settlers of Otago.
In early a cover by Scottish singer Nathan Evans became a viral hit on the social media site TikTok, leading to a “social media craze” around sea shanties and maritime songs.
The history of whaling in New Zealand stretches from the late eighteenth century to In the British-born Weller brothers Edward, George and Joseph, who had immigrated to Sydney in founded a whaling station at Otakou near modern Dunedin in the South Island of New Zealand, seventeen years before Dunedin was established. Speaking at centennial celebrations in New Zealand’s Governor General Lord Bledisloe recalled how the Weller brothers had on their voyage to New Zealand “brought in the ‘Lucy Ann’ (the Weller brothers’ barque) a good deal of rum and a good deal of gunpowder…and some at least were rum characters”. From the Weller brothers sold provisions to whalers in New Zealand from their base at Otakou, which they had named “Otago” in approximation of the local Māori pronunciation. Their employees became known as “wellermen”. Unlike whaling in the Atlantic and northern Pacific, whalers in New Zealand practised shore-based whaling which required them to process the whale carcasses on land. The industry drew whalers to New Zealand from a diverse range of backgrounds encompassing not just the British Isles but also Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Pacific Islanders and Indigenous Australians. The whalers depended on good relations with the local Māori people and the whaling industry integrated Māori into the global economy and produced hundreds of intermarriages between whalers and local Māori, including Edward Weller himself, who was twice married to Māori women, thus linking the Wellers to one of the most prominent local Māori families, the Ellisons.
At its peak in the Otakou station was producing 310 tons of whale oil a year and became the centre of a network of seven stations that formed a highly profitable enterprise for the Wellers, employing as many as 85 people at Otago alone. From the Otakou base the Wellers branched out into industries as diverse as “timber, spars, flax, potatoes, dried fish, Māori artefacts, and even tattooed Māori heads which were in keen demand in Sydney”. However, given that the Colony of New Zealand would not be declared until 1840, the Wellers were treated as foreign traders and were affected by protectionist British import tariffs on whale oil. By the