Soon May the Wellerman Come

DESCRIPTION: "There was a ship that put to sea, And the name of the ship was the Billy of Tea." The captain spots a whale and sets out to take it. The boats are lost, but the captain will not give up the pursuit even after forty days. The Wellerman visits with supply
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1969/70 (collected from Frank Woods, according to Colquhoun-NZ-Folksongs-SongOfAYoungCountry)
KEYWORDS: whaler ship hardtimes
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Colquhoun-NZ-Folksongs-SongOfAYoungCountry, p. 17, "Soon May the Wellerman Come" (1 text, 1 tune) (p. 10 in the 1972 edition)
Garland-FacesInTheFirelight-NZ, pp. 48, "(Soon May the Wellerman Come)" (1 excerpt)
DT, WELLRMAN*
RECORDINGS:
Tommy Wood, "Soon May the Wellerman Come" (on NZSongYngCntry)
NOTES [3493 words]: There is much that is mysterious about the origin of this song. The notes that follow will not be able to answer all the questions. What I have done is dig up as much information about the background to the song as I can possibly find, in case it helps future sleuths -- or just informs those who sing the song.
When this song became an odd internet hit at the end of 2020, a number of commentators observed a similarity to the tune of a 1971 recording, "The Lightning Tree," by The Settlers. This is only a year and a bit after Neil Colquhoun reported collecting the song from Frank Woods, and a year before he published it. The Tommy Wood recording is from about the same time. Colquhoun usually admitted to making up tunes when he did so, but could alleged source Frank Woods have heard the Settlers song?
It may not be the original tune, either -- Gibb Sahib on mudcat has argued cogently that the song is based on "The King of the Cannibal Islands."
Another curiosity: The tune recorded by Tommy Wood is not the same as in Song of a Young Country -- it is in major, not Dorian, although there are points of contact. Mike Harding, on mudcat.org, offered information of much relevance here. He spoke to Tommy Wood about it, who remembered, "I came across the poem in a book on NZ sailors and as a folk singer in those days was collecting songs to sing at the clubs. I had mentioned it to Neil Colquhoun, then a fellow club member, who knew about it and hummed a rough guide to the tune. It became my song at the time, singing it at various clubs around until finally singing it on the album 'Songs of a Young Country'...unfortunately I have not got the book anymore. All I can remember was stories connected to whaling, exploring NZ and immigration ships, containing personal letters of life on board these ships, including poems... black and white sketches of ships, sailors etc... it was fairly old then [late 1960s?]! My late wife Margaret was a librarian and she brought it home after it had been removed off the shelves... The Wellerman was an actual poem in the book but not quite in rhyme I had to adjust some of the words to fit the tune that Neil and I managed to put together."
Thus one suspects that after Wood and Colquhoun "agreed" on the tune, one or the other (I would guess Wood, since he didn't have Colquhoun's musical training) unconsciously converted the tune to a different mode.
So far, attempts to locate the book Woods saw have been unavailing. Not even Tod, which tried to assemble whaling songs pertaining to New Zealand, had a text.
So what can we learn from the song itself? For starters, What is a "Wellerman"? The answer is, an employee of the Weller Brothers....
NewZealandEncyclopedia p. 593: "WELLER BROTHERS, Edward, George, and Joseph, were among the earliest N[ew] Z[ealand]-based whalers, the first permanent European settlers on Otago Peninsula, and the first merchants to attempt to establish a trade between the South Island and England. They were recorded as having arrived in NZ from Sydney in 1831, aboard their ship carrying gunpowder and muskets, grog, whaling equipment, clothing and stores, and they quickly established whaling stations in the South Island and set up trade links between NZ and Sydney.... [Because of export duties and shipwrecks,] by the early 1840s they had abandoned Otago.... One of the Wellers, Joseph, had died in Otago in 1835, and Edward and George disappeared from NZ following the rejection of their land claims and were not heard of again." (According to Morton, p. 128, Joseph Weller died of consumption, "and, like Nelson, was taken home for burial in a cask of rum"; so also Tod, p. 26.)
(Morton, p. 309, quotes George Weller's explanation for the bankruptcy of the Weller Brothers: "the loss of the two Schooners [described below]... combined with the unsuccessful fishing [i.e. whaling] seasons, a loss by sheep [in Australian] to the extent of £4000[,] a pressure in the money market.")
The site of their initial landing has become a landmark, "Wellers' Rock" (Tod, p. 21); it can be located in Google Maps. It is apparently almost the only thing left of that original settlement (Morton, p. 234), even though it was one of the largest, if not the largest, European settlement in New Zealand at the time. In 1931, a plaque was erected on the spot to celebrate their centenary; Tod, p. 99. has a photo of it, with one of Edward Weller's descendants alongside, taken in 1981, and p. 104 has a close-up of the plaque.
The Weller Brothers operation was a Sydney-based company which ran a shore-based whaling syndicate. Since they were shore-based, they had no true whaling ships; the men had whaling boats, and went out to sea when they saw a whale near the shore. So the Wellerman came (presumably from Australia) to bring the sailors what they needed for their work.
My understanding is that it was very hard to leave the employ of the shore whalers (Morton, p. 243, quoting E. J. Wakefield: "Discipline on whaling stations was strict, 'a species of despotic authority, maintained both on shore and in the boats by the exertion of a strong will'"). This would explain the plot of this song, where the whalers could not escape the captain's obsession with the whale. (If whalers aboard ship were able to go ashore, they might desert, which was bad, or they might get drunk and come back and resist the captain's authority, which was worse. So the captains were extremely harsh; Rickert, pp. 60-61. And there was no other law; New Zealand had not yet become a British colony; Rickert, p. 61. This was significant in other ways; because New Zealand was not British territory, the Wellers were required to ship their oil to Sydney before sending it to Britain in order to avoid the high duties on foreign oil; Morten, p. 146.)
(However, I suspect captains worked harder to retain their whalers in Australia, where a man could go ashore and find a region settled by Europeans, than in New Zealand, where a landing might put them among Maori who were often not at all friendly to Europeans. The sailors might well be kept incommunicado, though; "their employers often prevented their letters reaching their relatives and friends in Australia in order to keep any news from the fisheries from reaching competitors in Sydney"; Morton, p. 238).
Rickard, pp. 57-58, reports, "In 1831, the Sydney firm of G. and E. Weller decided to enter the bay whaling business in New Zealand, and to that end bought a barque, the Lucy Ann, of 214 tons, from the New South Wales government. The Lucy Ann carried the stores for the enterprise to the place that had been selected, Otakou, on the east side of Otago Harbour." Some of her cargo was for the whalers; some was probably for trade with the Maoris. (Chapman-Cohen, p. 15, however dates the founding of the station to 1832 and says the first load of whale oil was sent to Sydney in November 1833. Tod, p. 21, says the founding date was 1831 but the exact date uncertain.)
In addition to whaling, the Wellers set up a store at Otakou, which would outlast the whaling station; they had "a reputation for fair prices and honest dealings" (Morton, p. 280).
Rickard, p. 58: "The Lucy Ann brought back a good cargo of timber and flax from this voyage, but actual whaling operations got off to a bad start. Early in 1832 an accidental fire at Otakou destroyed all the buildings of the whaling settlement, the conflagration being assisted by the explosion of a considerable quantity of the gunpowder that remained. As a result, the whole of the following whaling season was a complete loss. The Wellers, however, were not deterred, even by an attempt to burn the Lucy Ann as she lay at anchor in Sydney Harbour.... In May, Captain Worth sailed for Otakou with a whaling gang... to make a fresh start. On the return voyage, the Lucy Ann brought to Sydney the first cargo of Otago oil, 130 tuns of it, as well as seven tons of whalebone, one ton of flax, eight tons of potatoes and a cask of seal skins. There was considerable trouble with the Maoris in 1834, but otherwise the Otakou station proved for several years to be a very profitable investment, employing seventy-five to eighty men and twelve boats in peak years."
Incidentally, the Lucy Ann, although not a whaler at this time, would soon become one. She is famous enough to have a Wikipedia entry, because in 1842 she was the ship on which Herman Melville sailed on his second whaling voyage, in which he ended up being put off the ship for alleged mutiny; Forster, p. 131. In 1835, the Wellers authorized Captain Thomas Richards to take her whaling: "The 'Lucy Ann' provisioned and watered and in every respect fitted for a sperm whale voyage. I authorize you to take command of her and proceed on said voyage" (Tod, p. 27). Thus the Wellers' actual ship was a supply ship turned whaler, just like the Billy of Tea -- though she was supposed to hunt sperm whales, not right whales.
Morton, p. 70, quotes George Weller as saying there were 85 men employed at Otakou in 1835, "three fourths of which were Europeans" (he rest presumably being Maori). They eventually, but only briefly, established other stations (Tod, p. 26).
The Wellers were not just owners; they actively participated in the whaling. At least, "George Weller in his letters from Sydney requested that Edward leave the whaling to others" (Morton, p. 74). Nor did they confine their business entirely to whaling; they would carry other cargoes -- George Weller "traded in potatoes, flax, timber, and fish, as well as coopers' flags, whalebone, and whale oil," and at one time made inquiries about purchasing the preserved human heads that the Maori sometimes made of enemies they had killed! (Morton, p. 153).
Edward Weller even went semi-native; he married a Maori, Paparu, by whom he had a daughter Hana ("Fanny"), and when Paparu died, he married another Maori, Nikuru (Tod, pp. 27-29).
Keep in mind, however, that the Wellers' work was actual shore whaling; the Lucy Ann was not used as a whaler at first. Rather, she supplied the whalers. Later, they employed a ship they named the Joseph Weller to carry oil, but she apparently was a schooner (Morton, p. 80), so not especially suited to hunting whales. (She was, however, apparently the first ship built in Stewart Island and the first New Zealand ship registered in Australia -- a small ship of 49 tons -- Tod, p. 22 -- which would make her too small to be a whaler.) Perhaps part of the irony of the song is that the shore whalers, who were supposed to be supplied by the Wellers' ship, were instead supplying the ship from the shore.
The Wellers did send at least some true whalers to New Zealand, though, or at least ships capable of processing oil; the Dublin Packet, a schooner with "trying out" equipment for rendering oil as well as a couple of whaleboat crews, did visit on at least one occasion (Morton, p. 146).
New Zealand whaling had a season, and in the off-season the whalers had to do something with their time -- either stay at the shore station or head off for somewhere else such as Sydney. Some stations were better-kept than others in the off season. Of the Weller Brothers' station, Rickard, p. 94, reports, "Otakou was another station that had a rather squalid air about it. Dumond d'Urville saw near it two wretched taverns whose owners appeared to be doing very well from selling liquor of abysmally bad quality, not only to the whalers, but also to the Maoris, who flocked to spend their money as soon as they received it."
The Wellers' Otakou station hit its peak of production (310 tuns) in 1835; this was down to 213 tuns in 1838, and only 65 tuns the next year, then 14 in 1840; after bringing in just 10 in 1841, the operation was shut down (Rickard, p. 111; Tod, p. 89, says that word reached Otago on February 25, 1841, that the Wellers were out of business). Thus, if this song truly refers to Weller operations in New Zealand (rather than Australia), it must refer to the period 1831-1841. (On the other hand, the Wellers by that time had "bought" a great deal of land from the Maoris at absurdly low prices -- Tod, pp. 73-74 -- and were working on farming settlements. So they might have sent a ship to the settlements which were distracted by a whale.)
The Wellers were not the last whalers to leave New Zealand, but the rest gave up soon. By 1845, the right whales were gone from the vicinity -- and New Zealand became a British colony in 1840, which meant the whalers had to deal with more regulations, plus the Maori were raising the price of supplies, which made other ports less expensive places for captains to supply their ships (Morton, p. 17).
(This does not mean that the Wellers vanished completely, to be sure; Edward Weller in fact lived until 1893, when he was killed by a flood at his home in Maitland, Australia; Tod, p. 89.)
The fact that the right whales were hunted out does not mean that there were no whales around New Zealand; there were still humpback and finback whales. But these were not generally hunted, because they fought back harder than right whales and tended to sink when they died, so no oil would be recovered (Morton, pp. 26-27). Whereas the right whale was relatively easy to catch (it had a speed of about five knots; Morton, p. 31), didn't fight back much, and supplied an adequate amount of fairly good oil.
The fact that the Wellerman made a regular call, when there was only one New Zealand station, raises an interesting question: Was the Billy of Tea going in circles?
The song says that the Billy of Tea had four boats, and this is in fact typical of whalers in this period; the crews would have four "boatsteers" or "harpooners" (Rickard, p. 8) for the four boats they usually carried (Rickard, p. 9; Morton, p. 148). There is an interesting question: Usually the captain and mates would be in the boats, leading them to the whale. If *all* boats were lost, would the captain have survived to demand that the ship still follow the whale, and would there still be enough men to man and navigate the ship?
Also, what was the line tied to that the ship could follow the whale, and how could the line go slack? The standard line was only a thousand feet or so (though whaling boats would sometimes tie lines together to make them longer) -- and not particularly heavy, typically about an inch thick. In New Zealand waters it was likely made of linen, which was locally available, although hemp or manila was used elsewhere (Morton, p. 35).
The Wellers may have left New Zealand over land claims, but they probably would have left soon after anyway. The whales had already been largely fished out. Rickard, p. 83: "In the early years of bay whaling round New Zealand, twelve or thirteen tuns could be expected from a right while.... By the time Dieffenbach visited Te Awaiti in 1839, nine tuns was regarded as very good, and when Shortland spoke to Hughes, which was in 1843, the latter considered that five tuns was an average yield from one whale." In other words, they'd killed off all the big whales and were working their way down through the young ones; as had happened everywhere else, they were driving the local whales extinct.
A captain who insisted on following a whale is not an unknown phenomenon; "Some captains seem to have been obsessive whaling men, who could not resist the chase" (Morton, p. 74). Sadly, there is no source cited for this statement. But on pp. 77-78 Morton points out the number of whaling captains who stuck with the trade even though they were qualified for other nautical jobs and could have made more money; whaling really did seem to have some sort of special lure, strange as it seems to us now.
The men could be obsessive sometimes, too; according to Morton, pp. 75-76, most New Zealand whalers at this time were paid by the "lay system," which as I understand it consisted of a modified share system in which they were guaranteed their basic needs such as food, but most of their pay came from shares (a lower share, however, than a pure share system in which they had no guarantees). And the lay did not include tobacco or replacement clothes, so a dry voyage could still leave the whaling hands in debt. And they still got a payoff for taking more whales. So the crew would probably want to take any whales they could reasonably hope to pursue. The lay system would also explain the desire to desert: If a tour is lasting a long time and few whales are taken, then they would be in debt for whatever they bought beyond the lay and would have little expectation of a share. Desertion would be an easy way to avoid the debt (Morton, p. 76).
That demand for rum was high among Weller's men is likely. The usual drink among sailors and shore whalers at this time was generally rum, often of abysmal quality -- and shore whalers apparently went through more of it than those aboard ship, simply because they could have as much as they wanted at any time (Morton, p. 247), whereas those aboard whaling ships were limited to a standard ration until they reached port.
The use of the term "billy" is perhaps a dating hint, although not much of one. Ramson, p. 52, cites the first use of the term as from New Zealand in 1839: "[We] boiled the Billy and made some Tea out of tawa bark." The next entry, from 1849, is from Australia. Citations after that are fairly common. It looks as if the word was coined by the 1830s but didn't become common until the 1850s. That said, there is no reference to a ship called the Billy of Tea in the list of ship logs on pp. 346-357 of Morton or the index of ships on pp. 149-151 of Forster or the shorter lists of ships in the indices of Tod, etc. Not that that lists are complete -- and presumably you didn't expect the ship to be real anyway. But it's worth noting: Australia and New Zealand weren't building the whaling ships at the start of this period (they couldn't build ships that big, although that gradually changed); they came from Britain and the United States and France and other European countries. How would a ship in this era acquire such a thoroughly Australian or New Zealander name?
"Tonguing" and "Tonguer" is older; for this verb and noun (which referred to a man who cut blubber and was paid with the oil of the whale's tongue) see the notes to "Come All You Tonguers."
Another thing that occurs to me. This is just speculation, and I do not believe this is a direct source. But I wonder if the author of the original poem didn't have the story of another ship, the Henry Freeling, somewhere in his mind. She was a Weller Brothers ship (a 91-ton schooner, according to Ingram, pp. 13-14) that was eventually destroyed. "The Wellers were denied their insurance payment for the loss of the Henry Freeling, wrecked at Tautuki, 'she having deviated from her course, according to the Policy of Insurance'" (Morton, p. 227).
And she had interesting adventures even before she was lost. "The homeward voyage of the Henry Freeling, which commenced when she left Otago on 31 May 1837, was an eventful one of no less than 11 weeks. The hurricane force winds which had caused so much havoc along the Otago coast throughout the year caused the delay, and before reaching Sydney she was almost entirely out of provisions. When she finally made port, she was described as little more than a wreck, having lost her bowsprit. bulwarks, boats, etc. The insurers refused to pay out the claim because the ship deviated from the Otago-Sydney passage by calling at Port Cooper" (Tod, p. 34).
Thus, like the Billy of Tea, she left course, spent a very long time on a voyage, and eventually never came back. What's more, she might have been nicknamed the "Henry Free," which would sound a bit like "Billy of Tea." Her captain on her last voyage, according to Ingram, p. 14, was named "Fisher."
Her loss was followed not long after by the loss of another Weller Brothers cargo carrier, the Dublin Packet, in 1839, with the loss of several hands (Tod, p. 39; Ingram, p. 13). The insurance paid out on that one, but the combination of losses was a "tragic" one for the Wellers (Tod, p. 71) and was followed soon after by their abandonment of New Zealand.
Tod, pp. 108-123, lists all Europeans known to have settled at or visited Otago by 1848, plus some of the Maori. Might the author of this song be one of them? No way to tell; several of them must have been literate (the doctors, some of the storekeepers, the missionaries, the surveyors), but there is no indication that any of them wrote poetry.
For those who wish to find out more about the Wellers, Tod is the best book I've found so far. It has a big picture of Edward Weller on p. 20 and a smaller one of George on p. 22. Morton also has images of them facing p. 241, with a picture of Fanny Wells on the same page, and a picture of their Otakou station taken in the 1860s, long after it ceased to be used for whaling. - RBW
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