Otago Harbour - History

History

The existence of the harbour was guessed by Captain Cook when he was off what is now the Dunedin Pacific coast in 1770. It is not known when the first Europeans entered but it was some time 'long before' 1810, according to the Creed manuscript discovered in 2003. George Bass made the Dunedin end of the harbour the north east limit of his proposed fishing monopoly in 1803. The American ship Favorite with its supercargo Daniel Whitney may have called in the summer of 1805 to 1806. Daniel Cooper, master of the London sealer Unity probably did call in the summer of 1808 to 1809 when his Chief Officer, Charles Hooper, probably gave his name to Hooper's Inlet on the Otago Peninsula. William Tucker (1784–1817) was with a gang employed by Robert Campbell, a Sydney merchant, dropped on islands off the Dunedin coast in November 1809 and with another man, Daniel Wilson, was at Otago Harbour on May the 3rd 1810 when Robert Mason, master of the Brothers, anchored in the harbour and picked him up. This is the first, explicit and identifiable reference to a European ship in the Otago Harbour. The court record containing it, made in 1810, refers to the harbour as 'Port Daniel', a name which stayed in use for some years.

Another English sealer, the Sydney Cove, Captain Charles McLaren, was anchored in the harbour late in 1810 when Te Wahia's theft of a knife, a red shirt and some other articles sparked what has been called "The Sealers' War" - also - the 'War of the Shirt'.

A much disussed affray in that conflict occurred after James Kelly of Hobart anchored the Sophia in the harbour in December 1817 with William Tucker on board. After a visit to nearby Whareakeake (Murdering Beach) where Tucker had been living since 1815 and where he and two other men were now killed Kelly took revenge on Māori on his ship in the harbour, including a chief Korako. He then burnt a harbourside village,'the beautiful City of Otago', probably on Te Rauone Beach and certainly not at Whareakeake as has often been suggested.

A peace was concluded in 1823 and on 17 July of that year John Rodolphus Kent of the Naval cutter Mermaid from New South Wales, while in the Harbour, took 'the liberty of naming it (as it has not hitherto been named) "Port Oxley", in honour of the Surveyor General of the Colony' in fact John Oxley (1783/85?-1828). As noted, it had already been named. In 1826 Thomas Shepherd, one of a party of intending colonists, explored the site of Dunedin and left the oldest surviving pictures of the harbour and nearby coast, now in the Mitchell Library Sydney (Mitchell Library (Australia).

From its origins as a secret sealers' haven Otago Harbour developed into a busy international whaling port after the Weller brothers established their whaling station at Te Umu Kuri, Wellers Rock, at what is now called Otakou in November 1831. The busiest whaling port south of the Bay of Islands, it was also the hub of the largest European population in New Zealand after the Bay of Islands/Hokianga district by the end of 1839. By that time whaling had collapsed and Dumont D'Urville and his officers, visiting in 1840, observed the port had become the centre of a riotous trade in liquor and prostitution. This continued until the Scottish settlers arrived in 1848 and made Port Chalmers and Dunedin the new population centres on the harbour.