Last of the Sail Whalers, The: Whaling off Southern New Zealand and Tasmania

- Blurb -

This book is dedicated to the old sail whalemen. They worked themselves, their ships and their crews very hard in winter in stormy cold seas south of New Zealand and across the Tasman, testing the very limits of sail whaling. Captain Bill McKillop brings Southland's whaling heritage alive. He is a great writer, direct and simply worded. There is no exaggeration when he describes the dangers of climbing down cliffs to get seals, and the terror of attacking huge whales from a tiny fragile cockleshell boat, just the bald facts from his personal experience. That's enough. He was there, and he speaks with authority, adding a personal flavour not in better known works by Frank Bullen, Robert McNab and other southern writers. Captain Bill McKillop was the last of the sail whalers in Foveaux Strait, Fiordland and the southern islands. He was born at The Neck on Stewart Island in 1865, grew up in Riverton and spent his adult life sealing and then whaling. This is his life story, in his own words, with limited editing. His daughter Beryel Rubina McKillop was born at Riverton on 4 August 1896. Thereafter a list of the McKillop family reads like a southern Who's Who. For example his sister married a cousin, Robert Winning, in 1877 and they had eight children. In turn they married locally with many children: at Mataura the Winning family, at Gore the Spratts, at Bluff the Stalkers, at Invercargill the Moores, at Fairfax the Bennetts and elsewhere the Newmans. His was a pioneer family in Southland, but Bill McKillop's adventurous life took him south to the Auckland and Campbell Islands, north across the wide Pacific to California and whaling throughout the South Pacific islands. Bill died in Hobart in 1938, shortly after dictating his life story. This, the New Zealand edition, includes an annex 'The whaleship Splendid of Otago Confirmed as the Model for Frank Bullen's Fictitious Cachalot'.