Decoding The Wellerman
By Ella Wong
Sagredo, R. (2024, May 6.) Tail of Whale in Sea. [Photograph.] Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/photo/tail-of-whale-in-sea-23508833/
The Wellerman, alternatively known as Soon May the Wellerman Come, is a popular folk song hailing from 1800s New Zealand. The traditional lyrics can be found here.
There is some dispute over whether it can be classified as a sea shanty. Sea shanties were songs designed to be sung during work at sea – often as a call-and-response communication technique, while The Wellerman was believed to have been sung either for pleasure or during work on land processing whale carcasses.
In either case, strictly speaking, it’s considered a ballad; defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English as “a poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas”, “typically of unknown authorship, having been passed on orally from one generation to the next.”
The lyrics tell the tale of a whaling crew aboard a fictional ship, the “Billy o’ Tea”. They’re determined to catch a right whale, referring to one of three species of baleen whales (the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Southern right whales), so named because they were just “right” for hunting. These whales float when dead and swim in coastal waters; large amounts of oil and baleen could be reaped from their corpses. As the crew struggle with the massive marine mammal, they hope for an elusive Wellerman to bring them “sugar, tea, and rum”.
In the 1800s, whaling was a prosperous industry. The “tonguing” mentioned in the song refers to the job of cutting strips of blubber—known as tongues—from a whale’s carcass. The oil obtained from this blubber was used for everything, from lamps and candles to soaps and lubricants. Whale bones were prized for their sturdiness and used in corsets, brushes, fishing rods, knife handles, umbrellas, and more. Killing one whale could make you a fortune, explaining the crew of the Billy o’ Tea’s persistence in hunting it.
The Wellerman likely referred to a man from the Weller Brothers of Sydney’s whaling and trading company in New Zealand and Australia. The company was founded by Joseph Weller and his family, wealthy Englishmen who moved to Sydney hoping it would ease his tuberculosis. Originally, they shipped luxury items such as rum and gunpowder; then, they expanded to build a prosperous whaling station on Otago Island.
They began to supply bay whaling stations—stations on land, where whale carcasses were harvested, and “tonguing” was done—with gear and provisions. Employees of the Weller Brothers’ company were known as Wellermen.
The “sugar, tea, and rum” the crew hopes the Wellerman will bring were likely what bay station workers were given instead of wages.
The dwindling number of right whales, Joseph Weller’s death, and his remaining family’s ill health eventually led to the decline of the Weller Brother’s company. New Zealand established legal protection for all marine mammals in 1978, officially marking the end of the dark and unethical business of commercial whaling that nearly drove right whales to extinction. The tonguing has been done, and the whalers have taken their leave, yet the song persists still.
According to the New Zealand Folksong page, between 1972 and 2018 alone, The Wellerman has been recorded 22 times by 20 different groups, artists and/or organisations. On YouTube, its most popular rendition is by Nathan Evans, with a good 374 million views and counting as of November 2024. Many creators used parodies of the song to express themselves; check out these ones about hope for the end of the Covid-19 pandemic and yearning for cold weather.
Ultimately, The Wellerman is a song of hope amidst the struggle for better days to come. It’s also a reminder of the whaling industry that horrifically damaged whale populations, the marine ecosystems and the environment. Today, although whaling is banned, whales are still negatively impacted by human activities such as pollution and collisions with maritime vessels.
By the end of the song, the whale and the crew are still locked in battle; the whale for survival, the crew for their fortune. And perhaps this is where the timelessness of this song lies. At what point will we choose to let the whale go? To help the environment recover from the damage we’ve wrought, over continuing to harm other organisms for our own gain?
Can we eventually live in harmony instead of in conflict?