Last time I shared a page from our mum's whakapapa manuscript, it was a hand-ruled table of arrivals. Nineteen lines, each carrying a name, a vessel and the places where people came ashore.
My brother Steve and I have kept following some of those names with Mum. Our line comes through Thomas William Norton. The next three stories stay close to Thomas and his brother James: a telegram waiting in Dunedin, three generations working together in a shearing shed at Kekerengu, and a sponsor's name in an 1853 baptism record that records an early connection between the Norton and Keenan families.
The first begins with men from Te Awaiti who had been away for two years and three weeks. They had scarcely made it home before they left again.
An urgent telegram was waiting for the Te Awaiti whalers when they reached Dunedin. James Norton, father of the Norton men in the party, was dead.
He had seen his sons off himself.
They were heading back to Campbell Island. Among them were Sid Thoms and Joe Timms, whose story Steve has been telling from our family papers. The Nortons and Timms belong to the same whaling history, and here their stories meet on one page.
Don Wilson tells it in Whaler by Providence. Before that telegram, there had been a long struggle to get home at all.
Joe Timms, Sid Thoms and Manny Norton had joined the Campbell Island syndicate as new hands. In the season Wilson describes, the men caught three whales and lost another eight because they did not have enough harpoon detonators. The following season brought only one whale. Then their launch, Whaler, was wrecked on the rocks after its anchor rope broke in a storm.
Their passage home had fallen through as well. An agreement with Norwegian whalers was supposed to get them back to the mainland between seasons. The Norwegians left New Zealand waters, and the Te Awaiti men were left waiting.
They had wool and whalebone to get off the island. Finding a vessel capable of carrying it was another matter.
In November 1913, John Norton reached Dunedin on the Amokura and went on to Bluff looking for a ship. He needed room for 119 bales of wool from the 1912 clip and another 130 expected from 1913.
The government quoted him five hundred pounds to charter a steamer. The book records his view of the price as "exorbitant and out of all reason". The whalers had previously chartered the Hinemoa for a five-day round trip at fifty pounds a day. John offered two hundred and fifty.
Eventually the Amokura brought the stranded men to Oamaru. They reached Picton on 21 April. Wilson counts their time away as two years and three weeks.
A little over three weeks at home, and they went again.
Their friends and relations farewelled them for the journey south. James Norton saw off his sons and their companions, then returned to Te Awaiti.
A child ran to meet him.
The Marlborough Express reported that James was carrying the child when he walked a few steps and fell. He died that afternoon, 19 May 1914. The paper said a telegram had been sent in the hope of reaching the family before they left Dunedin.
Wilson's account says it was waiting when the party arrived.
They turned back for the funeral. On 22 May, James was buried at Te Awaiti. Wilson records that he was buried where he had fallen.
Neither account names the child. But both kept that moment of someone running to meet him when he came home.
If your whānau has kept a letter, photograph or account of that journey home to Te Awaiti, Steve and I would be glad to hear it.
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