Russians in Queen Charlotte Sound

In the 1820s foreign shipping began to frequent Cook Strait in greater numbers. All the vessels known well before 1826 missed Whanganui-a-Tara, but it is hard to accept that all the many visitors to the area, where sealing, whaling or flax trading spanned Cook Strait, learned nothing at all of the existence of this handy safe harbour. Here, as elsewhere, there is no reliable alternative but to present what evidence we have of the near misses, and the probable visits, that preceded the known visits.

Bellingshausen, the leader of a Russian exploring expedition, took his two ships, Vostok and Mirny, into Queen Charlotte Sound for a week in June 1820. His officers wrote extensive reports on the Maori they met near Ship Cove, and the secured many Maori artifacts for Russian museums.

Recently intensive studies of these Russian records by Barratt, O'Regan and Simmonds, show very clearly that the Russians met Maori with very different lifestyles from the people Captain Cook and his men had met there fifty years before. The earlier Maori were mobile food gatherers without agriculture, passing between temporary villages in constant fear of attacking raids by their similarly itinerant neighbours. But the Maori the Russians met in 1820 were cultivators of potatoes, living a relatively settled life centred on defensive hill forts, or pa, but with their livelihoods based firmly on trade and agriculture, not war. The population had fallen between 1770 and 1820 from almost 500 to under 100. Many of the latter were exterminated by Te Rauparaha and his Te Atiawa allies by 1828, and more were killed by 1840. Consequently it is hardly surprising then that they, and their Wellington relatives, many of whom were also killed by Te Atiawa, failed to pass on any collective memory of the early sealers. That unrecorded sealers had been there nevertheless, is confirmed by the Russian observations that some garments were, or were modelled on, 'half coats with sleeves of flax sewn on', like those worn by sealers. Such are the shreds of history!

- Rhys Richards, The First Pakehas Around Wellington & Cook Strait 1803 to 1839, Porirua, 2020, p.27-8.

See also:
History: Wellington's early architecture, 10 March 2023
History: In memory of Captain Williams, 22 September 2019
History: Pre-1840 European visitors to Wellington, 21 February 2016