About Wellerman

"Soon May the Wellerman Come", also known as "Wellerman" or "The Wellerman" [c.?1860–70] is a sea song from New Zealand. The song refers to the "wellermen", pointing to supply ships owned by the Weller brothers who were settlers from England. In early 2021, versions by English folk music group The Longest Johns, Scottish singer Nathan Evans, and Scottish pirate metal band Alestorm became viral hits on the social media site TikTok, leading to a "social media craze" around songs erroneously considered sea shanties.

The history of whaling in New Zealand stretches from the late eighteenth century to 1965. In 1831, the UK-born Weller Brothers Edward, George and Joseph, who had immigrated to Sydney in 1829, founded a whaling station at Otakou near modern Dunedin in the South Island of New Zealand, some seventeen years before the first British settlement of Dunedin. Speaking at centennial celebrations in 1931, New Zealand's Governor General Lord Bledisloe recalled how the Weller brothers had on their voyage to New Zealand "brought in the 'Lucy Ann' (the Weller brothers' barque) a good deal of rum and a good deal of gunpowder...and some at least were rum characters". From 1833, the Weller brothers sold provisions to whalers in New Zealand from their base at Otakou, which they had named "Otago" in approximation of the local M?ori pronunciation. Their employees became known as "wellermen". Unlike whaling in the Atlantic and northern Pacific, whalers in New Zealand practised shore-based whaling which required them to process the whale carcasses on land. The industry drew whalers to New Zealand from a diverse range of backgrounds encompassing not just the British Isles but also Native Americans, Pacific Islanders and Indigenous Australians. The whalers depended on good relations with the local Maori people and the whaling industry integrated the Maori into the global economy and produced hundreds of intermarriages between whalers and local Maori, including Edward Weller himself, who was twice married to Maori women, thus linking the Wellers to one of the most prominent local M?ori families, the Ellisons.