a tale of a whale (1912)
On the night of 16 July 1912 a 70-foot-long (21 metre) whale was blown ashore in a southwesterly gale and washed up on jagged rocks near the Island Bay end of Lyall Bay. At first people thought the whale might have come in too close and got caught in the extremely high seas, but it seemed more likely that it had been dead for a while before it washed up. There was a suggestion that it had escaped from a whale hunt off Kaikoura. The Evening Post reported that the whale was a sperm whale, the Dominion thought it was a Rorqual and an expert thought it was a Humpback.
The whale lay on the beach for a few days while the authorities wondered what to do with it and locals flocked to see it. Takings on the Lyall Bay tram route went up dramatically, with thousands of people visiting. On 18 July the Evening Post reported that "a blind man could find his way to the stranded whale once he were set down on the Lyall Bay beach [and] the odour is now so powerful that it requires considerable courage to approach very near to the whale."
Two men were given permission to use the whale by the Marine Department, but they just took the jawbone and left the rest. The Mayor said there had been a game of shuttlecock over responsibility for removal of the body.
"It is likely to prove a serious nuisance to the citizens living in the locality. It is clearly not our duty to remove it. Below high water it is in the Marine Department's jurisdiction and above high water it is in the Harbour Board's. Well, the whale is lying partly above and partly below high water. But its condition is now becoming appalling for residents who are in the city's boundaries. Something must be done, and done quickly. The City Council cannot touch it. It would be a good thing, however, to have the skeleton."
Then the Government got involved. The Crown Law Office said that the head belonged to King George, the tail to Queen Mary, and the rest to the men who found the whale. "As their Majesties may be assumed to be indifferent to the fate of the leviathan, the Minister has come to the conclusion that the two men who put in a claim for the whale (which was granted) are responsible." There was a suggestion that the whale might be rendered on the beach. The Minister for Marine thought the two men who had been granted a claim and taken the whale's jawbone ought to be responsible for the whole carcass, but they didn't come forward.
A week after its discovery the whale was still on the beach being tossed around by the waves and becoming a menace to public health. The Evening Post, 22 July:
"The huge carcass stranded just alongside the road is rapidly degenerating to putrescence, and the activities of the numerous visitors in the shape of amateur butchering, for the sake of titbits taken away from the corpus vilo, and mementos left by names and initials carved as thickly as on an old tree are only hastening the process. There is no need whatever to ask where the whale is now, it advertises itself soon enough. Still, in spite of such slight drawbacks the stream of pilgrims to the cetacean shrine never ceases. This morning parties were strung out all along the road either going to or coming from the whale. On Saturday car after car, loaded to full capacity, ran to the Bay from 1pm onwards, and it is calculated that with those who walked, cycled and motored fully 5000 people visited the malodorous spot on Saturday."
Finally a Mr Riddle from Ngauranga said he would take the body away and boil it down. As workers turned the whale over to cut the flesh away, they found an iron harpoon stuck into its back. This proved that the whale was the one harpooned near Kaikoura two weeks earlier.
In August 1939 another large whale washed up. Read about it on Paperspast.
Sources:Various newspaper articles, July 1912
Lots of fish were washed up on the beach two days after the whale arrived.