The New Zealand Sealing Industry - Department of Conservation

Figure 18. Selected artefacts excavated from the Southport Caves (after Coutts 1972). a, b, c—
glass bottle fragments; d, e, f—pipe fragments of wood (d) and clay (e, f); g—gun flint; h, i, j—
bone buttons. (a, b, c—B45/20; d, f, g, h, j—B45/21; e, i—B45/11). Reproduced by permission
of the Anthropology Department, Otago University, Dunedin.
ences are from the period 1830–36, and relate to ships returning small parcels of
skins from the Cuttle Cove whaling station. Ship-based sealing at Gulches Head—
the northern entrance to the sound—was undertaken at least twice by Kekeno
during the 1946 open season (Sorensen 1969: 30–42; Scadden 1996: 86).
Archaeology
Archaeological surveys of Preservation Inlet (McGovern-Wilson 1985) have covered
all of its accessible shorelines and identified 73 archaeological sites. For none
of these has any association with the sealing industry previously been proposed.
Neither the foregoing review of sealing strategies, nor the historical
information summarised above, suggest that this interpretation should change.
All of the early sealing appears to have been ship-based, which would leave little
or no archaeological trace. Part-time sealing was later undertaken from Cuttle
Cove (B45/26), which was first and foremost a whaling station, and it is difficult
to see how anything distinctive to the sealing industry could be found there.
The sealing undertaken from Cuttle Cove was almost certainly by boat-based
gangs, who might have camped for short periods in caves or rock-shelters.
Thirty-one of these with evidence of occupation have been recorded in
Preservation Inlet, but all except one are within 5 km of Cuttle Cove and,
significantly, no closer to the mouth of the sound where the seal colonies
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