HEBERLEY'S JOURNAL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 457, 25 March 1948, Page 20

HEBERLEY'S JOURNAL

| ZB Story of a Seagoing Pioneer

OOKING through the Turnbull Library, Wellington, for . likely broadcasting, material, one of Station 2ZB’s announcers, Bill Beavis, recently came across a brown paper package, labelled simply Heberley’s Journal. Insidé was an old exercise-book whose paper covers were almost falling apart; but every page was covered with legible writing presenting an account of part of the life and adventures of James Heberley, an old-time seaman and whaler, in England and the Pacific. Heberley hailed from Weymouth in Dorsetshire. Beavis, who also comes from round about that part of England, took extracts from the diary and made them into a recorded narrative of five 15-minute episodes. The first of these recordings, spoken in Beavis’s natural burr (much the same as Heberley’s must have been) will be heard from 2ZB at 5.30 p.m. on Sunday, April 4, and the other four at the same time on the following four Sundays.

Heberley, who turned out to be a colourful character, was born in 1809, His father, a native of Wittenberg, Germany, who had been taken prisoner by a British privateer in 1790, married and settled in England, where he commanded the brig Nancy. After only three years at. school, James Heberley was put to work in a rope-walk, and at 11 years of age he was apprenticed to the skipper of a fishing smack. He ran away and found a job as cabin-boy in the ship Sarah and Margaret, trading between London and Hamburg, and afterwards in the West Indiaman Somersetshire. After many ups and downs, on the sea and off it, he reached Sydney in 1825 in the Alexander Henry, and two years later, in the whaler Cafoline, he put into the Bay of Islands. In the Maori Wars In 1830 Heberley shipped in the schooner Waterloo for Queen Charlotte Sound and settled at Te Awaite, where he took up whaling. He went through many exciting experiences during the last campaigns of the Ngati-Tahu against Te Rauparaha and eventually, in 1831, married a Maori woman. Some time later he went back to Australia, Returning in the Hannah in 1836 from Sydney-where he had heard of the proposed English colonisation of New Zealand-he bought some land at Port Nicholson, only to find that the deeds were not valid. Heberley piloted the ship Tory into Port Nicholson and round the coast to Wanganui and Taranaki. While she was at Kaipara he climbed Mount Egmont with Dieffenbach. He was appointed pilot at Port Nicholson, but the fees being insufficient to maintain him, he went fishing, and also carried on his whaling operations. Heberley was drowned at Picton in . 1889, In the final episode of his series of extracts from the journal, Beavis says that Worser Bay (Wellington) was named after Heberley’s nickname of "Worser." He adds: "I don’t know the actual circumstances of his death, but through his journal I, for one, have come to know and appreciate a typical sailor and a gentleman of the old school."