Heritage 0609_Lord Howe.pdf - Australian Heritage Magazine

Sooty terns breed in large numbers on Lord Howe and its offshore islands. Photo Hallmark Editions.
beach, in each of which there were a great number
of eggs, very large and well tasted when dressed. On
entering the woods I was surprised to see large fat
pigeons, of the same plumage and make as those in
Europe, sitting on low bushes, and so insensible to
fear, as to be knocked down with little trouble.
Over the next two decades Lord Howe Island was
visited by ships of the Royal Navy to collect turtles for
the Port Jackson and Norfolk Island colonies, most
likely to grace the tables of the officers and for use in
the hospital.
In 1798, the American whaling ship Ann and Hope
arrived, the first of many American, Australian and
European whalers to visit Lord Howe Island over the
next 70 years. They came not only for food and water,
but for ‘whaler’s wood’, “a stunted tree found growing
near the water, which burns with a fierce heat” that was
used for rendering blubber into whale oil.
In 1834, three Englishmen from New Zealand were
employed by the Sydney-based company, Robert
Campbell & Co, to establish a permanent supply
station for the whaling industry. Bringing their Maori
wives and children, they built huts, caught fish, kept
poultry, planted vegetable gardens and captured and
farmed the pigs and goats that had been left to run wild
by whalers. They traded their produce with visiting
whalers for clothing, tools, soap, sugar salt, tea, tobacco
and rum.
Seven years later, Captain Owen Poole, a retired
British officer and a partner with Sydney ironmongers,
Richard Dawson & Henry Augustus Castle, bought the
trading station from Robert Campbell & Co, and Lord
Howe Island’s boom period as a provisioning station
began. The discovery of gold in Australia in 1851
increased whaling traffic at Lord Howe Island still
further, as nervous ships’ masters called there rather
than at the mainland where crew were likely to desert
for the goldfields. However, by the early 1860s the
whaling trade declined as a result of overhunting of
whales and the destruction of most of the Union Pacific
whaling fleet by Confederate raiders during the
American civil war.
By this time, Lord Howe Island’s fragile ecology had
been seriously affected by the predations of humans and
their feral pigs and goats. Goats ate the forest
understorey and the coming generations of canopy
Emerald ground dove, widespread in Australia and possibly
introduced to Lord Howe Island. Photo Hallmark Editions.
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