Butler Point Whaling Museum
Coordinates: 34 ° 59 ′ 2.8 ″ S , 173 ° 32 ′ 11.4 ″ E
The Butler Point Whaling Museum is a museum in the village of Hihi in the Far North District in the Northland region on the North Island of New Zealand . The site is near Mangonui on Doubtless Bay , a center of whaling in the 1820s to 1850s.
The museum includes the house of the settler William Butler, built in the 1840s, an older house of the Church Missionary Society of Mission Waimate , both with original furniture, and a newly built whaling museum with a whaling boat, facilities for extraction of the whale oil on the ships, a collection of harpoons , models, scrimshaws and items from the whalers who went ashore in Doubtless Bay, including Charles W. Morgan . There is a larger garden around the museum, in which there is a Pōhutukawa tree with a circumference of 10.9 m, supposedly the largest in the world. The owners and curators , a retired ophthalmologist and his wife, also live on the property.