John Boultbee (seal hunter)

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John Boultbee (born September 3, 1799 in Bunny , Nottinghamshire , England , † 1854 in Ceylon ) was an English whale and seal hunter .

Life

He was born the ninth and youngest son of poor farmer John Boultbee and Sarah Elizabeth Lane in Nottinghamshire. Already at the age of 16 (1816) Boultbee went to Brazil as a seal hunter , two years later (1818) to Barbados . In 1823 he accompanied his brother Edwin to Tasmania ( Van Diemen's Land ). In 1824 he met the former convict and sealer James Munro (around 1779–1845) on the Tasmanian Preservation Island ( Furneaux Group , eastern Bass Strait , southwest of Cape Barren Island ), who lived there from 1819 and until his death as "King the seal catcher ”and official spokesman for the residents there remained.

From 1825 to 1828 he lived and worked with other seal hunters in southern New Zealand . During these tough three years, during which there were usually armed conflicts between the sealers and the Māori , Boultbee instead became the first European to document the Māori language and way of life around Otago Harbor . His observations, u. a. He wrote 220 expressions of the Morian language , some song texts and names, with berry juice instead of ink in his diary, which was only published in 1986 as the Journal of a Rambler . In 1827 he lived with the Māori in Murihiku .

He celebrated his 34th birthday in 1833 on a ship anchored off Manado ( Sulawesi , Indonesia ). In 1834 he emigrated to Ceylon, where he died in 1854.

literature

  • June Stark (Ed.): Journal of a Rambler. The Journal of John Boultbe. Oxford University Press, Auckland 1986, ISBN 0-19-558120-2 .
  • A. Charles Begg, Neil Colquhoun Begg: The World of John Boultbee. Including an Account of Sealing in Australia and New Zealand. Whitcoulls, Christchurch 1979, ISBN 0-7233-0604-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tom Brooking: The History of New Zealand. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, ISBN 0-313-32356-9 , p. 27 ( Google books )
  2. ^ Ray Harlow: Māori. A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-521-80861-8 , p. 89 ( Google books )
personal data
SURNAME Boultbee, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English whale and seal hunter
DATE OF BIRTH September 3, 1799
PLACE OF BIRTH Bunny , Nottinghamshire , England
DATE OF DEATH 1854
Place of death Ceylon