Wellerman: lyrics, meaning and the New Zealand whaling song

Wellerman: the New Zealand whaling song behind the shanty craze

"Soon May the Wellerman Come", usually shortened to "Wellerman", is a song about whalers in New Zealand waters. It tells of a ship called the Billy of Tea, a right whale that will not die, and a crew waiting for the supply boat to bring them sugar, tea and rum. For most of its life it was a folk club song known to a few hundred people. Then, in the first weeks of 2021, a Scottish postman singing it into his phone turned it into the most talked-about sea song in a generation.

The song is often dated to the 1860s or 1870s, and many websites repeat that confidently. The evidence is thinner. Nobody has found a copy written down before the 1960s, and folk song researchers in New Zealand still argue about how much of it is genuinely old. What is certain is the world it describes: shore whaling on the coast of the South Island, and a firm of Sydney merchants whose name became a word.

The Weller brothers of Otago

In 1831 three British-born brothers, Edward, George and Joseph Weller, who had settled in Sydney two years earlier, set up a whaling station at Otakou, at the mouth of Otago Harbour on the South Island. That was seventeen years before the founding of Dunedin. The brothers named their base "Otago", and the name stuck to the whole region.

New Zealand whaling in this period was largely done from the shore. Men rowed out in open boats from a beach station, killed whales close to the coast and towed the carcasses back to be cut up and boiled down on land. Southern right whales were the main target: slow, coastal and rich in oil. At its peak in 1834 the Otakou station produced around 310 tons of whale oil a year, and the Wellers ran a chain of stations from Banks Peninsula down towards Stewart Island.

A "wellerman" was the Wellers' man: one of their employees, and in the song the supply vessel that called at the stations with provisions and took the barrels of oil away. For isolated crews that boat was everything, the only link to stores, news and drink. The boom did not last. Whale numbers fell quickly, the brothers' land deals in New Zealand were later ruled invalid, and the Otakou station closed in 1841. A lookout point on the harbour is still called Weller's Rock.

Wellerman lyrics and their meaning: the Billy of Tea and the tonguing

The story is a tall tale, and the meaning of the Wellerman lyrics is easy to follow once you know the trade behind them. The Billy of Tea puts to sea, the crew harpoon a right whale, and the whale drags the ship away. Four boats are lost in the struggle, the captain refuses to cut the line, and the last verse leaves ship and whale still locked together while the wellerman keeps making his regular call. The chorus is the part everybody knows:

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguin' is done
We'll take our leave and go

"Tonguing" is the word most listeners trip over. It is usually explained as cutting the whale's blubber into strips for boiling down into oil, the last messy job before a crew could be paid off. One New Zealand folk researcher argues that the term was misapplied, and that the "tonguers" of the old whaling stations were beachcombers who made a thin living by rendering the scraps other men left behind. Either way, the line means the same thing to a singer: when the dirty work is finished, we go home.

The ship's name has also been picked over. A billy is the tin can that Australian bushmen and gold diggers boiled their tea in, and "billy of tea" was Australian slang by the middle of the nineteenth century, which suits a song set among whalers who came across from Sydney.

Wellerman sea shanty, or whaling ballad?

Strictly speaking, "Wellerman" is not a shanty at all. A shanty was a work song with a job to do: its rhythm timed a crew hauling on a rope, heaving round a capstan or working the pumps, and a shantyman led while the men answered. Songs like "Drunken Sailor" or "Leave Her, Johnny" belong to that tradition. "Wellerman" tells a story from start to finish, has no task built into its beat, and makes more sense sung round a table or in the forecastle off watch. Folk singers would call it a ballad, a sea song or a forebitter.

None of that has stopped it being sold, sung and searched for as a sea shanty, and the label is now probably permanent. The difference matters only if you want to understand how sailors actually used song at work; our guide to sea shanties covers the working songs properly.

From a 1966 field tape to ShantyTok

The song's written history begins with Neil Colquhoun, a New Zealand teacher and collector. He said he took it down around 1966 from a man then in his eighties, named in later sources as F. R. Woods, who had learned it from an uncle. It appeared in the 1967 collection Shanties by the Way, which Colquhoun co-edited with Rona Bailey and Bert Roth, and again in his own New Zealand Folk Songs: Songs of a Young Country in the early 1970s. A 1969 radio recording of Colquhoun singing it is the oldest known performance. Sceptics point out that he seems to have shaped the verses himself, borrowing from older whaling songs, so the text may be as much his as any whaler's.

Over the next fifty years it travelled steadily through the folk scene. Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir and Ed Trickett recorded it in 1990 for the album And So Will We Yet. The Wellington Sea Shanty Society put it on a record in 2013, and the Bristol group The Longest Johns included it on Between Wind and Water in 2018, a version that many later singers learned from.

Nathan Evans and the 2021 revival

Nathan Evans, then a postal worker from Airdrie, had been posting songs on TikTok for some time, and in December 2020 he uploaded his take on "Wellerman". Other users began adding harmonies, bass lines and instruments through the app's duet feature, and the clip snowballed into a trend the press nicknamed ShantyTok. In January 2021 Evans signed to Polydor, which released his recording on 22 January together with a dance remix by 220 Kid and Billen Ted.

The remix climbed the Official Singles Chart and reached number one in March 2021, after seven straight weeks in the top three, and it held the top spot for a second week. For a song first written down in 1960s New Zealand, it was an extraordinary afterlife, and it sent a whole new audience looking for older maritime music, from Fisherman's Friends to the naval songs of Portsmouth.

If you want to hear it the way folk clubs sang it before the charts, find an unaccompanied version with a big chorus. The song works best with a room full of people coming in hard on "Soon may the Wellerman come", which is exactly how it spread in the first place.