by JOHN LOW
THE STORY OF THE WATERWITCH
From the time a settlement was established on the Derwent River in 1803, Tasmania had thrived as a whaling centre. In 1841 there were over thirty bay whaling stations around its coast and by the end of that decade, as bay whaling declined, Hobart had become one of the great deep-sea whaling ports. British, American and French whalers visited regularly and the town was home to a large locally owned whaling fleet that competed successfully with its foreign counterparts. The years between 1840 and 1870 saw Hobart's greatest whaling activity, with the trade decreasing fairly rapidly thereafter.
The ship that later became the Waterwitch was built in England and was launched from the Pembroke dockyard in 1820. As HMS Falcon, a ten-gun brig, she saw service against the slave trade off West Africa. However, by 1842 she had passed into private hands, been renamed Waterwitch and was in Sydney preparing to go whaling under the flag of McDonald, Smith & Co. Between 1855 and 1857 she was home to the poet Henry Kendall who spent two years as an apprentice member of her crew. The experience does not seem to have inspired any poetry, though he did draw on what he learned for an article on 'Sperm Whaling' he later wrote for the Australian Journal (Vol. 5, Part 54, November 1869).
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In 1860 the Waterwitch was purchased by Captain John Scott McArthur and taken to Tasmania where she subsequently became one of the best known ships in the Hobart whaling fleet. When McArthur died in 1875 she was sold to Alexander McGregor, described by J. E. Philp as "the Grand Old Man of Tasmanian Whaling", and sailed under his flag until her last whaling voyage in 1895. She was then stripped of her gear, dismantled and, in 1899, broken up.
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Alexander McGregor (1821-1896)
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