Shapes of the Past

And then, a woman came past. Wrapped in a thick jacket and a bright red beanie (woolly cap) striding strongly against the slight breeze from offshore, which had again strengthened. She was, as it turned out, a marine biologist, a specialist, who lived in the community across the bay (what were the chances of that do you think?). She was simply out walking ‘her beach’ (as she called it). She stopped to view what we were up to. And upon seeing it, excitedly explained it all to us. It definitely wasn’t a dinosaur. Immediate disappointment for the children as, tired from the digging and plans on a newsworthy outcome evaporated. They felt fame disappear as quickly as the rain had earlier in the day. It was however, an enormous whale’s vertebra. Curiously just the one? She was a little surprised herself to see it alone, as, by then, we had cleared the sand in a wider deep hole and the central part was fully exposed, and only the side flanges from the main bone continued out and down into the sand below.

She did explain how it had probably come to be there and, importantly, how long it had probably been buried. Certainly not one thousand or even the one million years ago we had imagined. In fact by geological standards it was a very fresh deposit.

It seems there had been a whale beached on this stretch of sand earlier in the last century (1900’s), But, she believed that that had in fact, been entirely removed to Dunedin. She then suggested, since it was buried in such a way, it was likely something to do with the whaling past of the New Zealand coast (1791 – 1964). It was not unknown for whalers, having harpooned a whale at sea, to sometimes tow the captured dying mammal to a beach around high tide, dragging it up the beach where it would be cut up. The blubber would be cut away from the whale carcass and was melted down in large cooking pots before being loaded into barrels. Apparently, once stripped of all usable blubber, these large segments were ‘sometimes’ buried where they had been processed on the beaches. However, the biologist suggested that the carcass would have been in a trench and that the sailors and whalers would have just left it to be buried naturally.

It was then we saw, the tide was already racing back in and even we could see we were not going to succeed in uncovering the entire bone before it again was swallowed by the surf. Around that time our father arrived back and observed how much we had uncovered. He spoke with the lady briefly. She suggested that she would advise the local university, in case they were interested in it. I recall she made certain to mark the spot by lining up a couple of trees and tying a handkerchief to the spot. “Right-o, you lot lets get going then”. Our father said. We were looked at him. All a little stunned.

(Continued tomorrow)