Whaling pots

Have you ever wondered about the iron pot outside the Drunken Admiral? Read on to discover more.

This story is by Hazel Phillips, a regular visitor to Battery Point from London. While in Hobart in 2024, Hazel noted the presence of whaling pots around the waterfront and at Narryna in Battery Point. This account reports on their origins in Shropshire and use in the whaling industry.

Hazel has contributed other stories, including ‘St George’s Tower – a remarkable convict’s landmark‘ and ‘Lockdown in Wapping – a story from London in Covid times‘.

Ironbridge, in the English county of Shropshire, is famous as the birthplace of the industrial revolution in the 1770s. It is where a man called Abraham Darby was instrumental in processing iron core with coking coal instead of charcoal. This increased the use of iron and for many products including the iconic iron bridge itself. Among the set of museums in the town we visited the Museum of Iron in Coalbrookdale close to the iron bridge.

Many iron products were made there including pots of different sizes for a range of purposes, some industrial. Many were transported all over the world. The museum displayed a whaling pot which had a flat side.

Knowing that Hobart and indeed Battery Point were involved in the whaling industry, I was interested to see them mention some had been found as far away as Tasmania.

So while in Tasmania, I started to spot whaling pots of different shapes. One in particular, outside the Drunken Admiral restaurant in the harbour, had the Coalbrookdale name on its side.

The Reverend Robert Knopwood described the prominence of the whales around the shore in the early 1800s. The Narryna Museum has a pot in its garden.

The gruesome fact is that the pots were used to render oil from whale blubber when the whaling industry was at its height. Whaling was a very important industry in the early days of the colony with it providing more revenue than any other product in the 1830s, supplying oil to London, Calcutta and New York.

Back to the whaling pots. The rendering process could be carried out on the whaling ships themselves. The flat sides would enable say three to stand side by side across the beam of the ship and embedded in a brick structure known as ‘tryworks’ with a fire underneath. This would enable the blubber to be processed by melting it in the pots and enable the vessel to stay out at sea for longer.

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