I'm the GUEST who originally bumped this thread at the end of October. I'm excited to see some movement here and curious as to whether anyone in NZ will actively proceed to obtain the Reed book. I see it is exclusively in New Zealand libraries and NSW, except for a single copy in Hawai'i. I can attempt to request it from Hawaii, but only if there is no one in New Zealand right now willing to walk down the road to their local library to look at a copy. My own guess is that something resembling a chorus, perhaps a "tonguing" song, appears in Reed's book and that everything else was Colquhoun: Lightning Tree, Golden Vanity, Outward Bound, and Blow Boys Blow.

I'm looking into this now, and I can only link "sugar and tea and rum" to a single shipment in the Weller era, on the Sydney Packet, which arrived on 7 April 1834. As the linked teara.govt.nz site explains, while the Wellers were making some profit in the Sydney market (such as it was), they were forced to pay tariffs in London due to New Zealand being considered sovereign Maori land at the time, and were already wrapping up their whaling business by 1835. Were they really whaling long enough to have songs written in their honor? I am somewhat bemused that despite the flood of instant history lessons on New Zealand whaling, this does not seem to have been mentioned before.