GUEST.CJB wrote: Searching Google Books for such as "wellerman, sketches, whaling, zealand" does not bring up anything useful. Bearing in mind that Google Books claims to have scanned just about every English book in the world this is surprising.

Trust me, they aren't even close to having scanned everything. I have hundreds of books (at least) that they haven't scanned. :-p

But they might have scanned it and it wouldn't show you anything, if it's not a publicly available book -- or just if it scanned "wellerman" as "Weller man." Which is perfectly reasonable, since the wellerman is a Weller man. I've been hunting for stuff about the Weller Brothers, without finding anything that looks promising.

And, remember, Weller Brothers worked in Australia, too; we can't be too fixated on New Zealand.