Continuing the ongoing obsession. :-) If I don't get responses to this, I'll stop bugging people here and continue hunting on my own....

Maybe "Whaling in early New Zealand", by A W Reed, 1960.

I still haven't found a copy of this that doesn't have to cross an ocean to get to me, or that is for sale. However, I've now managed to get my hands on Honore Forster, The South Sea Whaler: An Annotated Bibliography. It has a section on children's books; the Reed book is not among them. So I have to read the whole dang bibliography. :-/

It does have an index of ships. It probably won't surprise anyone that there are no references to the Billy of Tea. :-) For one thing, any whaler would have been built in Britain or America, and so would not have an Australian/New Zealander name!

Also... I don't know if it has come up here or not, but the Weller Brothers had only one base in New Zealand, at Otakou in Otago. There were a bunch of books and pamphlets issued at the time of Otakou's centenary. This was about the right time for them to be discarded at the time Tommy Wood saw... whatever he found. Some of these are available for sale... at very high prices plus postage from New Zealand. Wish I knew if this would prove worth it. :-)

I find myself thinking that, if the only base the Wellers had in New Zealand was at Otakou, then the Billy of Tea must have been going in circles to get regularly supplied. :-)

(Also, how were they still able to run the ship after all four boats were lost? Based on the typical crew of Pacific whalers at the time, 80% of the crew and 100% of the non-warrant officers would have been in the boats. What fraction would have been lost if there were lost.)