Samuel Enderby & Sons

[1] The company was significant in the history of whaling in the United Kingdom, not least for encouraging their captains to combine exploration with their business activities, and sponsored several of the earliest expeditions to the subantarctic, Southern Ocean and Antarctica itself.

In 1773 Enderby began the Southern Fishery, a whaling firm with ships registered in London and Boston.

Rockingham embarked on her first whaling voyage on 11 November 1775 when Captain Elihu L. Clark sailed her from Britain for the Brazil Banks.

He and his business associates Alexander Champion and John St Barbe assembled a fleet of twelve whaling vessels on the Greenwich Peninsula, on the River Thames just downstream from the City of London.

The Enderby family therefore shifted its focus to the seas around New Zealand, with the Bay of Islands as its main base of operations.

In early 1786, the Enderby family lobbied the government for the right to go into the South Pacific (an area in which the East India Company had historically enjoyed a monopoly).

[4] The lobbying efforts were eventually successful, and on 1 September 1788, the 270 ton whaling vessel Amelia, owned by Samuel Enderby & Sons and commanded by Captain James Shields, departed London.

[2] Whaling vessels owned by Samuel Enderby & Sons were part of the Third Fleet taking convicts to New South Wales in 1791.

From this time forward, Enderby's ships Speedy, Britannia, and Ocean made frequent whaling voyages from Port Jackson.

From January 1793 to November 1794, Enderby sent Rattler to survey whaling grounds in the southeastern Pacific, under the command of Lieutenant James Colnett, Royal Navy.

[8] Despite the loss of several men to scurvy and the wreck of the Lively at the Falkland Islands in July 1832, the expedition successfully returned to London in early 1833.