His New Zealand travels began in Port Jackson in March 1826 when he joined a sealing party employed by Daniel Cooper and Solomon Levey, and embarked on the brig Elizabeth.
Boultbee was assigned to a boat carrying six weeks' victuals, three muskets, a dog and clothing, which headed 'about 100 miles to the Northward'.
The party landed on the Open Bay Islands, where they found a few provisions and messages from previous visitors in a hut used by earlier sealers.
The rest of the crew, watching his busy pen as he wrote his journal, regarded him as 'a regular scholard', an incongruous, educated presence in a mostly illiterate company.
Boultbee's boat followed the Elizabeth after a few days, reaching Pahia, the westernmost Māori settlement on the southern coastline, where the crew were welcomed by Jacky Price and his consort, Hinewhitia.
Bluff, Omaui, Wakapatu, Te Waewae, Codfish Island, are all vividly described in terms of the occupants' lives, their customs and language.
[citation needed] Boultbee joined a sealing gang from the Samuel, and stowed away on the ship at Paterson Inlet, landing penniless in Port Jackson on 8 March 1828.
His journal was compiled 'more for the amusement of my relations and friends, than with a view to that of the Public', but his first-hand account of the sealing industry on New Zealand's southern coasts is a rare and vital record of a trade cloaked in the secrecy of competition.