Chaslands Mistake (map Reference no 6)
Sealers and whalers from Australia were among New Zealand’s earliest European visitors. Some left their names on the New Zealand coast.
Chaslands Mistake is named after the legendary whaler Thomas Chaseland whose mother was an Aborigine. His ‘mistake’ was to delay slaughtering a herd of seals he came upon one evening: by morning they had disappeared. The other theory is that Chaseland mistook the point as Otago Heads.
It is the scene of the wreck of the passenger steamer Otago in 1876. It is now well known as a shipwreck area.
