Updated 26 February 2026
“Soon may the Wellerman come / To bring us sugar and tea and rum / One day, when the tonguin’ is done / We’ll take our leave and go.”
When Nathan Evans posted himself singing those lines on TikTok in late 2020, he had no idea he was about to hit number one in seven countries.
But the song he chose, a 19th-century New Zealand whaling ballad, had been waiting for this moment for about 150 years.
Here’s what the lyrics actually mean, where the song came from, and why it hit so differently during a lockdown.
What does Wellerman mean? The word refers to employees of the Weller brothers, a 19th-century New Zealand whaling company whose supply ships brought provisions to shore whalers. In the song, the Wellerman is the man who arrives with sugar, tea and rum — the only payment these workers would receive, since shore whalers were not paid wages but in goods.
Is Wellerman Actually a Sea Shanty?
Before anything else, this needs addressing: technically, no. Wellerman is a whaling ballad, not a sea shanty.
Folk musician David Coffin put it plainly to the New York Times: it’s a whaling song with the beat of a shanty.
The distinction matters. True sea shanties are work songs, sung aboard ships during specific tasks like hauling rope and raising anchors.
They’re functional, with a call-and-response structure led by a “shantyman” who cued each physical effort with a lyric.
Wellerman has the rhythm and some structural similarities, but it’s a narrative ballad telling the story of a single whaling expedition, not a work-task song.
What Wellerman actually is, more precisely, is a “forebitter”: a term for leisure songs sung by sailors during their downtime rather than during labour.
Nathan Evans himself called it a sea shanty, virtually every outlet ran with it, and ShantyTok was born. The mislabelling stuck. It doesn’t diminish the song, but knowing the difference is part of understanding what you’re actually listening to.
Where the Song Came From
The song’s full title is “Soon May the Wellerman Come.” It originates from New Zealand, likely written sometime between 1860 and 1870, though its authorship is unknown. It was almost certainly composed by a shore whaler, someone doing the work the song describes.
The story of how it survived is itself worth knowing. Around 1966, a New Zealand music teacher and folk song compiler named Neil Colquhoun collected the song from a man called F.R. Woods, who was in his eighties at the time.
Woods said he’d heard it from his uncle as a child. Colquhoun published it in 1973 in his book New Zealand Folksongs: Songs of a Young Country. Without that chain of memory, a man in his eighties recalling something his uncle sang, this song might not exist today.
Who Were the Wellermen?
The title references real people. The Weller brothers, Edward, George, and Joseph, were British-born merchant traders who emigrated to Sydney in 1829 and set up a shore-whaling station at Otakou on New Zealand’s South Island in 1831. At their peak in 1834 they were producing 310 tons of whale oil a year, running a network of seven stations and employing around 85 people at Otago alone.
From 1833, their supply ships travelled the coast from the Otakou base selling provisions to other whaling operations. The people working on and around those supply ships became known as “wellermen.” The song is named after those men: not a single person, but a job title.
The Wellers’ empire didn’t last. Joseph died of tuberculosis in 1835. By 1840 the brothers were bankrupt after failed land purchases in New South Wales.
The Otakou station closed in 1841 having produced just 10 tons of oil in its final year, a collapse from those 310-ton peak days.
In 1841 a New South Wales court ruled that all their New Zealand land purchases were legally invalid, after which, as one historian put it, they “slipped unobtrusively out of the pages of New Zealand history.”
The song outlasted everything they built.
Wellerman Lyrics Meaning: Line by Line
The song follows the crew of a ship called the Billy o’ Tea as they hunt a right whale, a slow, coastal species that was the primary target of New Zealand shore whalers. Here’s what the key lines actually mean.
“There once was a ship that put to sea / The name of the ship was the Billy of Tea”
The Billy o’ Tea is the fictional vessel at the centre of the story. The name itself carries an irony: a ship named after the simplest of provisions, crewed by men working for almost nothing.
“The winds blew up, her bow dipped down / Oh blow, my bully boys, blow”
A call-and-response line, with the “bully boys” reference addressing the crew directly. This is the structural element that makes the song feel like a shanty even though it isn’t one in the strict sense.
“Soon may the Wellerman come / To bring us sugar and tea and rum”
This is the core of the song’s meaning, and it runs deeper than it looks. The workers at New Zealand’s bay-whaling stations were not paid wages.
According to the New Zealand Folk Song website, they were paid in “slops” (ready-made clothing) along with spirits and tobacco.
Sugar, tea and rum weren’t luxuries they bought; they were the currency of their labour. The arrival of the Wellerman was the closest thing to a payday these men would see.
There’s also a darker layer. Sugar and rum in the 19th century were products of the triangular trade, grown on Caribbean plantations by enslaved Africans, then shipped back to Britain and beyond.
When the Wellerman brought rum to the New Zealand whalers, it was part of a supply chain that ran through one of history’s worst atrocities.
The song doesn’t reference this. It couldn’t, because it was written by workers who simply wanted their rations. But the context sits there beneath the surface of those three words.
Adrian York, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster, argued in The Conversation that the song is neither a critique of colonialism nor an embrace of it.
It’s the expression of exploited workers for whom sugar, tea and rum represented the smallest possible relief from brutal daily labour. That framing doesn’t resolve the history; it just locates the song accurately within it.
“One day, when the tonguin’ is done / We’ll take our leave and go”
Tonguing is the process of cutting strips of blubber from a whale carcass to render into oil, one of the most physically demanding parts of the whole operation.
Shore-based whaling, unlike Atlantic whaling, required the entire process of breaking down a whale to be done on land. The crew couldn’t leave until that work was finished. This line is the song’s emotional engine: the men aren’t singing about riches or adventure, they’re singing about the moment they can finally stop.
The later verses
The subsequent verses track the captain’s determination to land one particularly resistant whale over 40 days, losing boats in the process, as the crew wait and the Wellerman keeps coming on his regular run.
By the final verse the Billy o’ Tea is still locked in the struggle. The song ends without resolution: the whale isn’t caught, the men don’t get to leave. The Wellerman keeps calling. The work goes on.
Why It Went Viral in January 2021
The timing matters. Nathan Evans posted his version in December 2020. TikTok’s duet function let other singers layer harmonies on top of it, which turned a solo performance into something that sounded like a crew singing together, exactly what the song was designed to feel like. The format was perfect for the content.
But the deeper reason it resonated is harder to pin down. People in COVID lockdowns, stuck at home, waiting for something to break the tedium: in a fairly literal sense, that’s the emotional situation the song is about.
Nineteenth-century whalers on a remote New Zealand coast, waiting for the Wellerman, waiting to be allowed to leave. The parallel isn’t subtle.
Evans’ version, recorded on a phone camera in his kitchen with no production and just his voice, had what University of Westminster music lecturer Adrian York described in The Conversation as an “authentic sense of stoic forbearance.” That quality isn’t incidental. The song was built by people enduring something difficult. When Evans sang it, that weight came through.
The Recording History
The song circulated in folk music circles for decades before TikTok. In 1990, New England folk trio Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir, and Ed Trickett recorded it for their album And So Will We Yet.
The Wellington Sea Shanty Society put out their version in 2013 on Now That’s What I Call Sea Shanties Vol. 1. Bristol a cappella group the Longest Johns recorded it for Between Wind and Water in 2018, the version that was already building an online following before Evans blew it into the mainstream.
Evans’ version, remixed by 220 Kid and Billen Ted, hit number one on the UK Singles Chart and topped the charts in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Norway and Switzerland. It went Diamond in France, 2x Platinum in the UK, and Gold in the United States.
The Seattle Mariners adopted the 220 Kid and Billen Ted remix as a rally song in 2022. In Germany it was the biggest-selling single of the entire year.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is Wellerman a real sea shanty? Technically no. It’s a whaling ballad or “forebitter”: a narrative folk song, not a work song. It shares structural similarities with shanties but was composed as a story-song, not as a functional accompaniment to shipboard labour. Most people call it a sea shanty anyway, including Nathan Evans himself.
What does “the tonguin'” mean in Wellerman? Tonguing refers to the practice of cutting strips of blubber from a whale carcass to be rendered into oil. It was the final and most labour-intensive stage of shore-based whaling. The line “when the tonguin’ is done” means: when the hardest part of the work is finished, we can finally leave.
What does “sugar and tea and rum” mean in Wellerman? These were the provisions the Wellerman’s supply ships brought to the whalers. Because the shore whalers were not paid in wages, these supplies effectively functioned as their pay. They’re also products tied to the 18th and 19th century triangular slave trade, though the song itself makes no comment on that history.
Who wrote Wellerman? Unknown. The song was likely composed by a New Zealand shore whaler between 1860 and 1870. It was collected around 1966 by folk music compiler Neil Colquhoun from an elderly man named F.R. Woods, who had heard it from his uncle. It was first published in 1973.
What is the Billy of Tea in Wellerman? The Billy o’ Tea is the fictional whaling ship at the centre of the song’s story. It and its crew spend 40 days trying to land a particularly stubborn right whale. The ship is never confirmed to be based on a real vessel.
Why did Wellerman go viral on TikTok? Partly the format: TikTok’s duet function allowed singers to layer harmonies on top of Evans’ original, recreating the communal singing the song was built for. Partly timing: the song’s theme of waiting, marking time, and hoping for relief resonated directly with people in COVID lockdown.