In the coastal South Island, the Māori population was very small. Whalers, often based in Australia, set up shore stations along the southern and eastern coasts and formed Māori–European working communities. In the early 1800s chiefs commonly provided Māori wives - often their daughters - to whalers. By the 1820s European men had married about 200 Māori women in the coastal area between present-day Christchurch and Invercargill, about half of all the marriageable-aged women in the South Island – in fact, Māori men started to find it hard to compete for wives.