Blackbirding
Blackbirding was the trade in indentured labourers from the Pacific in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is often described as a form of slavery, despite the Slave Trade Act 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire, including Australia. The trade frequently relied on coercion, deception, and kidnapping to transport tens of thousands of indigenous people from islands in the Pacific Ocean to Australia and other European colonies, often to work on plantations in conditions similar to the Atlantic slave trade. These blackbirded people, known as Kanakas or South Sea Islanders, were taken from places such as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, Easter Island, the Gilbert Islands, Tuvalu and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, amongst others.
The owners, captains, and crews of the ships involved in the acquisition of these labourers were termed blackbirders. Blackbirding ships began operations in the Pacific from the 1840s and continued, in some cases, into the 1930s. The demand for this kind of cheap labour principally came from sugar cane, cotton, and coffee plantations in New South Wales, Queensland, Samoa, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, and Hawaii. In Auckland, a small group of South Sea Islanders worked in flax mills. Examples of blackbirding outside the South Pacific include the early days of the pearling industry in Western Australia at Nickol Bay and Broome, where Aboriginal Australians were blackbirded from the surrounding areas. In Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere in the Americas, blackbirders sought workers for their haciendas and to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands.
Australia
New South Wales
The first major blackbirding operation in the Pacific was conducted out of Twofold Bay in New South Wales. A shipload of 65 Melanesian labourers arrived in Boyd Town on 16 April 1847 on board Velocity, a vessel under the command of Captain Kirsopp and chartered by Benjamin Boyd. Boyd was a Scottish colonist who wanted cheap labourers to work at his large pastoral leaseholds in the colony of New South Wales. He financed two more procurements of South Sea Islanders, 70 of which arrived in Sydney in September 1847, and another 57 in October of that same year. Many of these Islanders soon absconded from their workplaces and were observed starving and destitute on the streets of Sydney. Reports of violence, kidnap and murder used during the recruitment of these labourers surfaced in 1848 with a closed-door enquiry choosing not to take any action against Boyd or Kirsopp. The experiment of exploiting Melanesian labour was discontinued in Australia until Robert Towns recommenced the practice in Queensland when he fitted out the schooner Don Juan and, in August 1863, despatched her on a recruiting voyage under the command of Captain Greuber.Queensland
The Queensland labour trade in South Sea Islanders, who were commonly known as Kanakas, was in operation from 1863 to 1908. Some 55,000 to 62,500 labourers were brought to Australia, most being recruited or blackbirded from islands in Melanesia, such as the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands and the islands around New Guinea.The process of acquiring these labourers varied from violent kidnapping at gunpoint to relatively acceptable negotiation, although most of the people affiliated with the trade were regarded as blackbirders nonetheless. The majority of those taken were male and around one quarter were under the age of sixteen. In total, approximately 15,000 Kanakas died while working in Queensland – excluding those who died in transit or were killed in the recruitment process – mostly during three-year contracts. This is also similar to the estimated 33% death rate for enslaved Africans in the first three years of arriving in the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean; the conditions were often comparable to those in the Atlantic slave trade.
Robert Towns and the first shipments
In 1863, Robert Towns, a British sandalwood and whaling merchant residing in Sydney, wanted to profit from the world-wide cotton shortage due to the American Civil War. He bought a property he named Townsvale on the Logan River south of Brisbane, and planted of cotton. Towns wanted cheap labour to harvest and prepare the cotton and decided to import Melanesian labour from the Loyalty Islands and the New Hebrides. Captain Grueber together with labour recruiter Henry Ross Lewin aboard Don Juan, brought 67 South Sea Islanders to the port of Brisbane on 17 August 1863. Towns specifically wanted adolescent males. Recruitment and kidnapping were reportedly employed in obtaining these boys.Over the following two years, Towns imported around 400 more Melanesians to Townsvale on one to three year terms of labour. They came on Uncle Tom and Black Dog. In 1865, Towns obtained large land leases in Far North Queensland and funded the establishment of the port of Townsville. He organised the first importation of South Sea Islander labour to that port in 1866. They came aboard Blue Bell under Captain Edwards.
Towns paid many of his Kanaka labourers in goods instead of cash at the end of their working terms. His agent claimed that blackbirded labourers were "savages who did not know the use of money" and therefore did not deserve cash wages. Apart from a small amount of Melanesian labour imported for the beche-de-mer trade around Bowen, Robert Towns was the primary exploiter of blackbirded labour up until 1867, when Captain Whish, formerly an officer in H.M. Light Dragoons and subsequently the owner of a plantation near Brisbane was a leading exploiter of Melanesian labour.
Captain Louis Hope applied Melanesian labour to his twenty acres of sugar cane at Ormiston, Queensland, and later on his farm near the Coomera River. By 1868, the extent of the cultivation of sugar cane exceeded that of cotton; which increased the demand for labour. Licences for recruiting ships were issued by Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, as well as Fiji.
Expansion of labour recruitment for Queensland
The high demand for very cheap labour in the sugar and pastoral industries of Queensland resulted in Towns' main labour recruiter, Henry Ross Lewin, and John Crossley, another recruiter, opening their services to other land-owners. In 1867, King Oscar, Spunkie, Fanny Nicholson and Prima Donna returned with close to 1,000 Kanakas who were offloaded in the ports of Brisbane, Bowen and Mackay. This influx, together with information that the recently arrived labourers were being sold for £2 each and that kidnapping was at least partially used during recruitment, raised fears of a burgeoning new slave trade. These fears were realised when French officials in New Caledonia complained that Crossley had stolen half the inhabitants of a village in Lifou, and in 1868 a scandal evolved when Captain McEachern of Syren anchored in Brisbane with 24 dead islander recruits and reports that the remaining ninety on board were taken by force and deception. Despite the controversy, no action was taken against McEachern or Crossley.In early 1868, fears of a new slave trade and the absence of legislation governing imported non-European labour led to some public opposition to the trade in Brisbane, including a committee chaired by Joshua Jeays and a petition to Queen Victoria. The wording of the petition indicates that the opposition was motivated by a combination of indignation at the unethical treatment of the forced labour, racist views on immigration, and fears of retaliation.
Many members of the Queensland government were already either invested in the labour trade or had Kanakas actively working on their land holdings. The Polynesian Labourers Act of 1868, which they enacted in response to the Syren incident, required every ship to be licensed and carry a government agent to observe the recruitment process, but had few adequate protections and was poorly enforced. Government agents were often corrupted by bonuses paid for the numbers of labourers "recruited", and did little or nothing to prevent recruiters from tricking islanders on-board or otherwise engaging in kidnapping. The Act stipulated that the Kanakas were to be contracted for no more than three years and paid £18 for their work – an extremely low wage that was only paid at the end of their indenture. Islanders were also heavily influenced to buy overpriced goods of poor quality at designated shops before they returned home, which further deprived them of income. The Act, instead of protecting the South Sea Islanders, was criticised for giving legitimacy to a kind of slavery in Queensland.
The Kanaka trade in the 1870s
Recruiting of South Sea Islanders soon became an established industry with labour vessels from across eastern Australia obtaining Kanakas for both the Queensland and Fiji markets. Captains of such ships would get paid about 5 shillings per recruit in "head money" incentives, while the owners of the ships would sell the Kanakas from anywhere between £4 and £20 per head. The Kanakas who were transported on Bobtail Nag had metal discs imprinted with a letter of the alphabet hung around their neck making for easy identification. Maryborough and Brisbane became important centres for the trade with vessels such as Spunkie, Jason and Lyttona making frequent recruiting journeys out of these ports. Reports of blackbirding, kidnap and violence were made against these vessels with Captain Winship of Lyttona being accused of kidnapping and importing Kanaka boys aged between 12 and 15 years for the plantations of George Raff at Caboolture. The Queensland Governor made enquiries and "found that there were a few islanders between fourteen and sixteen years of age, but that they, like all the others who accompanied them, had engaged without any pressure and were perfectly happy and contented". It was alleged by missionaries in the New Hebrides that one crew member of Spunkie murdered two recruits by shooting them, but the immigration agent Charles James Nichols who was on board the vessel denied this occurred. Charges of kidnap were made against Captain John Coath of Jason. Only Captain Coath was brought to trial and, despite being found guilty, he was soon pardoned and allowed to re-enter the recruiting trade. Up to 45 of the Kanakas brought in by Coath died on plantations around the Mary River. Meanwhile, the famous recruiter Henry Ross Lewin was charged with the rape of a pubescent Islander girl. Despite strong evidence, Lewin was acquitted and the girl was later sold in Brisbane for £20.By the 1870s, South Sea Islanders were being put to work not only in cane-fields along the Queensland coast but were also widely used as shepherds upon the large sheep stations in the interior and as pearl divers in the Torres Strait. They were taken as far west as Hughenden, Normanton and Blackall. In 1876, several Islanders died, one by scurvy, on the 800 km journey they were required to make from Rockhampton to Bowen Downs Station. No police report was made and the overseer in charge was only fined £10. Whipping of the Islander labourers was found to be occurring across a number of districts including at the Ravensbourne sheep station, and at the coastal sugar plantations of Nerada and Magnolia owned by Hugh Monckton and Colonel William Feilding respectively. Fatal conflict with the landholders was at times evident, for instance a group of South Sea Islanders murdered Mr Gibbie and Mr Bell, owners of Conway station. One, possibly two of the labourers were shot by Gibbie, while the others were captured by Native Police, one dying while in their custody. When the owners of the properties went bankrupt, the Islanders would often either be abandoned or sold as part of the estate to a new owner. In the Torres Strait, Kanakas were left at isolated pearl fisheries such as the Warrior Reefs for years with little hope of being returned home. In this region, three ships used to procure pearl-shells and beche-de-mer, including Challenge were owned by James Merriman who held the position of Mayor of Sydney.
Poor conditions at the sugar plantations led to regular outbreaks of disease and death. The Maryborough plantations and the labour vessels operating out of that port became notorious for high mortality rates of Kanakas. During the measles epidemic of 1875, ships such as Jason arrived with Islanders either dead or infected with the disease. There were 30 deaths recorded of measles, followed by dysentery. From 1875 to 1880, at least 443 Kanakas died in the Maryborough region from gastrointestinal and pulmonary disease at a rate 10 times above average. The Yengarie, Yarra Yarra and Irrawarra plantations belonging to Robert Cran were particularly bad. An investigation revealed that the Islanders were overworked, underfed, not provided with medical assistance and that the water supply was a stagnant drainage pond. At the port of Mackay, the labour schooner Isabella arrived with half the Kanakas recruited dying on the voyage from dysentery, while Captain John Mackay, arrived at Rockhampton in Flora with a cargo of Kanakas, of which a considerable number were in a dead or dying condition.
As the blackbirding activities increased and the detrimental results became more understood, resistance by the Islanders to this recruitment system grew. Labour vessels were regularly repelled from landing at many islands by local people. Recruiter, Henry Ross Lewin, was killed at Tanna Island, the crew of May Queen were killed at Pentecost Island, while the captain and crew of Dancing Wave were killed at the Nggela Islands. Blackbirders would sometimes make their vessels look like missionary ships, deceiving then kidnapping local Islanders. This led to violence against the missionaries themselves, the best example being the killing of Anglican missionary John Coleridge Patteson in 1871 at Nukapu. A few days before his death, one of the local men had been killed and five others abducted by crew of Margaret Chessel who pretended to be missionaries. Patteson may also have been killed due to his desire to take the Islanders' children to a distant mission school and that he had disrupted the local patriarchal hierarchy. At other islands blackbirding vessels, such as Mystery under Captain Kilgour, attacked villages, shooting the residents and burning their houses. Ships of the Royal Navy were also called upon to investigate the deeds and deliver appropriate punishment upon islands involved in killings of blackbirding crews and missionaries. For example, HMS Rosario in 1871 whilst investigating the Bishop Patteson murder and other conflicts between islanders, settlers and missionaries as the Commander describes in his book. And later under Captain de Houghton and under Commodore John Crawford Wilson conducted several missions in the late 1870s that involved naval bombardment of villages, raids by marines, burning of houses, destruction of crops and the hanging of an Islander from the yardarms. One of these expeditions involved the assistance of the armed crew of the blackbirding vessel Sybil commanded by Captain Satini. Furthermore, two South Sea Islanders were hanged in Maryborough for the rape and attempted murder of a white woman, these being the first legal executions in that town.