Blackbirding
The demand for this kind of cheap labour principally came from European colonists in New South Wales, Queensland, Samoa, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, Hawaii, and New Zealand, as well as plantations in Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala.
[13] 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.
[19] 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.
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.
[26][27][28][29] 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.
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".
[38] 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.
[30] 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.
[41] 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.
Furthermore, Sir Alfred Stephen, the Chief Justice of the New South Wales Supreme Court found that Captain Palmer had illegally seized Daphne and ordered him to pay reparations to Daggett and Pritchard.
This decision, which overrode the obvious humanitarian actions of a senior officer of the Royal Navy, gave further legitimacy to the blackbirding trade out of Queensland and allowed it to flourish.
[74] At Ambrym, the marines of HMS Dart under Commander Moore, raided and burned down a village in retaliation for the killing of Captain Belbin of the blackbirding ship Borough Belle.
[76] In 1882, the Melbourne newspaper The Age published an eight-part series written by journalist and future physician George E. Morrison, who had sailed, undercover, for the New Hebrides, while posing as crew of the brigantine slave ship, Lavinia, as it made cargo of Kanakas.
By a Medical Student" was written in a tone of wonder, expressing "only the mildest criticism"; six months later, Morrison "revised his original assessment", describing details of Lavinia's blackbirding operation, and sharply denouncing the slave trade in Queensland.
[30] Plantation owners such as Robert Cran also bought vessels and made contact with missionaries like Samuel MacFarlane in the New Guinea area to help facilitate the acquisition of cheap workers.
The large influx of New Guinea labourers also sparked concern from white supremacist anti-immigration groups, which led to the election in late 1883 of Samuel Griffith on an anti-Kanaka policy platform.
Reports such as those by Joe Melvin, an investigative journalist who in 1892 joined the crew of Queensland blackbirding ship Helena and found no instances of intimidation or misrepresentation and concluded that the Islanders recruited did so "willingly and cannily",[105] helped the plantation owners secure the resumption of the trade.
Joseph Vos, a well known blackbirder for many years and the captain of William Manson, would use phonographic recordings and enlarged photographs of relatives of Islanders to induce recruits on board his vessel.
[116] In 2012, the Australian government introduced a seasonal worker scheme under the 416 and 403 visas to bring in Pacific Islander labour to work in the agricultural industry performing tasks such as picking fruit.
[127] In 1875 magistrate Robert Fairbairn was sent to investigate pearling conditions at Shark Bay, following reports that people, described as Malays, employed by Cadell and Charles Broadhurst were unpaid, unable to return home and some had starved to death.
[30] In 1868, the Acting British Consul in Fiji, John Bates Thurston, brought only minor regulations upon the trade through the introduction of a licensing system for the labour vessels.
[30] A notorious incident of the blackbirding trade was the 1871 voyage of the brig Carl, organised by Dr James Patrick Murray,[135] to recruit labourers to work in the plantations of Fiji.
[139] Captain Martin of Wild Duck stole people from Espiritu Santo,[140] while other ships such as Lapwing, Kate Grant, Harriet Armytage and Frolic also participated in the kidnapping trade.
[145] The Governor of Fiji, Sir Arthur Gordon, endorsed not only the procuring of Kanaka labour but became an active organiser in the plan to expand it to include mass importation of indentured coolie workers from India.
From 1880 to 1883 these people were protected by strong government measures which included an appointed Protector of Pacific Islanders, routine checks of worker conditions and the ability of the labourers to take employers to court for maltreatment.
Well-known blackbirding vessels involved in the labour trade to New Caledonia were Aoba, Annette, Venus, Aurora, Ika Vuka, Idaho, Ambroua and Effie Meikle.
William Forsyth, an Englishman with expert knowledge on tropical plantations, promoted a scheme of recruiting people from the Gilbert Islands to counteract the shortage of workers in Mexico and Guatemala.
His company, J.C. Godeffroy & Sohn, was able to obtain large tracts of land from the indigenous population at times of civil unrest by selling firearms and exacerbating factional conflict.
[180] Imported Chinese workers eventually became more favourable but labour recruiting from Melanesian islands continued until at least the transfer of power from the Germans to New Zealand at the start of World War I.
(p 270)Georges Baudoux's Jean M'Baraï the Trepang Fisherman, a semi-fictional novella, relates the brutal history of the Kanaka trade and highlights 19th century imperial connections between the French and British Pacific.
