THREE

Indentured Labor and the White Savage

The murders of British missionaries on western Pacific islands reinforced stereotypes of their inhabitants as “treacherous,” too impulsive to be trusted. But such violence also advanced a key humanitarian counterclaim. As the prominent Anglican missionary-cum-ethnologist Walter Ivens put it, “[I]n most cases of wrong done to whites in Melanesia there has been some antecedent cause, some evil associated with a white person somewhere.”1 Ivens, for whom the killing of Bishop Patteson offered the ultimate proof of this dictum, was no sectarian zealot. On the contrary, his belief that the Islanders were, in King Lear’s well-worn phrase, “more sinned against than sinning” became the core assumption in an exculpatory discourse centered on the Pacific labor trade.

Between 1863 and 1900, roughly 100,000 Pacific Islanders left their homes to work for European employers abroad, especially in Queensland and Fiji. By contemporary European standards, most of these migrants were “savages,” products of rude barter economies and practitioners of the crudest kind of retributive justice. Yet to many white contemporaries the lex talionis of these people seemed less brutal than the all-consuming greed that drove some European traders to snatch “boys.” Savagery, as Jane Samson has observed, was partly a moral state from which an Islander might be raised or to which a white man could just as easily fall.² Humanitarian activists denounced the indentured labor traffic, insisting that it constituted a thinly disguised form of slavery. If slavery must require overt physical coercion, then the humanitarians’ case was weak in certain respects, as we will see. The Pacific labor trade nonetheless served up several spectacular examples of white savagery in action, however unrepresentative of the trade they may have been. Consider the disturbing story of the Young Australian.

In the late spring of 1868, the Young Australian, a three-masted schooner of 190 tons sailing under the British flag, left Sydney bound for Melanesia. The vessel carried a general cargo of supplies for the planters, traders, and missionaries who clung tenaciously to outposts scattered throughout the island groups lying to the northeast of Australia. But the true purpose of this voyage involved a different commodity. Two Sydney businessmen had recently formed the South Seas Trading Company, a speculative venture whose aim was to supply manpower for the labor-starved cotton planters of Fiji by recruiting workers from among the island populations of the New Hebrides. The demand for cheap labor was just as strong in Queensland, where both sugarcane and cotton flourished in a semitropical climate. But the Queensland Assembly had, in March of 1868, passed the Polynesian Laborers Act,3 legislation designed to prevent the outright kidnapping of naïve Islanders by regulating the conditions of their recruitment, transport, and employment. Fiji, not yet anyone’s colony, seemed a safer labor market. So the South Seas Trading Company chartered the Young Australian, hired an experienced master, Albert Ross Hovell, to sail her, and appointed one Hugo Levinger, a Bavarian by birth, to serve as “supercargo,” the company’s agent and the man in charge of recruitment. The ship’s crew was a polyglot assortment of Australians, Frenchmen, and Pacific Islanders. Referring to the murders later committed in this schooner’s quest for cheap labor, the Sydney Morning Herald would protest that “the originators of a dark deed are shielded [by the law], while the men they have employed as their tools are seized upon, and now await the award of justice—death for death.”⁴

The voyage began quietly. Captain Hovell established a base of operations at Port Resolution on the still turbulent New Hebridean island of Tanna. Hugo Levinger opened a trading station at the head of the harbor. Buying pigs, coconuts, and sulfur in exchange for muskets, ammunition, tobacco, and cotton cloth, Levinger encountered no hostility from the Tannese. This happy circumstance may have resulted from the fact that the Islanders were too busy killing one another with their newly acquired guns. Thomas Neilson, the young Presbyterian missionary stationed nearby, tried to halt this “mutual destruction” by appeals to conscience. The moral high road took Neilson nowhere: Captain Hovell still had 300 pounds of bullets left to trade and Levinger announced that he would make more of the same by melting down the lead linings of tea chests.⁵ Such single-minded pursuit of profit was of course not on display when, in early October, the captain sailed to Levuka, Fiji, and asked his friend J.B. Thurston, the acting British consul, for a license to recruit laborers in the New Hebrides. Thurston liked Hovell. Besides, as a former cotton planter himself, the acting consul recognized local labor needs. Hovell’s license was therefore granted and the ship sailed west to troll for recruits. Five months later it would be a furious Thurston who alerted both the Royal Navy and the governor of New South Wales about news that the Young Australian had perpetrated an atrocity in the New Hebrides, “the particulars having oozed out from members of the crew [later] left in Fiji.” It would also be Thurston who sent three Islander witnesses to give evidence at the sensational trial in Sydney.6

That trial sought to apportion blame for what occurred off the island of Paama in late October 1868. By this point in its voyage, the Young Australian had about seventy recruits aboard, most of them obtained from the southern New Hebridean islands of Tanna and Erromango. Erromangans and Rotumans also served as oarsmen in the two whaleboats that brought recruits from shore to ship. While rowing toward Paama one morning, these whaleboats intercepted a canoe carrying three Islanders, all of whom attempted to escape by swimming away. The terrified Paamese were wrestled into the boats, one of them reportedly with the aid of a gaff hooked through his cheek.⁷

The capture of these three “strange coloured men” (as the white first mate later described them) took place in silence, for neither the crew nor the oarsmen understood the Paamese tongue. Mutual incomprehension could only have heightened the captives’ anxiety. They were presented with loincloths and given yams to eat on the poop deck, but were then forced down into the hold where several Tanna men lounged around mocking the newcomers’ obvious confusion. Whether motivated by fear or rage or a blend of both, the Paamese began pelting the Tannese with coconuts and chunks of wood. After the latter threw open the hatchways and escaped to the main deck, the three Paamese discovered a cache of Tannese bows and arrows in the hold. Seizing these, they began shooting at anything that moved above them. Amidst the escalating violence the words and actions of Captain Hovell and the company agent, Levinger, would remain matters of dispute among witnesses at trial. The weight of the evidence, however, suggested that Levinger eventually ordered a few trusted crewmembers to fire into the hold through gaps in the bulkhead. When even this countermeasure was judged inadequate, the second mate, a Frenchman nicknamed “Bob,” ordered the cook to tie a kerosene-soaked wad of hemp to the end of a long pole and, using this makeshift torch to illuminate the hold, the musketmen granted Levinger’s wish to “quieten” the Paamese. Three corpses were retrieved from the hold and tossed overboard next morning. The Young Australian sailed back to Fiji, where its recruits disembarked as arranged at Levuka and a handsome payment of £1,200 was received.8

Although several men, perhaps as many as seven, assisted in the killings off Paama, just three could be located when, six months later, evidence sufficient for prosecution had been gathered. Captain Hovell and an Islander from Rotumah, “Rangi,” were tried for murder on the high seas at Sydney’s Central Criminal Court. Levinger faced the same charge in Melbourne. The Sydney Morning Herald, having provided detailed coverage of the first trial, took grim satisfaction in the guilty verdict that a jury had very reluctantly delivered against Hovell and Rangi: “let it be observed that in the eye of the law of England murder is the same whether the victim be black or white.”⁹

But this was Australia, not England, and white colonial doubts about the reliability of black witnesses ran deep. The governor of New South Wales had urged Thurston in Fiji to send only Islander witnesses who were “sensible of the obligations of an oath from religious sentiment and belief.”¹⁰ Nevertheless, after the verdict had been rendered and a sentence of death imposed on both Hovell and Rangi, defense counsel argued before the state Supreme Court that “Josiah,” one of the witnesses from Rotumah, should not have been allowed to give evidence. Josiah explained during the trial—through a sworn interpreter—that he had been baptized; that he had learned about Jesus from a Methodist missionary; that he could read the “Rotumah book,” as he called the New Testament translated into his language; and that he knew he would go to hell if he told lies. Yet these assurances meant little to Sir James Martin. Learned counsel for the defense objected that Josiah, “being of a savage race which was not shewn to have any system of religion or morality of its own,” should have been required to offer proof “as to the nature and extent of the religious knowledge [he] . . . had acquired.”¹¹

A better illustration of legal hair-splitting it would have been difficult to find. But other forces combined to make Martin’s argument attractive as the way out for a governor under mounting public pressure. First, a petition signed by 1,746 “respectable” citizens of Sydney listed twenty reasons why the trial of Hovell and Rangi had been unfair.¹² Second, on 8 May 1869, the secretary of the Presbyterian Missionary Society, Robert Steel, had published a letter in the Herald that was later deemed to have “disturbed the free course of justice” by damning the actions of Hugo Levinger in advance of a trial. Dr. Steel was officially reprimanded and fined.¹³ Taken together, these post-trial developments persuaded the Earl of Belmore to commute the death sentences to penal servitude for life. Just two years later he released Hovell and Rangi.14

Hugo Levinger, who quite likely had orchestrated the slaughter off Paama, also escaped severe punishment. Tried in Melbourne, the supercargo was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. Although during the subsequent appeal at least one justice on Victoria’s Supreme Court refused to accept that Levinger’s ship had engaged in kidnapping, the conviction stood.¹⁵ As in Sydney, however, a legal nicety thwarted the course of justice. Under the Colony of Victoria’s criminal procedure, Levinger, a foreigner, enjoyed the right to be tried before a “mixed” jury. Since the requisite number of Bavarians had not been impaneled, the Privy Council moved to quash Levinger’s conviction, leading shortly thereafter to his discharge.¹⁶

Both Australian opponents of indentured labor and humanitarians back in Britain regarded the Young Australian scandal with deep concern. Writing to Her Majesty’s consuls in the Pacific, Britain’s Foreign Secretary warned that “a slave trade with the South Sea Islands is gradually being established by British speculators for the benefit of British settlers.”¹⁷ Neither the Young Australian case nor the even more heinous Daphne incident that followed hard on its heels can be taken as typical of the treatment of Islander migrants. But such horror stories, widely noted in the British as well as the Australasian press,¹⁸ tended to create a presumption of malice on the part of labor recruiters. These stories, moreover, should remind us today that the focus of postcolonial scholarship on sexual and intimate relationships as the main axis of interracial relations is sometimes misleadingly narrow. In the western Pacific, it was above all the world of work where the quotidian violence of colonial rule expressed itself. Stubborn European stereotypes about life in the Pacific Islands heightened concerns over reports of exploitation. After all, these Islanders were thought to inhabit an earthly paradise free from the curse of work. Why would they willingly quit paradise to toil on a white man’s plantation?

MONSTERS REAL AND IMAGINED

Between 1863 and 1906, debate over indentured labor in the Pacific featured few measured words. Those who recruited Islanders for plantation work found themselves stigmatized as “heartless,” “inhuman,” even “monstrous.” In return, champions of the “poor native” earned scorn as “demented” philanthropists and “hysterical” pawns of Exeter Hall. The unedifying venom of such rhetoric has understandably driven some historians to push beyond the obsessions of rival European interest groups toward a more “island-centered” reading of the Pacific past. Although this scholarly shift of focus has enriched our appreciation of the Islander-as-actor, matters of scale and context, easily overlooked, must also be kept in mind. The Pacific labor trade, for one, represented a tiny fraction of the global migration of labor during the nineteenth century, constituting perhaps three percent of the whole.19 For another, the condemnation of unscrupulous recruitment (“blackbirding”) in the Pacific mirrored contemporary critiques of labor markets in China (the “pig trade”) and India (the “coolie trade”).²⁰ Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, “coolie” (probably derived from the Hindi kuli) had become a generalized label for any Asian-Pacific unskilled laborer hired at or near a subsistence wage—whether the person so labeled picked cotton in Queensland or cut sugarcane in Louisiana.²¹ Most importantly, however, we need to remember that the Pacific labor trade was predicated on an assumption of indispensability: without Islanders to endure its scorching fieldwork, plantation-based agriculture was widely believed to be unsustainable.

This reliance on “native” labor in the western Pacific was not new and had never been trouble-free. Apart from brief and widely spaced contacts with European vessels of exploration, most South Sea Islanders first encountered white men as whalers or collectors of bêche-de-mer, the “sea slugs” whose smoked flesh was prized in China. The ships chasing sperm whales were largely self-sufficient, since the flensing and boiling down of carcasses took place at sea. Whalers obviously had to find fresh water, trade for food, and replace masts; and Melville’s literary depictions of the business were accurate in their references to Islanders joining ships’ crews. Still, the success of a whaling voyage did not hinge on local labor. The harvesting and curing of the edible species of bêche-de-mer²² was, by contrast, local labor-intensive. Valued in China partly for their supposed aphrodisiac qualities, these marine creatures, varying in length from six inches to nearly two feet, littered coral reef shallows throughout much of Melanesia. Only Islanders waded or dove for them. The slugs then had to be dried, and here again indigenous help proved vital. Local labor built and thatched the long curing sheds and, under white supervision, gutted, boiled, and smoked the holothurians over closely watched fires. “Too much heat,” warned one trader, would “cause [the slug] to blister, and get porous like a sponge; whereas too little heat . . . will make it spoil, and get putrid.”23 Profits from the sale of properly cured bêche-de-mer in Manila or Canton could be handsome. But the weeks and sometimes months during which black labor continuously served white needs created workers with a shrewd understanding of their own commercial value, and employers who rued this emerging sophistication.²⁴

The sandalwood and pearl shell trades were, according to the reports of missionaries and naval officers, more brutal. Pearl shell, or mother-of-pearl, referred to the iridescent lining of certain warm water oysters. The fancy buttons and fine knife handles made from this substance came at a considerable human cost. Although as early as 1825 London entrepreneurs had tried to fabricate an air-filled “bell” to replace the slow and dangerous job of free-diving for pearl shell, it was not until 1874 that the cotton twill and rubber “diving dress,” complete with heavy copper helmet and air hose, reached the Torres Strait. South Sea Islanders did nearly all the underwater work before 1874, and predominated among the “dressed” divers until Japanese competitors displaced them in the mid-1890s.²⁵ Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, freelance “pearlers,” mostly Australians, earned an evil reputation for abusing their black divers.²⁶

The sandalwood atrocity stories, worse yet, should be treated with caution. One of several authorities to recount the emblematic Efate (Sandwich) island massacre of 1842, Commander Albert Markham noted simply that the “reckless” crews of two British vessels had shot down twenty-six Islanders while collecting the aromatic trees. Later, lighting brushwood fires at the mouths of caves where other Efatese had taken refuge, the crews suffocated several more. “This is merely one instance of the barbarities perpetrated by . . . Englishmen,” Markham was “ashamed” to say.²⁷ What actually occurred on that New Hebridean isle in 1842 is far less certain. The crewmen sent ashore to cut sandalwood were all Tongans, and the fighting apparently broke out over an exchange of insults. Whether those who employed the Tongan musketeers deserved equal blame for the killings may be argued, but it is noteworthy that no white man set foot on shore.²⁸

The sandalwood trade, in any case, became permanently associated with what the Nautical Magazine termed “all kinds of excesses.” Cruel treatment at the hands of sandalwooders was popularly thought to have reignited the “fiendish ferocity” of some Islanders, thereby launching an undeclared tropical war between savages black and white.29 As Dorothy Shineberg has shown, the denizens of sandalwood-rich islands (like the indigenous mainstays of the bêche-de-mer business) quickly grasped their own economic worth, since they were often needed to cut trees growing far inland.³⁰ The Islander-as-victim image nonetheless remained unchallenged in the eyes of most humanitarians. Missionaries were particularly keen to connect the sandalwood trade with the later resort to indentured labor. Clerics alleged that both enterprises wallowed in “awful depravity,” both depended on “collecting cannibals,” and the advocates for both spread vicious lies about the servants of Christ.³¹ There was, in fact, a famous capitalist whose career bridged the two trades. Robert Towns, a Sydney merchant, had joined the search for sandalwood in 1844, and nearly two decades later, his ship, the Don Juan, recruited the first laborers for Queensland. Australians today still debate whether Towns deserves to be branded a “blackbirder.” They frequently forget that even the fair-dealing James Paddon, one of Towns’s main rivals in the sandalwood boom, believed that Melanesians worked better when removed from their home islands and made dependent on their employers for food.³² Ironically, in at least one respect antipodean critics of the sandalwooders helped to sustain a robust triangular commerce: they drank tea. Australia’s unquenchable thirst for the beverage drove its rising merchant class to exchange tobacco, steel axes, and muskets for Islander-harvested sandalwood; and sandalwood, which China burned as incense in Buddhist ceremonies, bought a great deal of Chinese tea.

If the extractive trades of early Pacific commerce called into question the ethics of their white undertakers, the plantation-based cotton and sugarcane industries sharpened these questions. Cotton grown in coastal Queensland and Fiji at first appeared to offer the brightest prospects. As early as January 1860, eight months after Queensland won recognition as an independent colony, its new governor was urging London to help turn northeastern Australia into the world’s leading producer of luxurious “sea island” cotton. Featuring unusually long fibers, a silky texture, and high market value, the sea island variety was then grown mainly by slave labor along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. But Queensland boasted at least six hundred miles of rich alluvial soil where this crop had been shown to flourish. And the moral stench of slavery need never pollute the land, for indentured Chinese or Malay or Indian laborers would tend fields in the torrid north, while in the milder south British emigrants would build a prosperous cotton-growing yeomanry.33

The onset of the U.S. Civil War sparked an explosive transformation in global cotton production. When Union ships imposed a blockade on Confederate ports, the resulting “cotton famine” in Lancashire’s textile mills suddenly energized growers large and small around the world, from the Nile delta to the northern shores of Brazil.³⁴ The direction of British interests seemed clear. By turning to her “loyal dependencies . . . in the Southern Hemisphere,” the mother country could avoid any future reliance on foreign nations (or “half-civilized” people) for her raw fibers. Such at least was Bobbie Towns’s thinking when he bought 4,000 acres of prime agricultural land south of Brisbane.³⁵ Fiji, unlike Queensland, was not yet a British possession. Still, most of the European settler-adventurers who had rushed there to cash in on cotton were now demanding swift annexation.³⁶

Whereas the cotton boom proved fleeting, the lure of sugarcane endured. The end of the American Civil War and the reopening of the South’s cotton pipeline eventually drove down world prices for the fiber. Moreover, the two violent storms that flattened crops throughout central Fiji in early 1866 brought ruin for many planters who were already deeply in debt for the land and equipment they had purchased.³⁷ The nimbler planters, both in Fiji and in Queensland, managed to shift from cotton to cane, having already begun to import South Sea Islanders for the former crop. Cane growers had the additional advantage of feeding a local addiction: sugar and molasses consumption in Australia was reportedly then the world’s highest, a formidable 78.7 pounds per capita in 1878.³⁸ (All that tea had to be sweetened.) As with any farming scheme, the success of cane growing hinged on labor costs, as well as on weather and market price. In Fiji, where powerful rulers tended to control the labor pool, planters found it difficult to enlist enough local help. In Queensland, the Aboriginal peoples had long frustrated settlers who expected an improbable marriage of docility and initiative in their hired hands.³⁹ As one sugar-farmer observed, just ten days by sail from Brisbane lay the New Hebrides, islands “densely crowded with a population who, having nothing to do and sometimes very little to eat, spen[d] their whole time killing one another, not as we do in Europe, for the sake of an idea, but for the sake of a dinner.”⁴⁰ The planters would save the cannibals from themselves and turn a profit in the bargain.

This simple solution masked what was, in fact, a complex debate about the requirements of tropical labor. Those eager to see Australia provide a home for the respectable surplus population of Europe abhorred the idea of importing either Chinese or Indian “coolies.” As for South Sea Islanders, in modest numbers they might prove useful on small farms. But the European immigrant, as exotic plants and animals had already done, would learn to acclimate to the rigors of a new environment; so long as they blocked the sun’s harsh rays, British immigrants would flourish in Queensland.41 Eventually, of course, whites did adapt to raising cane in the high heat and humidity of coastal Queensland, making Australia’s the only sugar industry in the world to rely on workers of European origin.⁴² However, this distinction was not achieved until the early years of the twentieth century, when exclusionary “White Australia” legislation made a virtue of necessity. For a generation before that, Islander muscle, commonly called “Polynesian” or “Kanaka” labor, did all the punishing fieldwork, from “trashing” (trimming) the cane plant’s lower leaves to manhandling the sheaves into carts or tramway cars. The growers of Fiji were less particular about where their laborers originated, so long as they came cheap: “Let John Chinaman once scent a new field for accumulation, and he will undergo any amount of privation . . . to pile up a few dollars.”⁴³ It was nevertheless on Islander backs that Queensland’s sugar production rose from 388 tons in 1867 to 21,000 tons in 1880, and expanded almost as impressively in Fiji.⁴⁴ The critical question therefore became not “Will they work?” but “Will they come?”

To make sure they did, recruiters began in 1863 to entice able-bodied Islanders with “gifts” and the promise of more such wealth once a specified term of labor had been completed. Even where interactions between blacks and whites did not appear to involve physical coercion, opponents of this rapidly expanding labor trade denounced it as “disguised slavery.” Such accusations greeted the docking in Brisbane on 15 August 1863 of Towns’s Don Juan. Within a week the Courier had declared that this “traffic in human flesh” was “palpably rank” and brought “a crying disgrace upon the colony.”⁴⁵

Such invective stemmed from two related concerns. There was, first, the issue of Queensland’s racial identity. “We want to make this colony different from those of the West Indies,” proclaimed the Courier. An influx of “coloured” labor would constitute a giant stride in the wrong direction.⁴⁶ Then there was the record of white violence in the Pacific to consider. Some Australians still remembered the cruel conduct of the schooner Velocity in 1847. Seeking Islanders as shepherds for New South Wales, its captain had shot a Rotuman chief and several of his followers when they dared to protect a group of abused recruits.47 Much more recently, international pressure had been brought to bear on the Peruvian government, which throughout 1862 and early 1863 had licensed private recruiting ships to scour the eastern Pacific for workers. Having abolished slavery in 1855, Peru needed bodies not only to cultivate its cotton fields but also to mine guano, its most valuable export. Through outright abduction, diseases introduced during transport, and meager rations, this brief but disastrous experiment had ravaged Easter Island and the coral atolls of Polynesia. Now, it appeared, Queensland was poised to enter a commercial field that Peru had just abandoned in shame.⁴⁸

Robert Towns’s enduring notoriety as a blackbirder, it should be added, was mostly a matter of guilt by association. He had not originally tried to recruit Islander labor. But his attempt to hire “coolies” at Madras and Calcutta had run afoul of India’s colonial government, and his subsequent plan to engage German immigrants had unraveled when these “useless” Europeans demanded higher wages.⁴⁹ Granted, Towns could never have been mistaken for a diplomat. In an open letter to missionaries that accompanied the Don Juan on its first recruiting voyage, this lion of commerce sought clerical help with his “worldly mission,” noting that picking cotton in Queensland “will do more towards civilizing the natives in one year than you can possibly [do] in ten.”⁵⁰ Towns’s most glaring defect, though, was employing Ross Lewin, one of the mythical monsters of the Victorian Pacific.

Among them, Lewin, Dr. James Murray, and William “Bully” Hayes personified the worst of white savagery. Exactly because their careers remained shrouded in unknowns, they could bear the weight of rumor, providing the “slave trade” with human faces and, in the long recounting of their evil acts, perpetuating a crude villain/victim dichotomy. Prior to the large-scale recruitment of Islander labor for Queensland and Fiji, white savagery in the western Pacific had often been associated with “beachcombers,” a catchall category that included shipwrecked or abandoned seamen, deserters from whaling ships, escaped convicts, and nearly any masterless man who appeared to have “gone native.”⁵¹

The monsters of the 1860s and ’70s seemed to be an altogether more calculating lot. In the eyes of their enemies at least, they combined pretensions to gentility with a cold-blooded pursuit of wealth. Ross Lewin, once a Royal Navy seaman and possibly a deserter, was said to have honed his manstealing skills in the brief but lethal Peruvian labor trade. By his own reckoning, Lewin had taken up trading in the South Seas around 1842.52 Robert Towns’s recruiting agent between 1863 and early 1867, Lewin was widely believed to be a blackbirder, an imputation he denied almost as vehemently as his alleged rape of a Tanna girl aboard the Spunkie in 1868.⁵³ The rape charge against Lewin failed for lack of a white witness. Nor did his subsequent ownership of the Daphne, a small schooner that R.N. Captain George Palmer found to be “fitted up precisely like an African slaver, minus the irons,” result in anything more penal than revocation of his Queensland recruiting license.⁵⁴ Yet a harsher judgment awaited him. Lewin boasted that the best proof of his kindness toward savages was his flourishing estate on Tanna: “Had I been the wholesale and unprincipled kidnapper . . . represented by those who can know nothing of the circumstances . . . I should not have dared to land upon the island, much less make arrangements to live there.” It was on Tanna, in April 1874, that this demonic figure was shot in the back while strolling about his heavily fortified plantation—rough justice for killing a local banana thief.⁵⁵

James Patrick Murray vanished before he could be rewarded in the manner of Ross Lewin, although not before winning a reputation for diabolical cruelty. Born in Ireland and raised in New Zealand, this one-time health officer for Sandhurst, a borough in the Australian colony of Victoria, abandoned medicine for the lucre of the labor trade. Having bought the brig Carl, Murray set sail from Melbourne in June of 1871. The doctor’s savagery began in the New Hebrides but reached its peak off Buka in the western Solomons. There the crew of the Carl was ordered to drop cannonballs, iron spars, and lengths of heavy chain on the canoes of Islanders who had paddled alongside to trade.⁵⁶ Those fished out of the sea were added to the “recruits” already locked in the ship’s hold. Repression bred resistance. On the second night of rioting in the hold, worried crew began firing down the main hatchway (Figure 3.1). Far from halting this massacre, Murray joined the shooters, reportedly serenading them with the callously upbeat “Marching Through Georgia” (which celebrated, among other marvels, “How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound” of Sherman’s army approaching).⁵⁷ A large fraction of the estimated seventy Islanders killed were wounded men tossed overboard after having their hands and feet bound. Dr. Murray, the “monster in human shape” who had orchestrated these atrocities, dodged all legal sanctions by turning Queen’s evidence at the subsequent murder trials of four crewmembers. Lest it abet a lynching, the Town and Country Journal waited until Murray fled Australia before publishing his likeness. Murray’s own father agreed that this brute ought to hang, should capital punishment be considered.58

Figure 3.1   The Carl atrocity, 1872. “Blackbirders” shoot into the Carl’s hold to silence terrified Islanders.

SOURCE: Illustrated Monthly Herald [Melbourne] (28 December 1872).

If, as one historian has suggested, the enormity of James Murray’s crime served to distance the Carl massacre from its “enabling colonial context” of labor exploitation,59 such spectacles of inhumanity nonetheless cast a moral pall over the most upright recruiters. As for South Sea outlaws, a resort to blackbirding was assumed to be irresistible. William “Bully” Hayes, for example, topped any Oceanic rogues’ gallery. American by birth and a brawler by nature, Hayes, from the mid-1850s through the mid-1870s, made the Pacific his pond, surfacing unpredictably in San Francisco, Honolulu, Sydney, Hong Kong, and a great many of the island groups in between. He somehow managed to stay a step ahead of the naval authorities and swindled the merchants hunting him.60 Hayes’s reported kidnapping of Islanders dismayed the Aborigines’ Protection Society, caused consternation in the House of Lords, and allowed Fijian planters to denounce the “tyranny and rapacity” of ruffians who had given labor recruitment an undeserved bad name. In 1877, his murder at sea by an enraged mate wielding a marlinspike—a “deserved extinction,” R.L. Stevenson called it—ended a famously larcenous life.⁶¹ And yet there exists no solid evidence that Bully Hayes was a blackbirder. Such conflation of theft and slave-trading occurred in part because humanitarian activists encouraged it.

These activists argued, rightly, that the labor trade was fast reshaping island life, although they often lacked the statistical data to prove it. Thanks to patient demographic reconstruction, we now have a far clearer sense of the scale of Pacific labor migration. Between 1863 and the end of Queensland’s recruiting in 1904, roughly 61,000 Islanders, primarily from the New Hebrides and the Solomons, arrived in northeastern Australia. The years 1864 to 1911 saw another 27,000 go to work in Fiji.⁶² Several thousand more were obtained to toil on the coconut plantations of German Samoa, in the nickel mines of French New Caledonia, and as crew aboard European ships sailing under many flags. It has been estimated that in 1882, during the peak period of labor recruitment, there were about 14,000 New Hebrideans working abroad out of a total population of 100,000. Their absence represented not merely fourteen percent of the New Hebridean population but an alarming share of its young men. British missionaries railed against this denudation. They could not have known, as we do today, that as a proportion of their combined populations, the central Melanesian islands furnished more migrants than China during the last third of the nineteenth century.⁶³

Other aspects of the labor trade struck humanitarians as no less repugnant. The distinguishing feature of indentured labor was its contractual character—an agreement to serve an employer for a fixed period at a fixed wage rate with penal sanctions to enforce these terms. The length of service specified for Islanders migrating either to Queensland or Fiji was initially three years, although in 1877 Fiji adopted the five-year indenture more common in British colonies. On paper the agreements looked fair. Beyond his wages (paid in the form of trade goods), the migrant was entitled to free food, clothing, and shelter, as well as passage back to his island at the end of service. But when profit margins shrank, unscrupulous employers were known to skimp on these benefits, sometimes with deadly consequences. For example, the captain of a recruiting vessel might save himself considerable time and expense by dumping returning workers on the first island sighted or, far worse, among their traditional enemies.64

Even without evidence of callous neglect, humanitarians were disposed to view indentured labor in the Pacific as a stain on Christian civilization. The timing, admittedly, seemed suspect: no sooner had slavery been abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833 than indenture schemes had arisen in its place. And this was a new sort of servile labor. Whereas the indentured servants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been poor Europeans seeking better lives in the New World colonies, the indentured poor of the mid-nineteenth century were now all nonwhite. Those twin pressure groups forged in the fires of abolition, the Aborigines’ Protection Society (1837) and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (1839), believed that planters everywhere would “inevitably” oppress the “negro” so long as right-thinking citizens remained silent.⁶⁵ Neither organization in fact slowed the destruction of black communities in South Africa, Australia, or Tasmania. Indeed one could argue that their humanitarian ideology, which often posed British Christianity as the only practical alternative to extinction, smacked of white supremacist thinking.⁶⁶ But the activists backing the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) in particular managed to heighten public awareness of the dangers facing indentured Islanders. Civilization, declared one APS leader in 1872, had little to do with “machines, steam-ships, and electric telegraphs,” and everything to do with extending the “civil rights of mankind.” To this end APS delegations not only haunted the Colonial Office and the halls of Parliament, but also operated a global network of correspondents—merchants, clerics, and colonial civil servants, in the main—whose identities were cloaked.⁶⁷ So, when rumors of skullduggery aboard a labor recruiting ship spread in a Levuka hotel or on a Brisbane wharf, there was a fair chance that they would eventually reach London.

Whether aligned with the APS or not, the foes of the labor trade saw threats to dark strangers nearly everywhere. In Queensland, the articles of indenture derived from its 1861 Masters and Servants Act, legislation that devoted far more attention to the duties of employees than to those of employers. This was worrisome enough. More disturbing still, such agreements began as oral contracts with illiterate men and women. Admirably flexible instruments for recruiters, who could alter the terms of service before they were fixed in ink, these contracts impressed humanitarians as hopelessly flawed.68 Where brute force trumped the letter of the law, protecting indigenous peoples came down to the might of the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, Britain’s Australian Division, organized in 1859, was too occupied with New Zealand’s racial strife to provide meaningful oversight of labor recruitment until 1866, and long thereafter, as we will see, legal restrictions continued to hamper effective action against blackbirders.⁶⁹ Nor was action to shield vulnerable Islanders likely to originate in the Colonial Office, especially after 1871 when the deeply religious permanent undersecretary, Frederick Rogers, retired. Only the prospect of imperial “dishonour” appeared likely to rouse torpid civil servants.⁷⁰ Thus, the enemies of indentured labor sought to make their case using a moral register from which moderation was missing.

Moral absolutism proved a potent weapon, to be sure. But the humanitarians’ fevered rhetoric often outstripped their facts, and their zeal to “humanize savage and cannibal races”⁷¹ struck defenders of the labor trade as irresponsible. Whereas the murder of J.C. Patteson became an abolitionist parable, planters in Fiji pointed out that, although the martyred bishop had expressed grave doubts about renegade recruiters, he never proposed to halt the traffic.⁷² Planters and merchants in pre-cession Fiji were widely depicted as thugs, it is true. Their contempt for most missionaries seemed complete, and their tiny commercial hub, Levuka, served as headquarters for the “British Subjects’ Mutual Protection Society,” better known as “the Ku Klux.”⁷³ Still, they had good reason to complain that the humanitarians tarred all labor recruiters with the same sanctimonious brush. Especially in the Presbyterian-dominated southern and central New Hebrides, abolitionist claims could be far-fetched. Hence the charge that recruiting had increased infanticide by separating husbands and wives for several years, the latter growing desperate to eliminate proof of their infidelity.⁷⁴ Early in 1872, 10,000 copies of a pamphlet on the “slave trade” were mailed to Presbyterians in Scotland, Nova Scotia, and the Australasian colonies. Subtlety did not muddy its message. To speak of Islander recruits as “free labourers” was “simply to prostitute words, pervert the English language, and turn it into a vehicle of deception.”⁷⁵

Conspicuously missing from these mutual recriminations was any Islander assessment of the labor trade. Recruits published no tracts and delivered no speeches. They did act, however, and their actions, although often difficult to interpret, suggest a lively appreciation of injustice.

AGENCY AND OUTRAGE

Both during the years of the Pacific labor trade and among those who later studied it, questions about Islander participation have stirred fierce debate. Could a “savage” gauge the probable consequences of near-term decisions? What, in the context of nineteenth-century Melanesian cultures, marked a “free” decision? Assuming that they did behave as rational actors, how much decision-making power did Islanders actually wield when depraved white men stood in their way? And if Oceanic subalterns did speak, can we, products of vastly different worlds, hear them?

Even to frame these questions is to impose retrospective clarity on what often must have seemed a spider’s web of possibilities; choices and consequences, expectations and results, were never so neatly formulated either for Islander recruits or for those who spoke and wrote about them. Assessments of “native character,” to take an obvious example, varied widely among self-styled friends of the Aborigine. According to one such ally, the South Sea Islander was “in mental capacities and development on a par with . . . the English schoolboy”—impetuous, trusting, naïve. The Islander also resembled the “simple English country girl in London” who “rushes into the snares awaiting her!”76 Here, popularly dressed, was J.S. Mill’s only exception to the sovereignty of the individual: when “backward” peoples were in their “nonage,” they, like children, must be protected against their own actions, as well as against external harm.⁷⁷ Another staunch supporter of “these uneducated savages” depicted them as perfectly sensible people who would never have agreed to leave their homes for three years if the true length of their service obligation had been disclosed. Deception, the abolitionists maintained, wore many masks. “The horrid trick of putting remorseless savages in charge of recruiting [whale]boats” was among the most cynical because it channeled the presumed appetite of the cannibal into procuring bodies for plantations to devour. Eternally divided among themselves by an inveterate lawlessness, island folk were easily turned against one another, or so it appeared to their would-be protectors.⁷⁸

At the same time, however, some late-Victorian defenders of the labor trade imputed to the savage a basic business acumen. William Wawn, an English expatriate who took up labor recruiting for Queensland, allowed that the early years of the trade had witnessed several egregious cases of kidnapping. But such misbehavior would be “extremely impolitic on the part of a recruiter who expected to be engaged for any length of time,” since, once deceived, indigenous communities would rebuff all future overtures. A like-minded writer complained that semi-Christianized Islanders became “learned in the trading tricks of the white man, drive hard bargains, and having lost much of their respect for the European by intimate association with him, are apt to regard themselves as his equals.”79

Modern revisionist historians have been blunter. Hugh Laracy declared in 1975 that to represent labor recruitment as thinly veiled slavery “involves the assumption that Melanesians were so stupid that for more than forty years tens of thousands of them stood around on island beaches waiting to be kidnapped.”⁸⁰ Similarly, it has been argued that as Islanders grew more familiar with the recruiting process, kidnapping was rendered “at once unnecessary and impossible.”⁸¹ Seeking to reconfigure the labor trade as a set of willing negotiations between Europeans and Melanesians, the revisionists have tended to downplay the coercive conduct of the former as “petty acts of duress,”⁸² and to emphasize the initiative, or agency, of the latter. After the mid-1880s, many scholars have agreed, the forcible recruitment of Islanders grew increasingly rare. To account for this shift in the nature of the trade, revisionists accept that stricter state oversight, particularly the presence of government inspectors aboard all British-registered recruiting vessels, was a contributing factor. But the explanatory key to the normalization of recruiting, they insist, lay with the accommodation and resistance of the migrants themselves. The volunteering of Islanders for second and third periods of indenture has thus been cited as proof that they were making a free and informed choice. The revisionists have pointed out that laborers returning to their islands after three (or more) years toiling on European-owned plantations brought back a wealth of knowledge about the material rewards to be gained abroad and the physical price to be paid for them. In short, after a turbulent start the labor trade created its “own harbinger.”⁸³

Depicting Melanesian recruits, like E.P. Thompson’s early industrial workers, as “present at [their] own making”⁸⁴ does not, of course, suffice to explain why these tropical migrants left their homes in the first place. To the extent that it can be answered at all, the question of motivation must be approached largely by inference. Leaving aside those Islanders who were abducted into indentured service, several considerations could have made paid labor abroad attractive. Discussing Solomon Islanders, a leading revisionist historian discerned four “stimuli”: the lure of European goods; the novelty of travel; the example set by others who had returned and apparently profited from their experiences in a variety of ways; and pressures within their own society.85 Certainly the tobacco, cloth, steel axes, and, in the early years, firearms that recruiters gave to the friends and relatives of men willing to sail away provided material lubrication. Enemies of the labor trade were wont to see such transactions as “bribery.” But because Western concepts of buying, selling, and gift giving rarely carried the same connotations in isolated island communities, the abolitionists’ case was weak on this score.⁸⁶

The enticement of the new is another “push” factor that can easily lend itself to distortion. Ironically, imagining the Islander as a free agent keen to see distant lands can also infantilize, conjuring up “a Pacific Sambo, mindlessly lusting for the bright lights of civilisation.”⁸⁷ The spectacle of returning workers laden with white men’s goods would have made a lasting impression for at least two reasons. First, on islands that produced no cash crops, indentured labor constituted one of the few forms of negotiable currency; unless an employer reneged on a contract or a recruit died on the job, cutting cane for three years would yield a predictable cash-equivalent. Second, the treasures that a young man brought home in his “trade box”—typically a rectangular pine chest with a lockable lid—could have invested him with a tribal status disproportionate to his tender years. The prospect of lavishing trade box wealth on his elders might have proven irresistible to a young mind.⁸⁸ Finally, fixed-term immigration to Queensland or Fiji would have offered a convenient escape for individuals out of favor in fishbowl villages. Queensland, the missionary-ethnologist Walter Ivens observed, was a “veritable refuge” for Solomon Island pariahs: “murderers, sorcerers, adulterers, . . . thieves, discontented wives, rebellious children, all hailed the coming of a labor-vessel as a chance to be freed from the likelihood of punishment or from the irksomeness of home restrictions.”⁸⁹

The reasons why Pacific Islanders would voluntarily, even eagerly, seek passage on recruiting ships must have been as varied as the migrants themselves. Surely desperation, as well as calculated advantage, drove Islanders overseas. For example, famine produced by local crop failures would have chased some to distant plantations, while others, suffering from chronic disease, reportedly saw their only hope for cure in European settlements.⁹⁰ But in their campaign to resuscitate the Islander-as-agent, revisionist scholars of the labor trade have sometimes failed to acknowledge that the line between coerced and free labor must often have been blurred. Formerly indentured workers, once back on their islands, sometimes acted as middlemen (“passage masters”) in the recruiting business. The careers of enterprising brokers such as “Kwaisulia” of Ada Gege, northeastern Malaita, can be offered to show that the give and take of the labor trade became an accepted rhythm in Islander life.91

Yet some “volunteers” for Fiji and Queensland were captives of local custom if not of white monsters. Where social expectations called for the repayment of one clan’s debt to another, a senior member of the obliged side might have felt great pressure to enlist himself, or to lean on a younger relative, when the recruiter’s boat arrived. Although such mechanisms of clientage and control operating unspoken within island communities probably escaped the notice of most government inspectors, they would certainly have limited the free choice of recruits. Volition, then, was a contingent state. Or, put another way, Islander agency did not preclude the existence of constraining forces within local cultures.⁹²

If trying to square revisionist accounts of the labor trade with the ongoing grievances of its descendants is apt to be an exercise in frustration, the fact remains that affected island populations usually had options. This assertion flies in the face of much abolitionist evidence. Rev. R.H. Codrington of the Melanesian Mission, for one, would have disputed any such claim. Referring to the Mission’s stronghold in the Banks Islands, he lamented in late 1872:

There are six “labourers” returned from Queensland now at Mota; not a single one of them was a free agent entering into a contract with the colonial Government or employer. Everyone had been deceived into going as he thought for three months to some country they call Sydney, without any notion of work or wages. They were generally well treated, it is true, but their [understanding of] their condition in the Colony is simply that they were bought and sold.⁹³

Codrington, normally an astute observer of island life, was then reeling from the news of Bishop Patteson’s murder—ostensibly a product of unfocused revenge for the brutality of white labor recruiters. Had this trauma distorted his perception of the Mota men and their innocence?

By late 1872 such naïveté would have been rare in central Melanesia (although not in New Guinea or on its adjacent islands). If an Islander was willing to migrate, there often arose a choice between Queensland and Fiji. Since Queensland paid indentured men £6 per year, twice Fiji’s wages, and asked three rather than five years of service, recruiters for the latter worked at a disadvantage. Fijian ships also retained the onus of the pre-cession years, when struggling planters had often been unable to return Islanders on time. Once it became a crown colony in 1874, however, Fiji enacted a comprehensive set of labor regulations that conduced to the Islanders’ benefit. Migrants usually preferred Fiji’s yam ration to Queensland’s rice. Fiji, well before Queensland, made sure that wages were paid into a government-supervised fund every six months (thereby minimizing the wages lost through planter bankruptcies), and earlier recognized the justice of sending what was owed a deceased laborer to his next of kin.94

Whether their young men and, much less often, young women chose Fiji or Queensland, Melanesian villagers would eventually have learned that indentured labor entailed serious risks. Captain William Wawn declared that Islanders who had recently spent three years cutting cane in Queensland stood out on any New Hebridean beach: “They would present a healthier aspect, possess more muscular frames, and be devoid of the furtive, ‘wild dog’ expression which the genuine savage usually wears.” Another champion of the Queensland trade held that “habituating” Islanders to prolonged hard work “infuse[es] into their minds the germs of civilization, viz. a knowledge and a feeling that they have rights, and are protected by law.”⁹⁵

Alas, an appalling proportion of these lucky laborers never lived long enough to savor the rule of law, or to glimpse the beaches of home. Compounding the mortality of the Pacific’s own Middle Passage, roughly a quarter of the Islanders who reached Queensland between 1863 and 1904 died in that colony.⁹⁶ Most—over seventy percent—of these deaths occurred among people in the prime of their lives, a period spanning the mid-teens to the mid-thirties. Between 1880 and 1883, the mortality rate among this demographic segment was about five times higher for Pacific Islanders than for Queensland’s European population as a whole. The foes of indentured labor sketched a still more damning profile, estimating the “Polynesian” male death rate at nine to eleven times that of English males between ages sixteen and thirty-two.⁹⁷ Mortality rates for Islanders working in Fiji, although more difficult to ascertain, would have been little, if any, lower. Physical exhaustion rendered Melanesians in both places highly susceptible to dysentery, influenza-pneumonia, and tuberculosis. Acknowledging a link between overwork and the severity of infectious disease, the Fijian government in 1890 prohibited the employment of Islanders on sugar plantations where new land had to be cleared. Yet 12.5 percent of those recruited between 1891 and 1900 perished on the job all the same.98

The continuing sacrifice of Melanesian recruits on white men’s lands must have deterred an unknowable number of Islanders from accepting terms of indenture, or from reenlisting. But where death or injury resulted from perceived malice, Pacific Islanders were often keen to settle scores. They did not need European employers, missionaries, or colonial administrators to explain their “rights.” Seeking revenge against an aggressor was both permitted and expected in many Melanesian cultures. The British imperial view was naturally far different. Particularly where Islanders succeeded in killing Europeans, newspapers habitually referred to the perpetration of an “outrage”—that is, an act of violence constituting “a gross or wanton . . . indignity,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defined this emotive noun.⁹⁹ The dignity of presumed racial superiority was nearly always violated when blacks slaughtered whites. Only where black men organized large armies and demonstrated tactical cunning on the battlefield, as the Zulus did on the South African veldt and the Ashanti in the dense forests of West Africa, might “savages” become “warriors.” The South Sea Islanders, by contrast, were merely “treacherous” because their tactics involved the false smile and the hatchet blow from behind. Regardless of means, however, striking against an enemy, or against those who resembled that enemy, constituted the most dramatic form of Islander agency.

Although defenders of the labor trade praised the usual docility of Islanders employed in Fiji and Queensland, meekness was not a defining feature of the aggrieved Melanesian. White traders based in the New Hebrides knew this all too well. Surrounded as they believed themselves to be by compulsive thieves, these pioneers placed their faith in fortified compounds and drastic action against trespassers. Such belligerence had not preserved Ross Lewin. Nor did it save George de Lautour, whose small coconut and maize farm on Aore island, off the southeastern coast of Espíritu Santo, was stoutly fenced and gated, each gatepost adorned with a human skull. On a tree close to the gate hung a warning that presumably pleased the trader, even though it would have been meaningless to his illiterate neighbors:

Notice.

Dogs and Niggers are Forbidden to enter inside the Portals of [these] Gates. Any Dogs or Niggers found therein will suffer the Penalty of Death. By order of George de Lautour, British Resident.

Unluckily for de Lautour, one day in the late 1880s his son left the gate ajar, allowing an embittered local to creep toward the main house and shoot the master through its cane walls.100 Aore, and indeed many of the tropical islands located between the Dutch East Indies and Tonga, formed one of Britain’s most turbulent colonial frontiers, as exotic as her African enclaves and just as dangerous.¹⁰¹

It was at the interface of ship and shore where this turbulence was most apparent. (See Figure 3.2.) European captains began to take precautions against Islanders swarming aboard their vessels long before the labor trade commenced. In early 1846, for example, a Marist priest wrote to his brother about the “vast net-work of ropes which rose up above the bridge of the ship . . . & which formed a kind of wall” to repel the Solomon Islanders among whom they were cruising.102 But the hunt for indentured help plainly did multiply the points of potential friction: between 1863 and its end in the early twentieth century, the Queensland labor trade alone generated over 700 voyages to or from Melanesia.¹⁰³

Figure 3.2   Labor recruiters at work in the New Hebrides, circa 1878. To discourage an ambush by opportunistic Islanders, the covering whaleboat remains at a distance.

SOURCE: Courtesy, Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales, DL 90_672, no_6.

We will never know how many deaths resulted from Islander attacks on labor vessels. One gentleman-tourist who spent a few months sailing through the Solomons and New Hebrides in 1880 later compiled a list of thirty-four “outrages” that had claimed 114 lives between early 1875 and early 1881. This catalog clearly understated the actual loss of European life because it failed to disaggregate what “murder of crew” meant for several attacks.104 In any event, naval and colonial officials knew where trouble lurked. The Admiralty’s Sailing Directions for the western Pacific offered indispensable advice about the locations of dangerous reefs, potable water, and protected anchorages. Tellingly, the 1885 edition also warned of the Santa Cruz group that “too much caution cannot be used in dealing with the inhabitants of these islands.”¹⁰⁵ Lieutenant-Commander Moore, upon completion of a peacekeeping voyage through the Solomons and New Hebrides aboard HMS Dart in late 1883, pinned much of the blame for civil unrest on former Queensland laborers. Their “moral welfare” having been neglected abroad, they had supposedly returned as brazen enemies of all whites. “It is the most daring of these men who are the leaders in all the conspicuous cases of massacre,” Moore declared. By 1892, John Thurston, now high commissioner for the western Pacific, had grown inured to the fact of violence in this region, where “ships of war are almost constantly cruising at a cost to the Imperial Treasury wholly incommensurate with the interests involved.” Regrettable as the killing of a white man on Espíritu Santo may have been, “all that has happened is that a British subject has adventured himself among barbarians, notorious for their savage propensities. He has been murdered. . . . Nothing is certain but uncertainty.”¹⁰⁶

Quite sure at least was the emergence of Malaita, largest island of the Solomon group, as among the most hazardous recruiting grounds. If familiarity did in fact breed contempt, then Malaita simmered with disaffection. After all, at least half of the 30,000 Solomon Islanders obtained for plantation work abroad hailed from this place. And in many cases such widespread exposure to European society seems to have made them no less truculent.¹⁰⁷ Malaita had long known intra-island raiding between the bush people of its hilly interior and the “saltwater” folk of the coast. With the tantalizing wealth in trade goods now available aboard recruiting ships, raiding turned outwards. John Gorrie, the Western Pacific High Commission’s chief judicial officer, could see no reason for the Borealis outrage of mid-September 1880 “except the desire for plunder.” Anchored a quarter of a mile off a small island in Mamana Bay, this recruiting vessel was quietly overrun by eighty Malaitans in canoes once the whaleboat carrying the ship’s captain and nearly all its firearms had rowed ashore. Only the cook survived the slaughter that ensued, a slaughter in which one crewman’s leg was found hacked off and gnawed to the bone.108 Two years later the Janet Stewart was seized under similar circumstances at Kwai.

When a recruiting vessel managed to beat back an attack, the losses it inflicted might just steel the Islanders’ resolve. The case of the Young Dick suggested as much. In late May of 1886, Captain Rogers foolishly left too few men aboard his labor vessel anchored in hostile Sinerago Bay. This mistake was compounded when his skeletal crew allowed several local men to feast their eyes on the trade gear spread across the deck. The so-called “cupidity of natives” soon launched an attack. But for the quick thinking of able seaman Thomas Crittenden, all aboard the Young Dick would have been lost. Once the axes began flashing, however, Crittenden fought his way up to the topsail yardarm, Snider rifle in hand and pockets stuffed with cartridges. From this perch he managed to pick off more than a dozen of the “seething, screeching mob of brutal devils” below. This halted the attack but not the bloodshed. To avenge their lost men, the Sinerago people offered a reward of 100,000 porpoise teeth to any village that could capture a ship. The residents of Manaoba earned a smaller prize two years later by killing the government inspector of the Ariel, whom they lured ashore with pleas for medical aid.¹⁰⁹

Why did Royal Navy “gunboats,” Britain’s best weapon in the Pacific, not punish such Islander aggression? Sometimes, of course, they did. Eighteen days before the attack on the Young Dick, tomahawk-wielding men had waylaid the ship’s boatswain. Blood streaming from his face and scalp, the mate had barely survived to tell his tale of treachery. The captain of HMS Opal, then visiting nearby Port Adams, decided that the offenders ought to learn a “salutary lesson.” Captain Brooke therefore shelled a village said to be sheltering them. One coconut palm perished, but none of the assailants—all of whom, having been warned by the resident Anglican missionary, watched this administration of naval justice from the safety of a distant beach. As for those who later swarmed the Young Dick, the likelihood of apprehending the culprits struck Rear-Admiral Tryon as remote. The declaration of an “act of war” against the offenders seemed inappropriate because the captain and crew of the Young Dick had, essentially, invited disaster. Moreover, since the Islanders of the eastern Malaitan coast could readily distinguish among trading vessels, labor ships, the mission schooner, and men-of-war, few naval craft would ever enjoy the element of surprise. And to order a landing party meant asking sailors to walk “Indian file” along narrow jungle tracks where the danger of ambush loomed large. Thus, if they could not persuade or pressure a local strongman to give up the architects of an “outrage,” naval officers had little room to maneuver.110

Adding to these tactical constraints was the ambivalence of public opinion about such attacks and the appropriate response to them. “Exeter-Hallism,” as supporters of the labor trade dismissed all philanthropic concern for Islander welfare, covered a wide range of humanitarian thought. Few were as doctrinaire as Rev. John Inglis, for nearly three decades the chief guardian of Presbyterian values in the New Hebrides. According to this missionary, a “small, wealthy, influential, bold, bouncing, unscrupulous class of men” would soon exterminate the “natives” unless enlightened naval officers kept these race-killers in check.¹¹¹ With J.C. Patteson’s martyrdom fresh in his memory, Commander Albert Markham later explained that he had “determined to do all in my power to shield and protect the Islanders.” Yet Markham’s enlightenment arrived too late for the Reverend Inglis’s taste: the commander’s destruction of two villages on Nukapu when his own men drew a hail of arrows impressed some self-appointed friends of the Aborigines as rash.¹¹² Markham’s reprisal was unusual for its time. Between the start of regular Pacific island patrols in 1829 and the cession of Fiji in 1874, just eight Royal Navy ships fired on indigenous settlements.¹¹³ True enough, at the height of the labor trade, stepped-up recruiting provoked more Islander “outrages” and correspondingly more punitive policing methods from naval authorities. But as the Sandfly affair suggests, it usually required spectacular violence to ignite the Royal Navy’s wrath.

HMS Sandfly was one of five Sydney-built schooners launched in 1873 and 1874 to survey the backwaters of Melanesia and monitor the labor traffic. Light and nimble, they were well suited to ply reef-strewn seas.¹¹⁴ The Sandfly’s log for 13 October 1880 mentions only that its captain, Lieutenant-Commander James Bower, and five crew left in the whaleboat at 6:30 a.m. to explore the tiny islands near Florida, in the central Solomons. It had been a placid cruise so far, the only mishap recorded being the loss of a hammer overboard. Calm gave way to consternation, however, when six days elapsed without word from the captain or his crew. A search party finally located the missing men on uninhabited Mandoleana Island. All save one were dead, their headless bodies baked black by the equatorial sun. Only seaman Francis Savage had managed to swim away at dusk and hide on a neighboring islet.115

Although conceding that the Sandfly’s captain and his men had been unwise to relax—brewing tea and bathing—on a strange beach, the same Sydney newspapers that normally urged restraint in dealing with wayward Islanders now demanded “sharp justice.” The attack, it appeared, had been entirely unprovoked. The assailants were headhunters, single-minded killers about whose deeds Lieutenant Bower had already warned his superiors. The victims, four of them Londoners, exemplified the best qualities of the English “tar.” No trade goods had stirred envy in savage breasts. The Sandfly murders, moreover, roughly coincided with at least four other massacres of Europeans in the Solomons and eastern archipelagoes of New Guinea.¹¹⁶ At the hub of empire, as well as on its Australian periphery, smug letters still praised the Royal Navy’s measured response to such “cowardly” acts. Subsequent searches for the ringleaders of the Sandfly tragedy yielded just two culprits. Rushed shipboard trials featuring unchallenged witnesses had prefaced both executions, one of which saw local men compelled to hang their own comrade. If this was naval justice at work, one skeptic observed, then Britain was waging a most peculiar war.¹¹⁷

The strangeness of the conflict forced colonial administrators, as well as admirals, to temporize. Established in 1877 and headquartered in Fiji, the Western Pacific High Commission had been saddled with vast responsibility backed by what its historian has termed “ludicrously inadequate” resources. The Colonial Office, on the far side of the globe, hoped that Sir Arthur Gordon, the first high commissioner, would somehow harmonize race relations throughout 8,000,000 square miles of ocean and sand.¹¹⁸ Gordon and his successors were authorized to punish British subjects for a wide variety of crimes. But over the denizens of uncolonized islands, a high commissioner had no legal authority.

How to discourage “native aggression,” therefore, posed a vexing problem. Sir William Des Voeux, Gordon’s immediate successor, was generally content to let Her Majesty’s ships deal with Melanesians accused of murder. When the latter were inconveniently delivered to Fiji, however, Des Voeux took cover behind legal fiction, treating the suspects not as “prisoners” (for fear that “some busybody might obtain a writ of habeas corpus”) but as “convicts.”119 Arthur Gordon’s chief judicial commissioner, John Gorrie, proved equally creative with the law. A political radical, Gorrie viewed the traders and planters around him very much as he had viewed the white colonists of Jamaica—as bigots bent on their own enrichment. Gorrie therefore set out to weight the scales of justice. In the 1879 case of Regina v. Kilgour, the captain of a Queensland labor vessel was slapped with a heavy £100 fine for burning native huts on the New Hebridean island of Aoba. Charles Kilgour testified that Aoba men had stolen one of his whaleboats on a previous recruiting trip, and that it was only after coming under musket fire while trying to recover his property that he had registered his displeasure. For Commissioner Gorrie, though, nothing excused a resort to private war: “It is the sovereign power alone which has the right to say when a recourse shall be had to arms.”¹²⁰ Gorrie failed to mention that the High Commission possessed no such power where Islanders were concerned.

Aoba produced another case that displayed Gorrie’s legal legerdemain at its most artful. There was no question that “Aratuga,” a resident of that island, had “treacherously decoyed” the Mystery’s whaleboat, urging its recruiting agent to land where Aratuga’s friends lay in wait. During the melee that followed, Aratuga hacked to death at least one member of the landing party and later confessed his deed to a missionary. Judge Gorrie addressed his thirty-six-page opinion not to intent, however, but to the issue of jurisdiction. If Aratuga had acted as an individual while committing homicide in a British boat, then, Gorrie reasoned, this Islander would have been solely responsible for his crime. But Gorrie chose instead to regard Aratuga’s deed as part of a “general and tumultuous onslaught,” an “act of the community.” Since Britain enjoyed no diplomatic relationship with this community, Britain had no right to punish members of it, at least not in a court of law.¹²¹ Aratuga returned to Aoba unscathed.

Their enemies charged that Judge Gorrie was a “protégé” of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, and that his superior, Sir Arthur Gordon, was a “pet” of Exeter Hall.¹²² Both charges were unfair. Nonetheless, the tendency of the Western Pacific High Commission to rationalize Islander attacks clearly did stir resentment among many Europeans living or working on a dangerous frontier. As one Royal Navy officer wrote in exasperation, the concept of “native practice” could be advanced to excuse almost any “savage outrage”:

To take a willing recruit off the beach without giving a

gun for him, is “stealing,” according to “native practice”;

to shoot a man from behind a rock because your

mother-in-law had died is a “native practice”;

to shoot any white man because one of your tribe

has died a natural death in the white man’s country

is “native practice”; to hack a man’s head off

with a tomahawk because your daughter has run

off to Fiji is “native practice.” “Native practice” will

account for every brutality committed in the South

Sea Islands, because “native practice” means to kill

whenever the opportunity . . . presents itself.123

Through the 1890s and on into the new century, Islanders continued to shoot at the sails of recruiting ships. Whether these volleys represented self-conscious defiance or merely target practice, it is impossible to say.¹²⁴ What can be shown is that a parallel form of skirmishing over the labor trade played out in Australian courtrooms.

THE MISRULE OF LAW

What British colonial administrators, naval officers, missionaries, and moral reformers of all hues found most galling about the labor trade was that legal ambiguities too often shielded predators. Captain George Palmer’s widely noted exposé of “kidnapping in the South Seas” drove home the point that, as of 1871, “You may hire a vessel and fit her up precisely the same as an African slaver”¹²⁵ without fear of interdiction. Palmer certainly stood to gain by demonizing the recruiting process. After all, his aggressive move against the labor ship Daphne in 1869 had landed him in serious legal trouble. But considerations of self-interest aside, Palmer’s argument impressed humanitarians at home and abroad as credible. “Let any intelligent man read Captain Palmer’s book,” challenged one letter to The Times, “and he will see that for a long time the British law was at fault.”126 British law did render it nearly impossible to try Islander “kidnapping” cases as crimes under the old antislavery statutes, an anomaly discussed below. Of greater practical consequence, though, was the refusal of some Australian courts, and many Australian juries, to deal severely with the misdeeds of labor recruiters.

As far back as 1828, Britain’s Parliament had granted Australian supreme courts the authority to hear criminal cases originating in New Zealand, Tahiti, or any other Pacific island not under the control of a European state.¹²⁷ On the rare occasions when this power was exercised, the judicial outcomes had generally sickened humanitarians. The November 1849 murder trial in Sydney of Captain John Charles Lewis, for example, served to “embarrass the march of justice.” Lewis had shot and killed a male adult, name unknown, on Maré, one of the Loyalty Islands located near New Caledonia. With no Islander present to rebut the captain’s account, a jury found that Lewis had acted while under the impression that his life was in danger. Little over a month after his “triumphant” acquittal, Lewis and the entire crew of his cutter, the Lucy Anne, were captured and butchered off Maré. A higher justice had intervened, or so it seemed to some humanitarians.¹²⁸

Six years after Queensland gained self-rule in 1859, Britain enacted legislation that allowed colonial assemblies to pass laws without obtaining prior approval from London.¹²⁹ This meant that, short of meddling with a self-governing colony’s constitution (a step bound to ignite settler resentment), Britain could no longer dictate how “natives” should be treated. Colonial officials in the mother country envisioned a partnership with local leaders in the autonomous reaches of the empire. For this partnership to succeed, however, both administrative costs and notions of good government would have to be shared. Unfortunately, neither in London nor in Brisbane or Sydney did those who greased the wheels of colonial justice wish to pay for refinements in that mechanism. Thus, in early 1871, when contemplating new legislation to protect Pacific Islanders from deceptive recruiting practices, an economy-minded Colonial Office pressed the Australian colonies to guarantee payment of expenses associated with transporting witnesses from and back to Melanesia. Down Under, this request smacked of coercion.¹³⁰

But the quality of justice delivered in cases involving Pacific Islanders suffered more from notions of racial inferiority than from administrative penny-pinching. Was it the oppressive heat, wondered Captain Palmer, that transformed “a certain class” of white men into crazed persecutors of dark-skinned peoples? “It is like flourishing a red flag before a bull,” Palmer observed, “to show an aboriginal of the South Sea Islands to some Englishmen, with the thermometer at 90° in the shade. They go mad.”131 Yet even in the cooler months of an Australian winter, racialized thinking generated a kind of courtroom madness. Kanakas—a general term for Pacific island laborers—were widely believed to occupy a higher branch on the evolutionary tree than the “ineradicably savage” Australian bushman. The distinguished English novelist Anthony Trollope, who toured the antipodes in 1871 and 1872, spoke for many white settlers when he wrote of the Kanakas, “Civilisation is within their reach—in spite of their island homes, their dusky colour, their various languages, and old cannibal propensities—because they will work.”¹³² Australia’s first people, however, were presumed hostile to steady labor of any sort and, until the late 1880s, often stood ready to resist European occupation of their ancestral hunting grounds. Such supposedly extreme cultural backwardness went far toward excusing judicial disregard of violence committed against indigenous Australians. The conviction of a white man for the rape of an Aboriginal did not occur until 1883, and not before 1888 were convictions for killing Aboriginals secured in Queensland courts.¹³³

If the failures of law to protect Pacific Islanders from European violence were less blatant, they were just as improbably justified. Here, in “a matrix of abstract legality,” can be found support for the postcolonial charge that liberal imperial values masked a bedrock authoritarianism designed to perpetuate the exploitation of subject peoples.¹³⁴ Take the exclusion of Islander evidence at trial. It had long been a presumption of English criminal procedure that before offering testimony, a witness must grasp the cultural underpinnings of “truth.” In theory, the compromise was elegant: understanding the religious consequences of a lie would dispel further epistemological doubt. But in practice, those who judged whether an Islander witness understood the meaning of an oath might have had personal interests in this determination. Hence John Fenwick, one of the justices of the peace who dismissed a charge of rape against Ross Lewin in 1868, was himself engaged in the labor trade and had been one of Lewin’s employers.¹³⁵

Should an Islander’s claim of conversion be trusted? Did nominal membership in a Christian community erase the savage propensity to deceive? In the Babel that was Melanesia, could an interpreter from one island accurately convey the words of a witness from another? Australian judges and juries asked these questions, and often answered them in the negative. As an enemy of the “slave trade” reasoned, “If the testimony of the South Sea Islanders is not to be received in our courts of justice because they are heathens and savages, they are thereby placed beyond the pale of the law, and debarred from the common rights and privileges of civilization, justice, and humanity.”136

At last, in 1876, legal barriers to the acceptance of Islander and Aboriginal evidence at trial began to crumble. By this time, with white settler fears of vengeful blacks ebbing in Australia’s Outback, the old exclusionary practices now seemed less vital. By legislation passed in 1876, New South Wales allowed a witness to make a “declaration” in lieu of an oath on a Bible; no longer would belief in a “power which can punish or reward after death” be demanded.¹³⁷ But Queensland, where the majority of Australia’s Islander immigrants worked and from whose ports most of the recruiting ships set out, did not start to relax its own oath standard until 1884. Unqualified acceptance of witness declarations would need another seven years.¹³⁸ That Pacific Islanders in Queensland had much to say about their lives became poignantly clear through interviews conducted by the so-called “Kidnapping Commission” of 1885. Literally hundreds of Islanders recruited for northern sugar plantations told of deep confusion over their terms of indenture and grief over separation from their loved ones. This voluminous testimony is peppered with confessions of ignorance (“I no savez”) and bristles with the linguistic ambiguities created through frequent double translations (from an Islander’s native tongue into Pidgin, and once more from Pidgin into the Anglicized Pidgin of the white interviewer).¹³⁹ Yet these voices, however filtered, were eloquent. And their exclusion from Queensland’s courtrooms until quite late in the labor trade era rendered that colony’s rule of law suspect.

Partly to preempt stricter imperial legislation, and partly perhaps to salve some tender consciences,¹⁴⁰ Queensland lawmakers passed the Polynesian Laborers Act in March 1868. Although a Liberal majority on the Colony’s Legislative Council had sponsored it, the act hardly qualified as a beacon of racial justice. It is noteworthy that “securing to the employer the due fulfillment by the immigrant of his agreement” shared pride of place in its preamble with “securing to the laborers proper treatment and protection.”¹⁴¹ The 1868 act helped. By requiring each Queensland labor ship to obtain a license, to post a bond for the proper engagement and return of workers, and to provide them adequate food and accommodation during transit, it clarified obligations for conscientious captains and recruiting agents. One year after the act took effect, a Queensland review committee declared it a success, although the committee recommended the placement of a government inspector on each recruiting vessel.142 As the scandals of 1869–1871 would soon show, however, the rapacious continued to pursue their prey undeterred.

The prospect of being punished under Queensland’s new legislation was, at worst, irksome. Kidnapping, if proven in court, would be treated as a breach of government regulations, punishable by a maximum fine of £500, whereas conviction for the same crime under Britain’s old antislavery statutes would have meant penal servitude for life and forfeiture of the offending ship. Since profits from a large recruiting haul, such as the 240 Islanders snatched by the barque King Oscar in 1867, could exceed £2,000, such a fine held little terror.¹⁴³ To avoid fines entirely, of course, some recruiting vessels licensed in Queensland simply unloaded their catch in Fiji—which, prior to 1874, had no capacity of its own to monitor the traffic. Bad luck, not stringent policing, would bring down those in command of the Young Australian and the Daphne, ships synonymous with white savagery. Rumors of a massacre at sea eventually caught up with the former, as we have seen. The Daphne, licensed to carry fifty laborers to Queensland, had collected a hundred when she arrived at Levuka to find HMS Rosario lying at anchor. What Captain George Palmer discovered aboard the Daphne savored of slavery. In the convoluted legal drama that followed his seizure of this ship, however, it emerged that the law saw “blackbirding” and slavery as different crimes.

As early as the 1820s, the “equipment clauses” in Britain’s antislavery treaties had enabled Royal Navy vessels to detain and condemn private ships as slavers even when no victims were discovered aboard. The paraphernalia of slave-trading alone—leg irons, structural modifications to increase a ship’s carrying capacity, excess stores of food, water, or matting—might justify a vessel’s seizure.¹⁴⁴ In 1869, Captain Palmer not only found telltale accommodations aboard the Daphne but also a hundred recruits (who were, he had to admit, free to move about the ship). The master of the Daphne, John Daggett, and Ross Lewin’s agent, Thomas Pritchard, had plainly violated the terms of their Queensland recruiting license, a violation for which they probably would have been fined if dealt with at Brisbane. But the zealous Palmer, a veteran of antislavery patrols off the West African coast, spurned caution. He sailed to Sydney, and there, invoking the stern majesty of British justice, charged the Daphne’s master and agent with having “knowingly and willfully . . . remove[d]” Islanders to be used as slaves.145

Captain Palmer’s initial seizure of the Daphne at Levuka, and the subsequent trial of Daggett and Pritchard in Sydney’s Water Police Court, drew detailed press coverage throughout New South Wales and in several British cities. Widespread consternation, therefore, greeted the court’s dismissal of charges against Daggett on the grounds that the existence of an agreement for a finite period of service nullified the presumption of slavery.¹⁴⁶ His legal position undercut, Palmer now became the quarry: the Daphne’s owners sued him for false imprisonment plus damages. How had British justice failed so completely, poised as it was to ruin a righteous man? “Where,” asked one of Palmer’s many allies, was the “slightest flash of that frenzy of indignation not long since exhibited in the case of the Jamaica black?”¹⁴⁷ In an opinion that closed the case but pleased few, Sir Alfred Stephen ruled that although Captain Palmer had been wrong to regard the Daphne as a slaver, he did have probable cause to seize her, and thus should be spared further litigation.¹⁴⁸ The inapplicability of slave trade legislation to conditions in the western Pacific would wait for judicial confirmation until 1880.¹⁴⁹ Well before that date, however, humanitarians were beseeching the mother country to lift this legal fog.

Britain’s attempt to clarify the criminal law as it pertained to labor recruitment was the Pacific Islanders Protection Act of June 1872, better known as the “Kidnapping Act.” The impetus for its passage derived from the intersection of two tragedies. We have seen that the murder of John Coleridge Patteson at Nukapu Island on 20 September 1871 sent a shock wave through the imperial heart, as well as its Oceanic appendages. The bishop’s killing alone would probably have wrung some legislative response from Parliament, given that his murder was framed in the sort of Manichean terms that a censorious Victorian public preferred. As one biographer summed up this tragedy, “slavery slew Patteson.”¹⁵⁰ The Queen’s Speech at the opening of Parliament on 6 February 1872 sounded the same note: “The Slave Trade, and practices scarcely to be distinguished from Slave Trading,” had “dishonoured” the British Empire “by the connexion of some of my subjects with these nefarious practices.”¹⁵¹ Dr. James Patrick Murray, the Irish-born instigator of the Carl massacre, was just such a subject. Indeed, the Carl revelations, which unfolded in the courtrooms of Sydney and Melbourne during the autumn and winter of 1871–72, first broke upon the British domestic scene one month after Patteson’s slaying (although one month before British newspapers announced the bishop’s death).152 This confluence of barbarities, wherein one saintly Briton and seventy bewildered Pacific Islanders were metaphorically burned on the same pyre, made calls for new law irresistible. Bishop Selwyn would not get an “armed steamer . . . constantly cruising among the Islands” to suppress man stealing.¹⁵³ But Patteson’s mentor, and those who shared his anguish, could at least hope that the 1872 Kidnapping Act would halt the ruin of Melanesia.

If hope they did, disappointment followed. The imperial legislation of 1872 made it a felony for British subjects to decoy, carry away, confine, or detain without his or her consent, any native of an uncolonized Pacific island.¹⁵⁴ It also provided for the seizure of any British ship causing “such outrages.” Building on Queensland’s 1868 statute, the new act required all British vessels engaged in the labor trade to take out a license, and obliged the masters of these vessels to pledge a bond of £500 against violation of its terms. Usefully, Australasian supreme courts were now empowered to compel the attendance of witnesses from outside British territory, and to exercise discretion in accepting Islander evidence. Yet the act fell well short of the comprehensive shield that ardent humanitarians had been demanding. Not by accident was the word “slavery” missing from the new legislation: its framers knew that to equate labor recruitment, even at its most vicious, with the old transatlantic slave trade was to invite protracted legal dispute. At most, imperial law could target “particular forms of inter-insular kidnapping.”¹⁵⁵ Nor did the 1872 act address deliberate misrepresentation of the work Islanders were expected to do, the duration of that work, and precisely where workers would be returned once their terms of service had ended. Above all, the Kidnapping Act’s narrow jurisdiction limited its influence. Until 1874, the “anarchical condition” of Fiji put British ships flying other flags beyond the Royal Navy’s reach. Since, for example, French law on labor recruitment was now considerably less exacting than British law, le tricolore gained sudden popularity.¹⁵⁶

The Kidnapping Act of 1872 would be amended six times over the ensuing twenty years.¹⁵⁷ An awkward division of responsibility for policing the labor traffic would come to frustrate both the navy and the new Western Pacific High Commission. Friends of the trade could now point to a multitude of protective regulations that specified everything from the duration of recruiting voyages to the minimum distance between berths. But the enforcement of these regulations remained loose—a crucial advantage for a speculative business. As one Queensland planter’s association observed, “a certain amount of laxness from the regulations was necessary as if these rules were strictly adhered to no islanders at all would be recruited.”158 Necessity was the mother of evasion.

Even the best-positioned eyes, those of the government inspectors assigned to all British labor vessels, might wink. Queensland’s colonial government began appointing shipboard inspectors (or “agents,” as they were commonly known) first, in 1871; four years later, when Fiji gained a colonial administration of its own, a similar requirement was instituted there. Although berthed and fed at the expense of ship owners, these agents should have been the Islanders’ best friends. That is, in addition to explaining the conditions of service to each prospective recruit, a government agent was adjured to “be most careful in seeing that no coercion, undue influence, unfair play, false representation, or treachery of any kind, is employed in procuring laborers, and that perfect freedom of action is allowed to those open to engagement.”¹⁵⁹ At least in the early years of their service aboard Queensland labor vessels, it is doubtful how effectively agents could have discharged these duties because, until 1874, they were not obliged to accompany the landing boats from which coercion would have been most visible.¹⁶⁰ Thereafter, some agents, on some Queensland ships, surely did give Islander well-being their full attention. Douglas Rannie, a Scot who had yearned to visit “long-dreamt-of South Sea isle[s],” realized his dream and became a hero at the same time: off Bougainville he allegedly saved a captive Buka man from becoming dinner by buying him.¹⁶¹ The diary of John Renton, another Scot drawn to the Pacific, documents the gentle care lavished on a New Hebridean man sick with consumption.¹⁶² But those government agents who tried to honor their appointments often found themselves “in a chronic state of warfare with the cook, the mate, or the recruiter,” not to mention the captain. The pressure to overlook recruiting violations, combined with poor pay and exposure to ambush along inhospitable coasts, encouraged more than a few agents to seek comfort in a bottle.¹⁶³

Some, sober or drunk, were prepared to ignore the worst treatment of Islanders. The conduct of a British captain found guilty of murder and kidnapping in a French court at Noumea, New Caledonia, in 1882, had recently been rated “satisfactory” by the agent aboard. As the Pall Mall Gazette exclaimed to its London readership, it was humiliating to find French colonial officials branding a British crew “the scum of the sea.”164 In Fiji, the Immigration Department generally gave its inspectors better support than did Queensland’s Immigration Board. Still, the surviving journals of Fiji’s government agents reveal much obstruction: captains who sneered at pleas for humane handling of Islanders in canoes; who denied requests for deck awnings during heat waves; who refused to send back child “recruits”; and who ignored demands for the ending of marathon voyages.¹⁶⁵ Such contempt for the letter of the law mocked the Pacific’s “free trade in labor.”

A full decade after Britain imposed the Kidnapping Act on its Pacific possessions, another round of scandals gave renewed force to the claim that only total suppression of this trade would halt its parade of horrors. Commodore John Crawford Wilson echoed the experience of many naval officers assigned to the Australia Station when he identified some of the legal loopholes through which recruiting ships continued to sail. The Kidnapping Act, Wilson noted, applied narrowly to Islanders hired for plantation work in Britain’s colonies; it offered virtually no protection to “many thousands” of men who lived aboard British commercial ships while diving for pearl-shell and sponges, or during the curing of bêche-de-mer and copra (dried coconut meat, from which coconut oil is extracted).¹⁶⁶

As for those Islanders destined to cut cane in Queensland or Fiji, their pursuers could not be denied a recruiting license unless hard evidence of their unfitness was produced. The commodore ridiculed defenders of the labor trade who cited “old hands”—Islanders who had agreed to work abroad beyond their three-year term of service—as proof that plantation life was agreeable. A lot could go wrong in three years, Wilson observed. Wives might find new mates. Abandoned huts might collapse. Gardens might revert to jungle. The man returning to face such disasters found himself “an alien and an outcast.” Once his trade goods had been distributed among his people, the returnee could be left with little more than a rifle and one shabby European suit. Under these circumstances, the semi-stranger might have no practical option “but to return to a life which probably he heartily detests.”¹⁶⁷

A cluster of widely publicized recruiting abuses did eventually compel Queensland’s government to ban all labor recruitment in the western Pacific. The mayhem that occasioned this drastic step began with the Ceara case of 1882—a calamity in which “Nomoo,” a Tanna man-turned-recruiter, stole an Erromangan chief’s daughter, shot her father, and later casually executed a Presbyterian teacher. The killer, in one missionary’s acid assessment, had spent sixteen years soaking up the “boasted civilizing influence” that the labor trade “brings to bear on savage character.”168 British missionaries were not alone in assailing greed gone wild. The conviction and early release of William McMurdo, Queensland’s government agent aboard the recruiting ship Stanley, stunned humanitarians in Britain as well as Australia. The main charge against McMurdo and his captain, Joseph Davies, had been malicious destruction of native property, but it was their calm, cost/benefit defense of violence that seemed so unnatural.

In April 1883, the Stanley anchored off a small island near the southeastern tip of New Guinea. The enlistment there of “boys” for the sugarcane fields of Maryborough went well until a rival German trader began spreading rumors about the ship’s secret plan to keep its recruits in permanent bondage. Mass desertion followed. McMurdo, supposedly the Queensland government’s best check against recruiting crimes, eagerly participated in a punitive raid to burn the nearest village and smash its canoes. As McMurdo noted in his journal, the raid was simply a “set off,” a business decision to ensure against the potential loss of £325 in negotiable manpower, “exclusive of expenses and delay.” This bottom line logic also justified the captain’s subsequent threat of war should his “boys” not return to the Stanley.¹⁶⁹ They returned. Although the Stanley delivered its living cargo to Queensland as arranged, news of McMurdo and Davies’s conduct resulted in their arrest at Brisbane, extradition to Fiji, conviction on all charges, and sentencing to three months’ imprisonment. What flummoxed humanitarian foes of the labor trade was the judicial sympathy shown to McMurdo. Never mind that this government agent had resorted to “ruthless intimidation” of the Lachlan Islanders: the “unfortunate” McMurdo had somehow been led to believe that his official duties “included the securing as well as [the] protection of recruited labourers.”¹⁷⁰ His sins absolved, McMurdo won immediate release from a solicitous William Des Voeux, acting high commissioner for the western Pacific. “If the truth were to be understood,” snarled one critic of this resolution, “the real savages, the treacherous villains, the brutal human animals who will shoot men with dusky skins as they would slaughter sheep . . . do not carry black faces.”¹⁷¹

Miscarriages of justice at trial, combined with a judicial disinclination to hold ship owners accountable for the crimes of their crews, made Queensland’s regulation of the labor trade seem farcical. If juries refused to condemn outright kidnapping, as the Jessie Kelly verdict of April 1884 appeared to prove, and if judges insisted that a labor vessel could not be confiscated just because “the consent of the natives” had not been clearly established, as the Forest King decision of October 1884 signaled, then of what use were laws to protect the Islanders of uncolonized Melanesia?172 This question gained added urgency when recruiting ships began visiting the little known island groups that bend in a great arc around the eastern tip of New Guinea. New Britain and New Ireland in particular were found to be full of comparatively innocent “boys” and “marys” (as trade Pidgin designated women). By the early 1880s, Islanders throughout most of the New Hebrides and the Solomons had become familiar enough with the recruiting game to spot at least some of the tricks that might be used to “gammon” (fool) them.¹⁷³ But on New Britain, for example, where Queensland vessels first materialized in early 1883, the Islanders knew only the routine of a Hamburg firm, Hernsheim and Robertson. Since Hernsheim’s agents typically hired plantation workers on brief, three-month “contracts,” three fingers held aloft by a Queensland recruiter were bound to mislead.¹⁷⁴

Misrepresentation, though, was the least damning charge leveled against the New Guinea trade. No fewer than fourteen of the thirty-two labor voyages from Queensland to that region in 1883 and 1884 became targets of official enquiries.¹⁷⁵ Among these stains on colonial commerce, none was more horrific, or more widely denounced, than the 1884 voyage of the woefully misnamed Hopeful. Not until a month after this schooner’s profitable return with 123 laborers from the D’Entrecasteaux and Louisade island clusters did the “hideous crimes” of seven white savages come to light. As the Brisbane Courier revealed in graphic detail, two fleeing Islanders had been casually shot dead, a third had his throat slit, and a little boy, too young to be recruited, had been left to drown in the surf. For their parts in this carnage, the Hopeful’s chief recruiter and another crewmember were condemned to hang, its captain and government agent earned life imprisonment, and three more seamen received long jail terms.¹⁷⁶ Yet except for the government agent, Harry Schofield, a drunk who died after less than two years behind bars, all of the convicted men would later be released in 1890—an act of clemency that made sense only to those who placed radically different values on lives black and white.

Still, the labor trade had been wounded. The Hopeful revelations, a growing awareness of the terrible death rate among Melanesian laborers in Queensland, and the ascent of S.W. Griffith to that colony’s premiership in late 1883 virtually guaranteed a new, more critical investigation of the trade.177 The son of a Congregational minister, Griffith detested the traffic in human toil, as well as the plantation society based upon it.¹⁷⁸ His rank-and-file Liberal Party supporters may have been more concerned about the threat that island labor posed to the white workforce, but Griffith’s electoral mandate was, for the moment, secure. Not surprisingly, then, the Royal Commission that launched its probe of labor recruitment around New Guinea on 6 January 1885 proved exceedingly thorough. After thirty meetings, during which the translated testimony of 480 Islanders was obtained, the Commissioners learned that very few of the men and women recently brought to Australia had grasped the nature of their engagements.¹⁷⁹ The clarity of this conclusion gave Premier Griffith the leverage he needed. In November of 1885, his Liberal government announced the banning of all recruiting licenses after 31 December 1890. Five years, surely, would be time enough for Queensland’s planters to find an alternative workforce. The era of the Kanaka appeared to be ending.

THE UNHAPPY AFTERLIFE OF INDENTURED LABOR

Contrary to most expectations, Britain’s Pacific labor trade received a long stay of sentence. By the late 1880s, with Queensland’s blanket ban on Islander recruitment drawing near, a common toast among Mackay planters was “D.S.G.”—“Damn Sam Griffith.”¹⁸⁰ Yet this purported tool of the “Anti-Slavery party”¹⁸¹ would soon pull a stunning volte-face. In a newspaper manifesto published on 13 February 1892, Griffith defended his decision to resume the colony’s labor trade. The Premier’s rationale was tortured. His concern supposedly centered not on “the colour of men’s skins” but instead on the long-term viability of Queensland as “a home for the British race.” By relying on Islander sweat, the colony’s sugar industry had called into existence a “large servile population” that was not only antithetical to “free political institutions” but also denigrated tropical agriculture as “unworthy of the white races.” If Queensland were to become a haven for the small, independent farmer, European immigrants would have to take over from Kanaka men and women. But until the former could be acclimatized, the latter needed to carry on as the least objectionable sort of “coloured labour.”182 A ten-year extension of Islander recruitment, minutely supervised, was thus essential.

The resumption of Queensland’s labor trade drew immediate protest. Dr. John Paton, chairman of the Presbyterian Church’s New Hebrides Mission, cut straight to the heart of the matter, as he saw it: if capitalists did not care about the depopulation of Melanesia, God did; and His judgment would be terrible.¹⁸³ Half a world away in the imperial hub, Dr. Paton’s concerns, shorn of their prophecy, found broad support. Although John Selwyn, recently retired as bishop of Melanesia, knew full well that the western isles could not be “wrapped up in cotton-wool” and preserved, he worried that their fragile cultures would soon collapse under the weight of renewed commercial exploitation. Both Vice-Admiral James Erskine and Sir Arthur Gordon believed that a catastrophic reopening of the New Guinea labor corridor was almost certain.¹⁸⁴ Queensland’s lobbyist in London, James Garrick, assured the British public that his colony would impose the most stringent conditions on all future recruitment. The Royal Navy’s confiscation of the licenseless Fiji labor ship Emma Fisher in late 1891 suggested that the general regulatory climate had indeed grown stricter.¹⁸⁵

But the trade remained morally suspect. Queensland’s importation of Pacific island labor finally ended not because most Australians came to share the humanitarians’ disgust, but rather because the old dream of a white yeomanry now seemed feasible under a federal government. Beginning with Victoria in 1855, the separate Australian colonies had already passed statutes restricting the entry of Chinese immigrants. Once these colonies merged to form the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, the Immigration Restriction Act of that year made the exclusion of most non-Europeans a nationwide policy. The 1901 Pacific Island Labourers Act addressed the closely connected issue of Kanaka immigrants. Under its terms, the number of Islanders allowed into Australia would steadily decrease until 31 March 1904, at which time immigration would cease. All Pacific Islanders still resident in the Commonwealth on 31 December 1906 would risk deportation. Exemptions were later granted for those who could prove long, continuous residence in Australia, had married there, or were elderly. Such extenuating circumstances nevertheless applied to few: of the 6,389 Islanders in Queensland in 1906, just 691 were deemed exempt from deportation. The prospect of forced repatriation apparently panicked many Melanesian immigrants. As early as 1901, some 3,000 of them signed (or marked) a petition to Edward VII in which they assured Britain’s king that to be shipped back to certain “entirely heathen and cannibal” isles would mean giving up their lives or their new Christian faith.186 Meanwhile, a Commonwealth subsidy of £2 per ton of refined sugar had been offered to producers who employed only white labor. The Melanesian no longer fit in this new colonial order.¹⁸⁷

Among some of Britain’s western Pacific territories the recruitment of indentured labor continued, although in highly varied forms. Fiji, unlike Queensland, never expelled its Melanesian field workers. It had no need to do so because Indian “coolies,” first introduced in 1878, impressed planters as more efficient (if also slightly more expensive) workers. By 1909, Pacific Islander immigration to Fiji had virtually ceased.¹⁸⁸ Local circumstances, not imperial edicts, also shaped the Solomon Islands’ labor regime. The “protectorate” that Britain established over half of the Solomon archipelago in 1893 gave its colonial administrator considerable power to regulate recruitment. C.M. Woodford, the Solomons’ first resident commissioner, proved to be an activist in this regard. Concerned that the siphoning off of “natives” to distant plantations was stunting the growth of local copra production, Woodford finally persuaded the western Pacific high commissioner to halt all recruiting for labor outside the Protectorate as of 31 December 1911. Labor shortages within the group would persist, but not because Solomon Islanders were being shipped abroad.¹⁸⁹ In the New Hebrides, finally, long-standing tensions between British and French residents made comprehensive labor regulation impossible. Well into the twentieth century, influential Presbyterian missionaries wore their “Galliphobe” prejudices proudly, infuriating French settlers.¹⁹⁰ British commercial as well as clerical interests, for their part, denounced what they regarded as the criminal sloth of the French Navy in policing rogue labor recruitment.¹⁹¹ France and Britain’s perplexing joint control—the Condominium Government—of the New Hebrides, ratified in 1907, did little to silence these cries.

On the eve of the First World War, indentured Islanders still bore the brunt of plantation work throughout central Melanesia. That these laborers were now restricted to toiling within their own island groups hardly guaranteed kind treatment, however. The Solomons remained a violent backwater whose isolated plantations attracted managers disposed to counter both loneliness and the fear of attack by maintaining strict discipline among their “boys.” When it came to controlling local labor, one seasoned manager assured Jack McLaren around 1910, the secret was simple: “Treat them as muck. Remember that a white man’s the only human being and that there isn’t any other kind. That’s the only way to get anything out of them.”192

After, as well as before, the end of recruitment for Queensland and Fiji, the prolonged drudgery of plantation work had robbed Islanders of “that interest in life which . . . forms the most essential factor in maintaining the health of a people.” Or so argued W.H.R. Rivers.¹⁹³ Writing in the immediate postwar period (and fresh from treating soldiers with shell shock), this pioneer neurologist and anthropologist sought to illuminate the “psychological” dimensions of Melanesia’s alarming population decline. The labor trade, Rivers believed, was deeply implicated. “Voluntary restriction”—abortion and traditional birth control techniques—had far more to do with Melanesia’s plummeting birth rate than did the sterility sometimes caused by venereal disease, he held. Ventriloquizing his New Hebridean informants, Rivers asked, “Why should we bring children into the world only to work for the white man?”¹⁹⁴

William Rivers’s speculation must remain just that. Nor is it possible to confirm a related claim that children born in Queensland to Islander parents rarely survived very long after moving to Melanesia and “relaps[ing] into savagery.”¹⁹⁵ But we can be confident that for many indentured laborers, homecoming was an event filled with as much dread as joy. If their ship did not sink (as the Young Dick did in 1886, when it struck the Great Barrier Reef and drowned 130 Kanakas¹⁹⁶), some of these workers would have been unable to help locate their home islands because, as people of the inland bush, they had probably glimpsed their own shorelines just once before, three (or five) years earlier. Provided that the right spot on the right island was sighted, heavy surf might force a captain to deposit his returnees elsewhere. Such unfortunates, Commodore J.C. Wilson explained, could be seen “gesticulating and wild with despair as the [whale]boat pulls away.” Even if an Islander landed with an armed escort a mere mile from his village, determined robbers still might grab his trade box, as happened at Losa Lava, Banks Islands, in 1882.¹⁹⁷ These dangers were magnified by haste. As of March 1904, nearly 6,000 Solomon Islanders still toiled in Queensland. Since by law most of these men and women stood to be deported starting on 1 January 1907, the odds against an orderly repatriation were long.¹⁹⁸

We can be confident as well that labor trading accelerated the flow of alcohol and firearms into Melanesia, further rending the fabric of traditional island societies. Like the germs they introduced, the guns and gin that Europeans carried to Oceania arrived decades before Robert Towns’s Don Juan sailed for the New Hebrides in 1863. But the intensity of the labor traffic, along with its resistance to regulation, created a pipeline for contraband. The tiny pre-cession white population of Fiji had swilled legendary quantities of cheap German gin (four gallons for £1), and this habit spread among Islander crews across the western Pacific. But missionary fulminations against absinthe-dealing Frenchmen notwithstanding, alcohol abuse in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Melanesian communities seems to have been rare.199

Their preoccupation with guns, on the other hand, proved ruinous. Muskets, ball, and powder became the main Marquesan currency after about 1813. The labor that these eastern Polynesians were willing to perform in exchange for the muzzle-loading weapons of the aoe (strangers) made warfare deadlier than ever while undermining the power of the haka ‘ika (nobility) and the purpose of koina (feasting).²⁰⁰ Muskets later found their way into the hands of Melanesians by way of bêche-de-mer and sandalwood traders. Yet it was the conjunction of the indentured labor traffic and advances in rifle technology that unleashed an acquisitive frenzy throughout the western isles.

In the 1850s, Jacob Snider of Philadelphia showed how the British Enfield muzzle-loading musket could be converted into a breech-loading rifle. Shortly thereafter armories in Birmingham and Liège, Belgium, began mass-producing this far more versatile weapon. With each successive refinement of the Snider design, older model breech-loaders were snapped up by Australian middlemen and resold to eager Islanders.²⁰¹ By 1870, rumors of Fijian “mountaineers” awash in Sniders had driven one planter to predict the outbreak of a Maori-like rebellion unless some way to stop “tempt[ing] the desires of a savage people” were found.²⁰² Islander “outrages” against British ships, if not coordinated rebellions, did employ these precision weapons effectively. And the ammunition for them was all too available. While leading a punitive raid on Api (Epi) in 1881, Commodore Wilson found at least 150 rounds of Snider ammunition in every hut he burned; the metallic cartridges had come to serve as “a sort of coinage” there. On Malaita in the north-central Solomons, the flood of breech-loading weapons turned homicide from a selective sanction against witchcraft, adultery, and other major crimes into raw gangsterism.²⁰³

Had it been the imperial government’s decision alone, tough restrictions on Snidermania would have been imposed soon after the 1872 Kidnapping Act took effect. But London’s view of the weapons question was not Brisbane’s, and Queensland, not Britain, supplied most of Melanesia’s rifles. In 1878, over objections from planters and merchants, the colony bowed to imperial pressure by halting the sale of arms to Pacific Islanders.204 This restriction was at best loosely enforced, however, since those tied to the labor trade saw rifles, cartridges, and dynamite as their trump cards in the competition with other colonies for a scarce human resource. These obstructionists were right. When, in 1884, Queensland and Fiji finally got serious about staunching the flow of guns into Melanesia, both German traders hiring for Samoa and French agents recruiting for New Caledonia quickly filled the void.²⁰⁵ Britain’s subsequent efforts to slap an international arms embargo on the western Pacific never moved beyond vague statements of principle.²⁰⁶

In any case, weapon bans deterred few returning Islanders. They became masters of concealment. Cartridges could be stashed almost anywhere: in a furled sail, under a woman’s skirt, packed with tobacco, mixed with the soil beneath plants. Bulky rifles, their barrels cut short or their stocks removed, were often hidden under false bottoms in the Islanders’ trade boxes. During government inspections, these prizes could be submerged in large water barrels, secreted in sheep pens, or lowered over the side of the ship. For a fee, Islander crews might hide weapons aloft in the rigging or down below with the ballast.²⁰⁷ Although legally denied access to firearms after 1884, many returning Kanakas brought home their Sniders regardless.

This gun-hunger further threatened already vulnerable island communities. At the village level, Melanesians were in effect trading manpower for a commodity that did nothing to enrich local agriculture, thereby making subsistence yet more dependent on indentured labor abroad.²⁰⁸ Unlike the indentured Indian “coolies” who eventually shouldered so much of the plantation work in the West Indies, British Guiana, Mauritius, Malaya, Natal, and, after 1878, Fiji, the Islanders of the western Pacific seemed set on a collision course with extinction. Cutting cane in Queensland or on Viti Levu had mostly failed to instill white values—or rather, the right kind of white values—among Islander veterans. Once all but intra-archipelago labor recruitment had ceased, a lethal lack of purpose seemed to cloak Melanesians like a shroud. One naval officer hoped that learning cricket would revitalize the young men of Malekula, in the northern New Hebrides. Discouragingly, they asked to be paid for this new form of work.209

By no means all European commentators believed that island peoples were doomed, or agreed on the forces pushing them toward ruin.²¹⁰ But for those who did accept that the “inevitable destiny” of Melanesians was oblivion, a moral dilemma arose. Referring specifically to the Pacific “savage” as a casualty of “Mr. Darwin’s law,” an unnamed ethicist wondered, “[I]s it either necessary or wise to prolong the dying agonies of the moribund by legislation, designed to protect him from one only of his numerous foes?” The answer was of course “yes”; “humanity and justice” demanded action. From the “lawless [labor] trader, that foul blot upon our national honour, prostituting his knowledge to the vilest purposes and giving the lie to our boasted civilization, we can and must preserve him.”²¹¹

The Aborigines’ Protection Society reasoned similarly when it declared that Britain and her colonies should treat their black subjects with “such justice as will make allowance for their defects.”²¹² Even the defect of a cannibal pedigree could not excuse the gulf between ethical theory and everyday practice, however. Britain and, more clearly still, her settler colony of Queensland had done too little too late to guard Pacific Islanders from predatory Europeans. The social-imperialist sage Benjamin Kidd argued at century’s end that Britain’s tropical colonies warranted firm rule; in an age of heightened rivalry among the world’s colonial powers, a long leash for dark peoples in hot lands was irresponsible.²¹³ The labor trade’s slipshod regulation would have provided Kidd a dramatic example of the cost of imperial neglect. The lure of large profits had, it appeared, brought out the beast in some Britons. As judged by one of their own, the British were “capable of a vulgarity, a coarseness” in the presence of beauty. And “this coarseness becomes savagery in many an isolated trader or settler far from religious influences and family ties.”²¹⁴ The savages had met their match in the likes of Hugo Levinger, James Murray, and Ross Lewin. Indeed, the labor trade’s much discussed brutality served to rationalize “native” violence, thereby releasing some white observers to mourn the passing of Melanesia’s most martial folk, its headhunters.