Horror in Paradise (34 page)

A boy wandering out of one of the quiet dwellings gazed out seaward, shading his eyes from the dazzle. He raised a shrill cry,
“He kaipuke, he kaipuke!”
(“A ship, a ship!”). Out poured the suddenly aroused folk—men, women, and children—just as they jumped up from their mats. They came running to the beach.

There she was, her sails shining pearly white against the blue, a brig, painted black, making for the reef entrance opposite the principal village. Sailing swiftly, and taking in her royals as she opened up the channel, she came in with yards trimmed to the good leading wind. Once well into the lagoon she rounded to and anchored.

The strange craft had an unusually large crew for her size, for while a dozen men were aloft stowing sails, she lowered two whaleboats, each with an officer and five men. By this time the lagoon was alive with outrigger canoes all making for the brig. While some of the clamorous crews were climbing on deck, the two boats had reached the beach.

What could she be, this strongly manned black ship? Vociferous questions went unanswered. But one thing was quickly made clear, she was not a British trader. The officers and sailors who had landed spoke a language strange to the Polynesians. They were dark-avised, their quick black eyes darted here and there; some of them wore cutlasses by their sides; others had holstered revolvers at their belts. But they professed friendship; they had a native of some half-caste breed with them who spoke a dialect understandable by the islanders; and they carried some small presents, tobacco, knives, and beads, which they gave to the headman in the big house for distribution among the people.

When night came down, the strangers returned to the brig. They had arranged that parties of the islanders should visit the ship next morning.

There was little sleep for the people of the palm-grove villages that night. Some of them sat on the beach till late, gazing out at the black shadowy form of the strange ship; the few lights she showed cast long wavering lines of brightness on the face of the lagoon. In the great thatched meetinghouse, most of the excited natives gathered for talk and song and dance. There were improvised chants about the new-come ship. The wooden drums were going with a clatter and a throb that carried far across the waters. The men in the brig could have heard that regular quick rattle of the
pahu,
the sounds that carry their onomatopoeic words to the Iblynesian—“Tingiri, ringiri, ranga-ra, ranga-ra, tikirangi-ti.”

Daylight had scarcely appeared before the canoes were in the water again. Nearly every man and boy was there, paddling for the brig. A side ladder was down, and men stood in the gangway admitting the natives, one canoe crew at a time. The visitors, tremendously happy and excited, were escorted down below by a ladder in the main hatchway. They were told that there was a feast of biscuit and meat awaiting them.

There were nearly a hundred brown men there, most of the adult male population of the atoll. Crew after crew went below, unsuspecting evil of these strangers almost as dark as themselves.

Suddenly the hatchway was closed, shutting up the islanders in darkness. Their amazed and terrified shouts were faintly heard by the few still left in the canoes. The boats were in the water and the armed crews quickly rounded up the astonished canoe paddlers and forced them up the brig’s ladder. Then they made for the shore and compelled the women to load the boats with coconuts, fruit, and yams. Some of the prettiest girls were seized by the officers and thrust into the boats, and off the raiders rowed to the brig. Sails were loosed, the capstan was manned; up came the anchor to the sound of a Spanish chant; the canvas was sheeted home, and under topsails and topgallantsails the black brig stood out through the channel, and into the heaving blue of the Pacific, leaving behind her a ravished land. The coral isle of peace and beauty was a land of mourning, bereft of most of its able-bodied men and its most handsome women, stolen away by whom they knew not, bound they knew not where, victims to the wicked greed of men in high places in a far-off land.

That drama of deceit and tragedy was witnessed in many a South Sea island seventy years ago. At a later date there were somewhat similar episodes in the Black Islands of the Western Pacific, but these raids of which I write were all carried out in the Fblynesian islands in the eastern sector of the great South Sea, among a harmless, unsuspecting people, the most pleasing and friendly of all the inhabitants of the Pacific. The piratical marauders were Spanish-American slavers; the vessels were under the Peruvian flag; their raids were carried out systematically over a great area of Polynesia for the purpose of getting free labor for the mines and plantations and guano workings of Peru.

At least a dozen of the coral lands which now fly New Zealand’s flag were among the objectives of these forced-labor-getting cruises, and many hundreds of hapless island folk were stolen away for slavery. The tragic recollection of these “thief-ships,” as the natives called them, lingers to this day all over the South Pacific.

The records of the raiders and their brutal deeds are scattered and fragmentary. I searched the files of the ‘sixties in an attempt to piece together a connected story of the ruffianly business, the lineal successor of the old African negro slave traffic to the United States and Spanish America. Notes on the subject, too, I gathered many years ago from old island traders and sailors.

This cheap labor enterprise began, as nearly as it can be fixed, in the year 1860. The Peruvian government and large private interests found it difficult and expensive to obtain labor for their works in a legitimate way. The mines, the guano islands, the plantations, and other scenes of industry must have men who would work for next to nothing, and if for nothing at all, so much the better. Africa was out of the question, since British warships patroled the slave coast so vigilantly. So Peru turned to the so-far untouched South Sea islands as a likely source of labor which would cost little but the expense of fitting up ships to go and steal it.

The raids by a fleet of Peruvian barks, brigs, and schooners were carried out in the period 1861-63. During that time many vessels were chartered for Callao, to “recruit” labor for the mines. It was said that an engagement was entered into by a Callao house to supply some ten thousand natives. In the year 1863 at least two thousand were actually secured and haled off to lifelong slavery—probably endured only a few years. The trickery and violence, and the murders, the crime and sorrow, make as sorry a tale of sin and suffering as anything in the shocking history of the African slave trade.

At least a score of vessels fitted out at Callao appear to have been for slaving cruises. From lonely Easter Island and that southernmost of the tropic lands, lofty Rapa, up to the Line Islands, and thence as far as the Carolines in the northwest, the pirates roved the Pacific, inveigling the trusting Polynesian people on board by promises, and when trickery failed, capturing them by force of arms. The ships were similar to those employed in the slave trade between West Africa and Brazil, and other American countries. Their holds were fitted with long rows and tiers of bunks, or rather shelves, for the accommodation of the ‘livestock’. They carried rice to feed the slaves, and were equipped with large boilers—one brig captured by the French in 1863 had three boilers—for cooking the rice and for condensing seawater for the tanks and casks.

The atolls of the Tokelau group (now under New Zealand’s jurisdiction) and the Ellice Islands, both groups lying northward of Samoa, were among the first visited, and hundreds of natives were stolen there. Penrhyn Island, Manihiki, Rakahanga, Pukapuka (Danger Island), the Cook Islands, the Paumotu or Tuamotu Archipelago, the Society Islands—at all of these some of the fleet of thief-ships called. Some places proved unfruitful in recruits—the Society Islands, under the French flag, for instance, and most of the Cook Islands, which are now British. Very few of the vigilant Raratongans fell victims, and none of the Samoans, so far as can be learned. There were many white residents there who would put the natives on their guard against the Spanish-American scoundrels. But the Tokelau people and their like, the atoll-dwellers, among whom there were few white people, fell very easily to the Peruvians’ wiles.

When islanders could not be enticed on board by promises of goods, armed parties were landed, the able-bodied men were captured, and those who resisted were shot down. Guns were turned on the canoes, and the terrified people swimming away were rounded up by boats’ crews. A trick often used when the natives came aboard unsuspectingly to visit and trade immediately a ship anchored in their lagoons, or lay off the reef, was to ask them down below to have a glass of grog and some biscuits and other white man’s food. They were taken into the hold or ‘tween-decks, and the hatches were shut down on them.

At Easter Island, that isle of mystery, seven vessels made rendezvous early in the slaving cruise. Their captains landed armed crews, gathered in some hundreds of natives, including the high chiefs and learned men, forced them into the boats, and took them on board. They then made a clean sweep of the island, carrying away all the taro, yams, sweet potatoes, and pigs and fowls, and capped their villainy by setting the houses on fire. Many of the poor people who were captured refused to eat or drink, and died of grief before the ships reached Callao.

At Niue, or Savage Island, two ships from Callao stole ninety men. Only one of these slaves, a young chief named Taole, lived to see his home island again. His narrative I shall give presently.

At the island of Mauke, in the Cook Group, the Auckland schooner
Flying Fish
in 1863 found the natives in great consternation over the deeds of these Peruvian craft. They feared they would be attacked, and desired that a man-of-war should be sent to cruise in search of the slavers. The schooner
Osprey,
which arrived at Auckland in April, 1863, from the Cook Islands, brought news that a brig, supposed to be Spanish, had visited Mangaia Island, the southernmost of the group, and had stolen away the principal chief’s son and several other men. Later, two other vessels, whose people said they were Americans, called and tried to engage two hundred men each, but failed.

Perhaps the most atrocious deed of all was the action of the captain of a bark which put many scores of sick natives on shore at Sunday Island, in the Kermadec group, to recover or die as they might. This was reported in 1863 by a vessel which called at Sunday Island on her way to Samoa. The slaving-vessel was a fast-sailing bark; she had a large crew of Spanish-speaking men from Peru and Chile. This was one of the vessels which had kidnapped natives from Niue. They would probably have had a better chance of recovering from the sickness, whatever it was, on shore, than in the crowded, unsavory ship, but they were callously left there marooned on an all-but-desert island, where nearly all of them died. The epidemic spread too to the family of the one white settler on the island, and his Samoan wife and several children died.

For one particularly vile crime there is no parallel even in the African slave trade. This was the sweeping-off of the Nukulaelae people, in the Ellice Islands. Nukulaelae (or the Mitchell Islands) is a coral reef and lagoon with ten beautiful islands. Before the visit of the Peruvian slavers the population of the atoll was four hundred and fifty, all living in peace and plenty, a happy primitive folk; they had been christianized by native missionaries from Samoa. When H.M.S.
Basilisk visited
the group in 1872 the population was seventy. The story of the great piracy was told to Captain Moresby by the only trader there, a German. He went from Nukulaelae on a cruise to Samoa and when he was away, in 1864, the man-stealers came. He returned to find only fifty worn-out people and children; all the rest had been kidnapped by the ruthless Spanish-Americans. The story told to Moresby was that three large barks, flying the Spanish flag, had appeared off the atoll, and an old man landed and told the natives that the vessels were missionary ships. He invited them on board to receive the Holy Sacrament. In simple faith the islanders went off in their canoes, all the able-bodied men. They were made prisoners and put into the hold. Again the old scoundrel landed and told the women and children that the men had sent him for them. They too went off to the black ships and were thrust into the hold of captivity. Then the wicked ships sailed away. None of those left on shore knew where their friends had gone; they vanished over the horizon. Long afterwards it was found that they had been carried off to Peru; but not a word ever reached Nukulaelae from the stolen people. They disappeared from all ken. “It was sickening,” Captain Moresby wrote in his account of his voyage, “to hear the tale told on the spot which had seen all this sorrow.” Only two men, one of whom the captain saw, escaped from the thief-ships; they jumped overboard and swam six or seven miles back to the island.

Two or three of the raiders received something of their deserts. In 1863 the French naval authorities at Tahiti had three captured slaving-vessels in Papeete harbor. One of these, the
Cora,
was seized by the natives at Rapa Island. One of the captains was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and another to five years. It would have been a fitting and dramatic retribution had they been hoisted to the yardarms of their own black craft, “rigged with curses dark,” and sent to the bottom with the scuttled pirate-ship. Unfortunately it does not appear that any of these sea ruffians of the ‘sixties were hanged for their crimes.

Thomas Dunbabin

Among the many contributors to the facts and legends of the buccaneering career of William Henry Hayes (1829-1877) was Thomas Dunbabin (1883-1964), journalist and author. Born in Tasmania, Dunbabin was selected as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1906. On his return he worked on Sydney newspapers. During World War II he served as press attache at the Australian Legation at Ottawa, and later was director of the Australian News and Information Bureau in London and attache in New York.

His best known book is
Slavers of the South Seas
(1935), from which “Bully Hayes and Ben Pease” is taken.