BLACKBIRDING IN THE PACIFIC

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31984, 10 May 1969, Page 4

BLACKBIRDING IN THE PACIFIC

Cannibal Cargo**. By Harold Holthouse. Rigby. 224 pp. Bibliography. Index.

One of the most unlovely chapters in the history of the human race was written during the last half of the nineteenth century and relates to the peoples of the Pacific area. This period became known as the "blackbirding” era, and it started innocently enough in the mind of a prominent Queenslander, Robert Towns, who needed workers for his cotton plantations, and because of the heat of the climate was unable to obtain enough white labour. Accordingly he decided to recruit natives of the many Pacific Island groups on definite, but not unreasonable, contracts, by which they could be returned to their islands after a specified time with accumulated wages—£3 a year—which is hardly liberal by any standards, but which, for coloured labour, was not considered unduly mean at the time.

The ramp which grew up as a result of this project was to be a grave embarrassment to the provincial government of Queensland, and, indeed, to the civilised world. Unscrupulous scoundrels among the ships’ captains sent to collect volunteers soon turned the transaction to their own account in the biggest possible way, and the author give* a fully documented history of the slave-trade into which the original project was turned. Communities of islanders—called collectively Kanakas—from the Solomons, New Hebrides, New Caledonia and other groups were systematically kidnapped in large numbers under false enticements to board the ships. Some, presented with indentures to sign, put their thumb-prints

to “agreements," not * word of which they understood; and all of them carried a private priee per hewi. payable to the -captain by labourhungry employers in the cotton, and afterwards the sugar industries, in the expanding colony of Queensland. Later, plantation-owners in Fiji joined in the general scramble for Kanaka workers.

But, badly victimised as these ignorant savages undoubtedly were, they were cannibals to a man, and, notwithstanding the efforts of missionaries who were particularly active in the area, the brutality and duplicity of their white exploiters were matched by their own murderous and inhuman practices. Women as well as men were recruited for the labour force, and in certain ships—notably that commanded by a notorious blackguard, “Bully Hayes”—were floating brothels, the captains allotting “wives” to the crew, while keeping a substantial harem for himself. The distribution of firearms to the natives, as part of their emoluments at the end of their engagements, resulted quite often in mutual massacres in the islands, where bad faith had been shown by black man or white. The slave-trade, indeed, became so notorious that the Royal Navy had to be brought in to circumvent it, though

the commanders of naval vessels found themselves hopelessly handicapped by the restrictions put on. any punitive action they were called upon to take in dealing with the situation, by the too humane administration at home. Yet, in this history of savage murders, cannibalism, prostitution and cupidity the book provides some evidence that the Kanakas were treated on the whole not too badly by their white employers, once they had reached their destinations, and a number of them returned home at the end of their engagements bearing gifts for relatives and friends—though too often this meant the distribution of lethal weapons. Legislation which eventually resulted in a “white Australia” policy could certainly be defended on moral, as well as economic, grounds, for cheap black labour was making life impossible for the poorer members Of a growing white population, indeed, the extinction of the •blackbirder" was a necessary-mea-sure if the ordinary decencies of civilisation were ever to be respected in the Pacific area. Now, nearly a, hundred years later, blackbirding

appears as one of the most shameful examples of man’s inhumanity to man in the name of get-rich-quick rewards.