LUCRATIVE PIRACY

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 28, 2 August 1923, Page 3

LUCRATIVE PIRACY

STORIES OF "BULLY"

HAVES

"THAT GENTLEMANLY MAN"

REFINED METHODS COMBINED

WITH CRUELTY.

Pirates of the accepted sort are a hairy set of ruffians, hung about with weapons and redolent of rum and rude oaths, declares Bassett Digby, F.R.G.S., in the "Manchester Guardian." You would not have taken 1 Captain Hayes, "that gentlemanly man," for a pirate. He certainly wore a beard, but it was a nice silky, well-combed, meticulously trimmed brown beard. He wore the clothes of a gentleman and tallied the talk of a gentleman. When the dirty work, of the profession had to be done (and Captain Hayes was the last man to shirk it) you could always rely on his emulating Mr. Neil Lyons's Joe Golightly and

"very politely" stabbing his victim in the spine or pushing him in the brine.

Hardly anyone in Britain lias heard of Captain- Heyes, but 'although he was knocked on the head by a mate fifty years ago his name is familiar on every coral island of the Pacific. Many a South Sea island has never heard of sMr.^Lloyd George, but none is ignorant of "that gentlemanly man" whose exploits, for twenty years, set Oceania, by the ears.

What he was up to before 1858 I was unable to discover. I don't think anyone in the South Seas knows, for, though refiued geniality, incarnate, he was never communicative about himself. Anyhow, he landed from the s.s. Orestes at Honolulu in 1858, and early in 1859, equipped with fifty dollars that he had borrowed from a missionary, the llev. Mr. Damon, he took a passage to San Francisco. A. few weeks later he sailed into the little cove of Kah'ului, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, in charge of a brig bound for New Caledonia. He tried to pick up a cargo of cattle. Sheriff Treadway promptly rowed out in.a little boat and arrested him for having omitted to call first at the Custom-house at Lahaina. Apologising for having been misled by his mate, he set sail for Lahaina with the sheriff oii board. Ten miles out at sea he courteously gave- Mr. Treadway the choice of paying his passage to New Oaledomia or rowing home. He ' chose the latter alternative, Captain Hayes leaning over the taffrail and smiling-at him as he started. About this time a warrant for Captain. Hayes's arrest arrived in Honolulu from San Francisco, where, it appeared, he had stolen his brig and fitted her out without bothering to pay any bills. The brig never reached New Caledonia. She ran on to a reef outside Wallace's Island, and Hayes, with a boatload of Jus favourite .men, reached the Navigator s Isles. He next turned up at Batavia-, as captain of a barque, and had loaded a cargo of coffee for Europe when the Dutch East India Company got wind of his reputation. He let them unload her, but he stuck to the charter fee.

Presently he sailed into Hong Kong and collected a cargo of Chinese coolies for Melbourne. On the way he heard from a passing ship that a £10 landing tax had been imposed on each coolie Arrived a few miles off Melbourne, he opened his sea-cocks and hoisted distress signals. Two salvage tugs responded. They found his vessel half full of -water and urged him to leave her. But he persisted that he would stand by the ship and work her in. No sooner had he watched, with sweet satisfaction, the tugs disappear landward with all the coolies ('each representing a liability of £10) than he pumped out the water and vamoosed. Not long afterwards he collected another cargo of coolies from a' China.port .(and the.£lo Australian landing-tax for ea-ch), took them to Hong Kong, "wangled" their naturalisation in that British Crown colony, and brazenly managed to land them in Australia as British subjects. There followed some years of mysterious South Pacific "trading" and raiding in the best Elizabethan tradition. One fine day he rashly put into Upolu, the port of Samoa, and the British Consul promptly arrested him. He submitted with good grace and charming nonchalance. His luck was in. for just then his old friend Captain Ben Pease happened to arrive on a fast little brig. Obtaining permission to take his chronometers aboard the Leonora one evening for readjustment, he was missing from Samoa in the morning.. So was the Leonora. When the brig got to Shanghai,' Hayes, backed up by ■members of the crew whom 'he had bribed, swore, to an affidavit that he owned her, and Captain Pease was gaoled. He refitted and filled up with stores, paying cash for nothing except a spare mainyard, and slipped down the river out to .the sea. At Saigon, in Cochin China, he got a charter to take rice to Hong Kong and intermediate ports. At the first intermediate port he went ashore with the owner of the rice. _ Promptly giving him the slip, he nipped on board again and put out to sea, subsequently turning up in Siam, where he sold the whole cargo for a good sum at Bangkok, and prudently applied a considerable part of the proceeds to having the Leonora 1 copper-bottomed. He cut things pretty fine, for, unknown to either of them at the time, the very night he sailed out of port again for the Pacific an incoming mail steamer was bringing the owner of the rice. A few weeks later Captain Hayes met with an unfortunate contretempts. His mate marooned him on an island. Was Captaiii; Hayes downhearted? Not a bit of it. He "found salvation," and an American mission gave, him the command of a missionary schooner. He fared forth on her, threw the harmonium and the Bibles and hymn-books overboard, and returned to lucrative piracy. While bathing on the beach at Guam, however, he was arrested by the Spanish officials and sent for trial at Manila. Here, when in imminent danger of being garrotted for a number of murders and piracies, lie managed to "get round" the powerful Roman Catholic hierarchy, became reconverted and disappeared. He turned up again in San Francisco, again stole a vessel—a smart schooner, the Lotus,-—and was off again, down to the South Seas. Once he.was caught by the U.S. patrol ship Narragansett, but he got on so well with the officers and made so favourable an impresion on her commander, Captain Meade, that he was released while still at sea, on account of insufficient evidence, and had the exquisite satisfaction of receiving a gift of new sails and gear at the expense of the Government which had i such a, heavy score marked yip against him.

Captain Hayes was always refined in his -methods. When he came to knock senseless the maroon oil a, coral island the Frenchman from whom ho had bought an interest in the schooner Giova.nni Apiani he chose a moment when the hapless fellow was eloquently admiring the loveliness of an atoll past which they were sailing. He then came up softly behind him and tickled him behind the ear with a feather from his wife's hat. As the Frenchman turned, after vainly trying to brush it away, "that

gentlemanly man" felled him- with a terrific blow on the forhead.

Captain Hayes's career was terminated not by the hangma^, the garrotter, or the firing squad, nor yet by shark or typhoon. A worm turned. He was knocked over the head by a mate driven to desperation by his refinements of brutality. ....