BULLY HAYES.

Colonist, Volume LVI, Issue 13912, 20 January 1914, Page 2

BULLY HAVES.

A visit of the celebrated Captain "Bully" Hayes to Hokitika iv the 'sixties was one of the events of the "roaring days" of the West Coast recalled by some of the gold-digging veterans at the Westland jubilee festivities. Mr. H. L. Michel, who arrived in Hokitika in May, 18G6, with his parents, told of his first game of Itowls in Hokitika in December of that year, on board the pirate ship run by "Bully" Hayes. When but a lad he had taken the cocoanuts on board and bowled them up and down the deck. During the visit of the ship there were tons of gunpowder stored away on board, and when the Customs officer went about below with a lighted match, "Bully" Hayes and some of his men had moved out of the way in fear of an explosion. However, the gunpowder was not discovered by the officer. It is, perhaps, rather unjust to the memory of Captain Hayes to call his vessel a "pirate ship," says the Greymouth "Star." The late Mr. Louis Becke sailed with Hayes for a considerable period as supercargo, and he exonerates that swaggering South Sea mariner from the worst of the charges levelled against him. Hayes was guilty of many lawless deeds, but he never quite descended to the sanguinary plane of the old-time- pirates. The vessel in-which he visited Hokitika in 1866 was the brig Rona, in which he traded amongst the South Sea Islands. Previously he had owned the schooner Shamrock, which he sailed on the New Zealand coast, and, like one or two other colonial shipmasters of that day, he was strongly suspected of selling gunpowder to the rebel Maoris. Hayes, however, could not have clone very much trading on the New Zealand coast. His main sphere of activity was in the South Seas, and there his peculiar methods of trading helped to make history. As far as is known, he lost tlio Rona in the■ islands, and it was ai'tor the wreck that he wont to China and obtained another fine brig, which he'na'mcd the Leonora, after one of his daughters. It was in this vessel that lie and Louis Becke wore wrecked at Ocean Island in 1874. "Bully" Hayes is said to havo hnd a trick o? slipping away from port without paying hi.s bills, and this was about the full extent of his piracy at Hokitika. But .some of those who sailed with him used to say that when he swindled them he did it in such a bluff and hearty and withal "gentlemanly" way, that they really had not the heart to set the law in motion.