Rascals in Paradise

by James A. Michener

  It was clear that she and her new husband were determined to retain title to the islands discovered by Mendaña in the South Seas, and that they planned to return there and take up their kingdom. At first, Doña Isabel’s petitions to His Majesty to be allowed to carry on the great work of Mendaña were received favorably, but gradually difficulties were interposed, and she never returned to seek the rich islands of King Solomon. What enraged Doña Isabel most was that at the same time the king rejected her plea, he decided to put the Solomon Islands expedition under the command of the skilled Portuguese pilot, Pedro Fernandez de Quirós. This peaceful, humane and zealous explorer, who dreamed of finding a great Southern Continent and becoming a second Columbus in the Pacific, was thus able to sail on the famous voyage of 1606, during which he discovered the Tuamotus and the New Hebrides, while his second in command, Luis Vaez de Torres, first sighted Torres Strait and came within thirty miles of the unsuspected continent of Australia.

  Doña Isabel finally swallowed her disappointment and settled down in Peru as the wife of Fernando de Castro, by whom she had several children. Later she took her family back to her ancestral home in Galicia, where she supervised the setting up of an elaborate estate in the country. In the evening of her life we can hear her telling her offspring, “Had it not been for the greed and envy and meanness of a gang of low-born rascals, your mother would today be queen of the islands of King Solomon!”

  * Actually the Quirós report was apparently set down by a young poet, Luis de Belmonte Bermudez, who acted as the Chief Pilot’s amanuensis aboard ship.

  7

  Bully Hayes, South Sea Buccaneer

  An amazing American tore back and forth across the Pacific during the middle years of the last century, terrorizing nearly half a world and leaving in his wake a forecastle full of horrifying stories. He was charged with murder and piracy and bigamy and blackbirding, and the foul destruction of his entire family. His name was whispered at night on lonely atolls to frighten children. Native chiefs prayed to ancient gods that they might be spared visits from this terrible man. Police and warships of many nations tried to track him down, but he either eluded them or talked his way to freedom, and after thirty years of unparalleled depravity he died of natural causes—that is, he was murdered and thrown to the sharks by his cook, whom he had bullied once too often.

  Today, looking soberly at the career of this unbelievable man, it is almost impossible to separate fact from legend, for there is no true account of his desperate adventures and upon a slim thread of proven incident has been hung all the romantic canvas of a great ocean. Nevertheless, an honest attempt should be made to isolate the true history before the sifting of legend becomes completely hopeless.

  From the first day on which the present authors, in their separate ways, embarked upon the alluring Pacific, they have been haunted by stories of this sometimes diabolical, sometimes ridiculous man. From the wilds of New Zealand, where he roamed, to the loneliest islets of the farthest reef, where he marauded, they have heard improbable stories of his outrageous career. Never, so far as they can recall, have they ever heard a dull yarn, and they now welcome this opportunity to review the available sources. With the rollicking echo of the great ocean setting the rhythm for them, they herewith present all that is nowadays known about William Henry Hayes.

  He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1829, son of a grogshop keeper. As a boy he stole $4,000 from his father, it is said, and ran away to become a sailor on the Great Lakes. He married early. This woman, whose name we do not know, was his official wife, but when he became involved in a horse-stealing affair he left town hurriedly with a tarnished reputation and a strange lady he had picked up near his father’s saloon. There is some evidence that he skipped out of New York as a passenger on the ship Canton on March 4, 1853, and here the confusion really begins.

  For into the port of Singapore, the capital of rascaldom, the Canton moved smartly on July 11, 1853, under the command of twenty-four-year-old Captain Bully Hayes. How he had got control of the ship no one knows, and whether he was then the rightful owner is uncertain, but as we shall see, this matter of papers never bothered Hayes, and one week after arriving in Singapore, he sold the Canton at a good price.

  He reappeared dramatically in Singapore on December 21, 1855, as master of the American bark Otranto, his papers apparently in order, and with a load of cargo he had picked up at Swatow. Disposing of the Otranto, on March 10, 1856, he mysteriously bought back the Canton, which gave him legal title to her, and promptly painted out her old letters and renamed her the C. W. Bradley, Junior, after the American consul at Singapore. This tribute to an American official is important, for all during his years of outrage in the Pacific, Hayes was able to hoodwink American officialdom, which at times seemed to be his best defender and often his only defense against long overdue justice. Bully loved consuls.

  On April 1, a fit day for the deed, he mortgaged his new ship to the firm of Dare & Webster, chandlers, for $3000 and next day left for a profitable voyage to Shangai. It looked as if Singapore had acquired a competent and industrious new captain, so that on his return to that city in November, 1856, Hayes stayed two days in port and loaded the C. W. Bradley, Junior, with every conceivable cargo he could lay hands on, promising full payment next day. The otherwise canny British merchants of Singapore appeared willing to trust any ship sponsored by the American consul, and the cargo was a rich one. Before dawn on November 20 Hayes fled Singapore’s island-studded harbor without clearing customs, without papers, without orders of any kind. He had discovered how easy it was to “pay your creditors with the foresheet.” He was well on his way to becoming the Pacific’s foremost absconder.

  A few weeks later he turned up in the steaming tropical city of Batavia, in Java, where he sold his rich cargo and refilled the C. W. Bradley, Junior, with the choicest items from the warehouses of hardheaded Dutch merchants. Properly suspicious of Hayes, these shrewd men demanded payment before he returned to his ship. He willingly paid them in full, using forged drafts upon the Singapore chandlers, Dare & Webster.

  Up to this time the arrival of Captain Hayes in any port had signaled the beginning of some clever and profitable fraud, but his next call showed another side of the dashing young American. He entered society. Not only was he a master thief of Singapore merchandise—he was an even greater thief of women’s hearts.

  Fremantle, at that time a little convict colony perched on the western coast of Australia, nestles on a hook of land where the life is hospitable and the climate delightful. Captain Hayes sold off his stolen Java goods in Fremantle and settled down to enjoy at leisure the gay life of the town. Trim-looking, impeccably dressed and always affable, he soon proved that his arrival at any party was the highlight of the evening. He sang extremely well and displayed a courteousness to women that was unusual in the Australia of that day. He was clearly the lion of Fremantle society and celebrated that fact by becoming formally and sentimentally engaged to the harbormaster’s daughter.

  Dashing young Captain Hayes took his ship on several passenger trips to Adelaide, and made out handsomely on the fares because overland travel between that city and Western Australia was impossible owing to the forbidding desert that interposed its thousand miles of desolation. But the profits that Hayes made on these trips were lost when the sleuths employed by Dare & Webster of Singapore caught up with him and forced him to sell the Bradley at auction. The ship brought only enough to pay the mortgage of £1250.

  The people of Fremantle, far from being suspicious at this turn of events, considered the sale merely a business reversal and invited Hayes to move his belongings ashore, where he enjoyed such a hilarious time that he celebrated his warm feelings toward Australia by jilting the harbormaster’s daughter and on August 25, 1857, marrying the liveliest and prettiest widow in town, Mrs. Amelia Littleton.

  The following year, supported by his new—and bigamous—wife’s high spirits, Hayes successfully fought off a horde of creditors f
rom three countries and finally escaped them by submitting himself manfully to insolvency proceedings in the Australian courts. On March 16, 1858, while still an undischarged bankrupt, Hayes pulled one of his neatest tricks and escaped jurisdiction of the Western Australian courts.

  Learning that the schooner Waitemata was weighing anchor for Melbourne, Hayes primed a crony to launch the rumor that he had got away that morning on a brig that had sailed for Newcastle. The creditors hastily chartered a tug and rushed vainly in pursuit, but while they were returning, sad and seasick, they passed the Waitemata setting forth on its way to Melbourne with Hayes aboard. His loyal wife later joined him in that city.

  There he persuaded Daniel A. Osborn, owner of the British ship Orestes, to give him command. How Hayes, an American with no certificate of maritime competency, managed to clear customs on September 2, 1858, for Vancouver is a mystery. After the ship had left port Osborn apparently reflected on his foolhardy choice of a captain and dispatched warnings to various British consuls, but their intervention was not required, because the Orestes’ supercargo, Clements, found the behavior of his captain so extraordinary that he had the American thrown off his own ship in Honolulu, on the charge that he had swindled several of his passengers on the trip.

  Honolulu, now a bustling port under the rule of King Kamehameha IV, was almost too easy for Hayes. Within a few weeks he had passed worthless drafts, borrowed from prominent citizens and enlisted the money of business adventurers. With $2000 in cash, he and his wife left for San Francisco in one of the bark Adelaide’s most expensive cabins.

  Anyone familiar with Hayes could predict what story the San Francisco Bulletin would sooner or later carry. On August 31, 1859, the paper informed its readers: “The brig Ellenita, Captain Hayes, ran off on Sunday night without clearing papers, and leaving creditors to the amount of several thousand dollars in the lurch. The captain pretended that he was about to sail for Melbourne, and obtained credit for the repair of the vessel and large amounts of stores, besides the baggage of intending passengers, with all of which he put off on an unknown and unlawful voyage.” Of course, he left many creditors, including M. S. Morrison, to whom he still owed $300 on the purchase price of the brig. Adding a new wrinkle, he also swindled Mr. Morrison out of some forty tons of beans. Bully left his wife Amelia behind, abandoning her to the mercies of the San Francisco water front.

  Cruising the Pacific in his fine new ship, Captain Hayes found that he needed to replenish his water stores, and so put in at the Hawaiian island of Maui, where he not only acquired water but also a good deal of gold for goods he smuggled ashore at night. On September 18 he was arrested by Sheriff Peter Treadway of Lahaina, but Hayes talked fast and persuaded the burly sheriff to come aboard the ship and see for himself that there could not possibly be any contraband on the Ellenita. After the sheriff had been heavily plied with liquor in the cabin, Hayes weighed anchor and cleared the port. Then, wakening the pudgy sheriff, Hayes told him coldly, “Go back on shore without me or stay aboard and take a long trip to Tahiti.” The sheriff studied for a moment, then climbed down into his boat and started rowing.

  Actually, Sheriff Treadway made a wise choice, for a month after he went ashore with the hootings of Hayes’s crew in his ears, the Ellenita foundered in heavy seas. The cargo of stolen beans shifted and plugged up the pumps. Hayes, with eleven others, navigated the lifeboat into Samoa in four stormy days. A makeshift raft carried the other sixteen crew members for twenty terrifying days through sharks and storms and blazing sun. The men survived only by eating raw shark’s flesh, and finally made landfall on lonely Wallis Island with the loss of only one man.

  By one of the strange coincidences that marked Hayes’s life, the men from the boat and the survivors from the raft were reunited seventy-seven days later, when a British warship and an island trading brig sailed simultaneously into Sydney Harbor on New Year’s Day. There was a drunken reunion, but Captain Hayes’s celebration was quickly over, for Australia was at last catching up with her adopted son from Cleveland.

  On January 6, the Sydney Morning Herald reprinted a scathing biography of Hayes from the Honolulu Advertiser. Next day the same paper reported that Hayes had been charged with assault on a fifteen-year-old girl named Cornelia Murray on board the Ellenita soon after leaving San Francisco. The case was dismissed, however, for lack of corroboration.

  On the ninth, the Sydney Empire came out with an exposé under the heading: “The Career of a Remarkable Scoundrel.” Hayes was therein described as “thirty-two years of age, six feet high, fifteen stone weight [210 pounds], and of rather plausible, bluff exterior, which with many, it would seem, has enabled him to pass off, until a settlement came, as a very honest jolly seaman, and he is a man who at times spends his money, or the money in his possession, very liberally.… The success of this enormous mercantile humbug (he having possessed himself probably to the amount of $20,000, or to the value thereof, if not twice as much, in the last eight years, without any equivalent but impudence and promises) is the more singular from the fact that he is a man of the most meager education, and possessing no particular qualities, except rare cunning, attended by an unlimited command of impudence, and a somewhat more than average degree of physical power.”

  In response, in the Herald for January 12 appeared a rambling letter signed by Hayes—but one which his illiterate hand was clearly incapable of framing—denying all charges except fooling Sheriff Treadway. In the same issue four other letters appeared in Hayes’s defense. Subsequently it was found that all five had been written by a friend who had sailed with Hayes on the Bradley.

  The fundamental character of Hayes was now becoming widely known throughout the Pacific. He was a cheap swindler, a bully, a minor confidence man, a thief, a ready bigamist, and about to prove himself a ravisher of young girls. The Sydney Police Court accordingly heard charges against Hayes in connection with a £53 fraud executed some time before in Samoa, but the case had to be dropped because of faulty jurisdiction. However, Australian creditors combined against him and he was popped into Darlinghurst Prison, from which he was duly released as an insolvent debtor.

  At this point Hayes descended to the ridiculous and became a member of a blackface minstrel troupe; this style of entertainment had lately been introduced from America and had proved quite popular at back-country race meetings and stock shows.

  At intermission time between the minstrel acts, Hayes spent his time in the barroom seeking out gullible investors, and soon uncovered a wealthy country gentleman who was willing to finance the purchase of the sturdy bark Launceston in April, 1861.

  This ship left Newcastle with a cargo of coal intended for Bombay, but when Captain Hayes reached Surabaja, on the north Java coast, temptation proved too great and he sold the coal for his own pocket and took on a charter cargo of sugar and coffee. But at this moment an article in a Singapore newspaper arrived with details of the gruesome commercial history of the American captain, and the frightened merchants and underwriters of Hayes’s cargo offered to pay him full freight to the next port if he would only give them back their goods. Bully agreed, but after they had relaxed their guard, he slipped out of port with a cargo worth fully $100,000 plus £500 he owed his agents.

  He and the Launceston then vanished and the ship was next heard of when it returned to Java under different owners, who sold it for ready cash.

  Hayes, who never explained how he had lost his ship, now turned up with a new trick, as reported by the Melbourne Age on September 9, 1862: “The notorious Captain Hayes, with the bark Cincinnati, visited Sydney, and after engaging passengers for Dunedin, New Zealand, and receiving their passage money, sailed away without a single passenger.”

  But Hayes was himself a passenger when, on September 13, the Cincinnati, under another captain, sailed from Newcastle, up the coast. Bully now began a phase of his career that combined high adventure, art and another fling at bigamy. Among his fellow passengers aboard a ship heading for New Zealand was a t
raveling company of vaudeville artists, including a Mr. and Mrs. Glogski, a handsome widow named Mrs. Roma Buckingham, her brother, her daughter and four talented sons called The Masters Buckingham. After a five-day passage, Hayes married Mrs. Buckingham and became the loving stepfather of her five children.

  He became a member of the vaudeville troupe and seems to have enjoyed a splendid season in New Zealand, but the lure of the sea was too strong and in some unaccountable way he turned up several months later as master of the Black Diamond, out of Sydney. With his reputation broadcast throughout the Pacific, how he could find an Australian owner willing to entrust him with a costly ship baffles the imagination, but soon the Black Diamond was loaded with the sevenfold Hayes family and, appropriately, a cargo of coal which was to be delivered within a few days up the Australian coast.

  This time an authentic cyclone tore away Bully’s sails and put three feet of water in his hold. Running the crippled ship before the wind, Hayes fought out the storm for fourteen days and wound up clear across the Tasman Sea near Auckland, New Zealand. “An act of God,” Hayes said and promptly sold the cargo, took on a new one, and early one blustery Monday morning when no one was looking slipped out of the harbor with all bills unpaid.

  Tragedy struck on August 19 when the Black Diamond was hiding in Croisselles Bay, off New Zealand’s South Island. The crew was busy loading firewood and calking leaky seams, so Bully borrowed a yacht and went for a sail with his latest wife, their thirteen-month-old baby girl, Roma’s younger brother and a maidservant. Caught in a squall, the boat sank instantly, and Hayes saved his own life by swimming to shore. His family drowned; only the body of the baby reached land. Bully’s enemies openly accused him of murdering his whole family, but no evidence could be established.