Rascals in Paradise

by James A. Michener

  The first to be thrown to the sharks, which trailed all ships in these warm waters, was a young boy who happened to have six fingers and six toes, which signified to the natives that their gods had marked the boy as their particular ward. When he was lifted to the rail the natives raised such a lament that the men holding the sacred child paused, but Dr. Murray stepped forward and struck the boy in the face, whereupon he toppled backward into the dark waves.

  The spell broken, the other wounded men were pitched overboard, where their trails of telltale blood soon attracted the sharks.

  Then the hold itself was entered and the dead bodies were hauled on deck and slid into the deep. In all, about sixty men were slaughtered that morning, at least sixteen by the doctor’s own admission having been thrown to the sharks while still alive.

  Although the tale of horror aboard the Carl became well known, Dr. Murray was never brought to trial, for he was allowed by a shocking miscarriage of justice to turn Queen’s evidence, but his testimony against his crew members was so pusillanimous that they too escaped the justice they merited. It was left to Dr. Murray’s father to pronounce sentence on his son. In a letter to a Sydney newspaper he said: “As regards Dr. Murray, the celebrated Carl man-catching approver whom I have for years cut off as a disgrace to creed, country, and family—your condemnation of that cruel, unhappy being I fully endorse and add, although opposed to capital punishment on principle, that if any of the Carl crew murderers ever ascend the gibbet for the seventy kidnaped and cruelly slaughtered poor Polynesians, Dr. Murray should be the first, as head.”

  Dr. Murray’s grisly performance was merely the worst example of blackbirding. A catalogue of horrors could be compiled depicting the way in which sea captains of all nations plundered human lives in the Pacific in the forty years following 1863. To Australia alone 1500 natives were taken annually during that time.

  Any native paddling his canoe in the South Seas could become a target for the blackbirders. Swift boat crews were trained to dart into a mass of canoes, cut out three or four with the ablest-looking young men, smash the canoes, haul the struggling swimmers into their boats and pitch them below decks.

  It was especially profitable to kidnap whole congregations where missionaries had taught natives the blessings of Christianity, and the reason we know so much about the depredations of the blackbirders is that their operations were mostly directed against natives who had already been converted, because the docility taught by the missionaries made them more tractable in the fields. Only the repeated protests of dedicated missionaries finally mobilized public opinion against the blackbirders.

  By far the cruelest device used by the blackbirders was that of subduing a hostile island by tossing ashore two or three natives infected with measles. Within a week this horrible disease, absolutely fatal to these people, would sweep an entire island. Men and women, quaking with fever, would dig pits in the sand and allow the cold sea water to cool their burning bodies, whereupon they would contract pneumonia and die. One of the authors of this book lived for several years on Melanesian islands where blackbirders had ravaged the populations, and he saw many flowering, lovely valleys in which a thousand people had once lived, but where six now huddled by the shore in desolation.

  It would be too mournful to narrate the individual stories of islands whose entire male populations were carted off to slavery. Manihiki, Penrhyn, Fakaofo—the roll call is one of senseless horror, because when the total depopulation of an island was ordered, it was inevitably found that the slavers had acquired many captives they could not use, and these had to be tossed overboard.

  But one expedition is remembered with particular remorse, for it exterminated an entire culture and left standing in the Pacific a haunting memory of the white man’s extreme cruelty in this area. This depredation was performed by the worst of all the blackbirders, those from Peru, whose completely vicious behavior was challenged only by depraved captains from Chile.

  Just as the American Civil War initiated slavery in the western Pacific, so the discovery of the properties of fertilizer encouraged the slave trade in the eastern half of the ocean, for entrepreneurs in Peru and Chile found that the guano deposits on rainless, rocky islands off their coasts provided the world’s best and most concentrated source of cheap fertilizer. All they needed was labor to dig the solidified bird droppings.

  Harder work has probably never existed in the world, and travelers reported that the rocky shores at the foot of the guano cliffs were customarily strewn with the bones of Indians and Pacific islanders who preferred to leap to certain death than to work another day under the lashes of the Peruvian overseers. It was to these guano pits that the natives of Easter Island were taken in 1862.

  Of a known population of three thousand, about one third were carried off, including all able-bodied men, all priests, all male members of the royal line and all who could read the symbols of the unique and once powerful Easter Island culture. Of these thousand men, nine hundred perished quickly, coughing out their lungs in the guano pits. European governments forced the return of the remaining hundred, but measles broke out aboard ship, and only fifteen got back to Easter Island, where their latent measles erupted in a terrible plague that killed half the remaining population.

  Thus in a brief space the Peruvian slavers had destroyed two out of every three people on Easter Island, and it is one of the great tragedies of the Pacific that among those dead were all the learned men. No one was left who could decipher the history of Easter Island. No one knew how to carve the gaunt stone statues that symbolize this ancient culture. An entire people had been paralyzed psychologically and has never recovered.

  It was this filthy business that Bully Hayes now entered, and it seems from sketchy evidence that on August 29, 1871, Hayes was involved in one of the most hideous aspects of the entire trade. On that day a black slave ship, supposed to be Bully’s, hove to off Florida Island, facing Guadalcanal in the Solomons. When five natives from Florida paddled out to inspect the ship, swift boats were dropped into the sea and were rowed quickly toward the Florida canoe. While the missionary Charles Hyde Brook stood on the shore, hiding his face in horror, the Florida men were beheaded, their bodies tossed into the sea and their heads collected in a heap to be taken back to the black ship.

  The facts of the affair cannot be denied. Their meaning is obscure. It seems likely that the two boats dropped from Bully’s ship contained one or two white men each—members of Bully’s crew—and several head-hunting warriors from some tribe to the north of Florida. Certainly Bully’s men were not chopping off heads, for there was no market for such items. But equally certainly, he had brought savages from one island to another and had not only permitted but had made possible a head-hunting raid. According to the records, this was often done by blackbirders in order to curry favor with chiefs, so they could get a hold full of natives for sale elsewhere.

  Whether or not it was Hayes’s ship that the Reverend Mr. Brook watched that day cannot now be decided. An investigation conducted by Lord Belmore in Sydney led him to conclude that it probably was, and he so reported to London on November 23, 1871. At any rate, Bully Hayes was now up to his neck in blackbirding, and for the rest of his life this was to be his main occupation. He seems to have made a good deal of money at his calling.

  At the beginning of his career as blackbirder an ominous coincidence of such improbability occurred that certain religious people throughout the Pacific held that it could only be interpreted as God’s divine intervention. Hayes had made so much money blackbirding that shortly he had two ships in the trade, the brig Rona and the brigantine Samoa. On March 22, 1869, his two ships left the same port in the Society Islands—one headed north for California to pick up trading materials with which to lure natives aboard, and the other for blackbirding operations among the Samoan Islands to the west. Hayes was not destined to reach California, for the Rona sank at sea, and after two agonizing weeks of drifting, Hayes and his crew sighted an island whi
ch they correctly took to be Manihiki Atoll.

  It was a minute speck in the vast Pacific, so small that it contained altogether only about a thousand acres, none of it much above sea level. It was nevertheless with some relief that Hayes led his starving men ashore, where to their astonishment they were hailed by loud cries from a band of shipwrecked sailors, who rushed down the blazing coral sands to meet them.

  On the beach there was a moment of utter disbelief as the two groups of men halted and stared at each other. Then one of the sailors already on Manihiki cried, “My God! It’s Bully Hayes!”

  The greetings grew solemn, for one of the Manihiki sailors pointed grimly to the other side of the lagoon, where a ship lay piled on the reef, a total loss. It was Captain Hayes’s second blackbirder, the Samoa.

  Thus both of Bully’s ships, one headed east, the other northwest, and departing at the same time from the same place, were lost and the castaway crews marooned together on one of the tiniest islands in the entire Pacific. A coincidence like this would have reformed most men, but Hayes supervised the building of a makeshift longboat out of salvaged timbers, and after a perilous voyage with little food and less water, his two crews made Samoa, without the loss of a man.

  As soon as he got ashore Hayes started to look for a new ship. “There’s money in blackbirding,” he insisted and soon stepped aboard a dirty old schooner, the Atlantic, which he drove full speed back to Manihiki, where he kidnaped most of the islanders and brought them to Samoa as slaves. But at Pago Pago, in what was later to become American Samoa, a brave native chief, Maunga, strode out into the breaking surf and single-handedly upset Hayes’s landing boats, whereupon the Manihiki blackbirds escaped.

  Hayes was brought to judgment at Apia, where, in February, 1870, Consul Williams found him clearly guilty of stealing men and women and remanded him to Sydney for sentencing and jail. It seemed that Hayes’s career as a blackbirder was over.

  But before Bully could be shipped to an Australian prison, another notorious American, probably even more cruel than Hayes, brought his ship into Apia and hell broke loose. Captain Ben Pease had met Bully Hayes, according to one account, when the two adventurers were commanding gunboats in the Imperial Chinese Navy. “The two became friends,” wrote Louis Becke, “and in conjunction with some mandarins of high rank levied a system of blackmail upon the Chinese coasting junks that brought them—not the junks—in money very rapidly, and Hayes’s daring attack on and capture of a nest of other and real pirates procured for him a good standing with the Chinese authorities. Pease soon got into trouble, however, and when a number of merchants who had been despoiled succeeded in proving that his gunboat was a worse terror to them than the pirates whom he worried, he disappeared for a time.”

  Pease’s ship, a 250-ton brig specially built for the opium trade, was called the Water Lily, of Aberdeen, when Pease sailed her into Manila in 1868 in a damaged condition. The firm of Glover, Dow & Company bought her in Manila, renamed her the Pioneer and retained her captain. Pease proceeded to become famous as the first man to bring blackbird labor into the Fiji Islands.

  Hayes broke his parole and bolted from jailless Apia on his pal’s ship, which sailed on April 1, 1870. Pease—a Satanic-looking rascal with a black spade beard—was a more openly piratical operator than Hayes. His ship was heavily armed with cannons and breechloading rifles, and was manned by a large crew. The bulkhead to the big fore-hold was loopholed so that if the Kanaka recruits that often inhabited it caused any commotion, they could easily be shot down by rifles. Pease was accustomed to land a big armed party on a new island and take off any coconut oil he could find there. After rescuing Hayes from the law in Apia, Captain Ben steered for Savage Island, where by means of forged orders he and Bully obtained £300 worth of produce owned by J. and T. Skinner of Sydney.

  Then, cruising the Bonin Islands, the pair fell out—over a woman, of course. Pease had bought a very beautiful girl from one of the chiefs for $250, which he told Hayes he did not intend to pay. Bully, with rare propriety, insisted that his partner either pay the sum or else give back the girl. He rescued her at pistol point and started to take her back ashore, but decided to ask the girl if she were afraid of Pease. When she said “no,” Bully told her to follow his brother captain; but thereafter the two distrusted each other.

  For some months, Hayes and Pease cruised the Western Carolines, mysteriously filling the brig with coconut oil and hawk-bill-turtle shell that brought $6 a pound. Then brazenly they sailed their ship right back to Apia, where Bully was still under arrest, and sold the cargo at a fat profit.

  How was Hayes able to get away with this? It was said that he had bought off Consul Williams, with whom he now became chummy, and the charge was dropped. In fact, Williams, unworthy descendant of the angelic John Williams, foremost missionary of these regions, probably helped Hayes get his next job, a commission from the world-famous German firm of Godeffroy & Son, out of Hamburg, who dispatched Pease and Hayes to the Line Islands for more blackbirds, offering $100 a head for all the laborers landed in Samoa.

  No one has solved the mystery of this savage trip, but when the brig Pioneer returned to Samoa, Captain Pease could not be seen and Bully Hayes was in sole charge. Pease, he explained, had tired of blackbirding, had sold his ship and had retired to China. People speculated, but the new captain’s big right arm prevented suspicions from becoming charges. It was rumored that Pease had been caught by an American warship and taken to the United States as a pirate. Others claimed he had been killed in the Bonins. Many people believe that he was captured not by an American warship but by a Spanish one, from which he either jumped or was thrown while wearing full leg irons, which dragged him to his death. All we know for certain is that a monster vanished, and another turned up in possession of his ship.

  Hayes now painted the ship a gleaming white, possibly to discourage identification of her as the Water Lily, which had been described as a black ship during the head-hunting episode. He hoisted over her the American flag, to which he was not entitled, and in a burst of fatherly affection rechristened her the Leonora, after his favorite daughter. Along with Cook’s Endeavour and Bligh’s Bounty, the Leonora was to rank among the most famous ships in Pacific history.

  Bully now entered the serious business of hauling semi-yearly cargoes of coconut oil, copra and blackbirds—all obtained by fraud—into Samoa, but this grew tedious to a man of Hayes’s temperament, and we find him in the legend-laden Tuamotu islands east and south of Tahiti. There he persuaded a dozen soft-eyed vahines to take a free pleasure cruise with him to Tahiti, where he was certain their charms would be more appreciated than at home. But when they were afloat, Hayes changed his mind and decided to skip Tahiti.

  “We don’t want to trouble the French authorities with extra work,” he explained, and headed for the Marquesas, where he sold off four or five of the willing ladies to local lovers, either white or native. Hayes always threw a marriage party, with plenty of gin, as part of the bargain.

  Any girls left over after such a cruise, and Hayes made many, would be dumped ashore somewhere with one of Hayes’s famed testimonials. For many years after Bully’s death, when a ship arrived in the Carolines or the Palaus, ladies would troop out to the dock to make the sailors welcome, each bearing tied to her pretty forehead with ribbons such interesting recommendations to the seafarers as this one, which has been preserved:

  To All Whom It May Concern:

  I, William H. Hayes, hereby certify that the bearer of this, Marutahina of Vahitahi, was with me for four or five months, and I can confidently say that I can recommend her to any one in need of an active young wife, general help, or to do chores. She is a very good girl, and the sole support of her mother—an old thief with a tattooed back who lives on Reka Reka.

  Hayes was reported in the Gilbert group in the fall of 1870, but nothing definite was heard of him until March 29, 1871, when the Leonora, bound for Hong Kong, put into the unlikely port of Bangkok in distress. After
repairing leaks at the cost of most of her cargo, she cleared on April 26.

  Back at his Samoan headquarters, Hayes was surprised on February 19, 1872, when two boat’s crews from the U. S. S. Narragansett boarded the Leonora, took possession of her, and escorted her master to the warship to answer charges of oppression of the Caroline Islanders and of carrying too large a crew and armament for a peaceful merchant craft.

  But after examining Hayes’s crew and papers for three days, Captain Richard Meade could not find sufficient evidence to warrant shipping Bully to San Francisco for trial. No arms were found, and the crew was actually under complement. Bully’s threats and fear of his heavy fist had probably intimidated most of the witnesses. Consul Williams also hampered the investigation at every turn in order to protect his crony, and Captain Meade’s report implied that Williams had deliberately held back the required proof. After his acquittal, Bully rushed back to the Leonora and dressed her out with flags to celebrate his exoneration. He then gave the crew liberty, and they painted the town, seeking from pub to pub any witnesses against their captain. When they found one, they beat him up to teach him respect for the law. And legends continued to spread in the South Seas concerning the cunning of Bully Hayes.

  Hayes himself contributed to the legend that had grown up around his name and kept it alive with barroom tales that displayed both his boastfulness and his capacity for invention. One of the most commonly heard is that he contracted in Hong Kong to take a load of Chinese immigrants to Australia, where a head tax of $50 had to be paid on each. He received the money in China, and then devised a means whereby he would not have to pay it out. Inside Sydney Harbor, at Watson’s Bay, Bully choked both his pumps, started his fresh-water tanks, and set his colors at half mast, union down, to show his sore distress. When a tug came to his assistance and offered him a tow, his humanity overcame his selfishness, and he shouted: “Just take off and save these poor souls first, and I reckon we can beach the ship before you come back!” The tug, scenting rich salvage, took the Chinese into port and her captain paid the tax. Of course, when he returned, Hayes’s ship was nowhere to be found. The story sounds rather like a barroom dream, for it seems especially incredible that a tug captain, even if he had the money, would pay out a heavy head tax on immigrants rescued by him.