The next island the Rosario touched at was Erromango, north of Tanna. Long before blackbirding, the recruitment of natives, by force or inducement, for indentured labour in Australia, it had been the scene of many depredations by sandalwood traders, and its natives had struck back with intermittent murder. It was here a chief told Palmer of the kidnap more recently of ten natives, who were lured aboard a ship with a promise of tobacco. Another ship took five. One captain got nine Erromangans aboard by telling them he could supply them with pigs for a coming feast. And so it went, a regular attrition of small numbers of men. Palmer discovered that not a single native that had been taken from Erromango had ever come back.
Captain Palmer came to despair of Queensland legislators and officials. Many others in Brisbane and other cities were similarly outraged. The Sydney Empire wrote, ‘The more inquiry into the Polynesian Labour question is prosecuted, the clearer it becomes that nothing less than a species of slavery is intended to be perpetrated by the planters of Queensland.’ The Governor of Queensland, Sir George Bowen, son of a Donegal rector and described as ‘a good trumpeter’ for Queensland, was told by the Colonial Office that the traffic in islanders was one ‘in respect of which . . . you are under the most serious responsibility’.
The Queensland government was thus forced in 1869 to appoint a Select Committee to inquire into the operations of the Polynesian Labour Act. Six of the seven members appointed either favoured the indenture system or used Kanaka labour themselves. The Methodist preacher William Brookes told the select committee that ‘husbands were separated from wives, thousands of children left without their natural protectors, homes desolated, villages ransacked and burned, drunkenness, fraud, and every dishonest artifice employed in order to procure these men who were to add so immensely to our comfort’. The witnesses summoned consisted mainly of planters and government officials, though Robert Short, the Queensland correspondent of the Anti-Slavery Society, was also summoned; his evidence would prove so damning that it was not included in the printed document sent to London.
The committee reported there was no evidence of kidnapping, no abuses during voyages and no complaints received about conditions on the plantations. The members of the committee further ruled the reports of brutality were entirely due to the behaviour of slavers from Noumea and Fiji. Queensland recruiting vessels were ‘in nearly all cases humane and kind’. The implication that this was slavery was denied, Captain Palmer lamented, ‘and even sleek oily men in sable broadcloth are found to stand forth in defence of the man-stealers’. He quoted an unnamed ‘late Governor of Queensland’, almost certainly Sir George Bowen, as saying that many of the indentured Kanakas serving in the colony had returned to Queensland after revisiting their homes. But much evil had been done, and would now continue to be done, said Palmer, under the Polynesian Labour Act of 1868.
The Queensland Parliament ultimately amended the Act in 1870 to allow for government agents. The salary offered was just £10 per month and was likely to attract men who were not necessarily accomplished at other trades. It was also enacted that recruiters, as blackbirders were called in the legislation, were to take out a government licence and lodge bonds of £500 to refrain from kidnapping and 10 shillings per recruit to return him to his home within three years. The master of each vessel had also to obtain a certificate from a prominent white man on the island of origin of the recruited native stating that the recruits understood the agreement and consented to it. The planters who purchased islander labour were to keep a register showing the names and condition of all natives employed, reporting any deaths to the local magistrate. And so on. Yet there were many ways to evade the pieties of this law. Captains could sail from distant parts of Queensland, recruit their natives and then land them back in unsupervised stretches of the Queensland coast. Even vessels that docked at Brisbane found enforcement of the Act was not strict. Captain Palmer initiated prosecutions for kidnapping against the schooners Daphne and Challenge, but despite powerful evidence against them the masters and owners of both were found not guilty. Even in the one successful prosecution for 1869, where it was proven that the officers of the Sydney schooner Young Australia had fired rifles into the hold and killed three rebellious natives, the murderers served only short sentences in Sydney and Melbourne gaols.
One government agent who did not shut his eyes was John Meiklejohn, stationed at Maryborough in Queensland. He alleged that John Michael Coath, captain of the Jason, had kidnapped several natives in the New Hebrides. Coath threatened Meiklejohn that he would shoot him if he recorded the incident in his log. A few days later, claimed Meiklejohn, he was given a powerful drug in a glass of wine, chained up in the hold of Jason, and left delirious and starving for five weeks. Friends of his who boarded the Jason at Maryborough found him hollowed out and demented. An official inquiry was called, but this time all three members were nominated by the Minister for Works, W.H. Walsh, a man who was accused of ‘monomania’ in his campaign against mistreatment of blacks. He was considered ‘soft’ on Aborigines by many members of the Parliament, but his campaign secretary, Travis, was the registered owner of the Jason, and so Captain Coath was exonerated.
The radical politician William Brookes was a gifted member of the early Queensland Parliament who had moved a message of condolence be sent from that body to Abraham Lincoln’s widow and who stood for a great deal of the opinions one founds in ‘towns’. He had recently lost his seat in Parliament, but still he continued calls on the British government to apply their anti-slavery laws to Queensland, and in this he worked with his friend Short, of the Anti-Slavery Society. He had attempted to move an anti-slavery bill in the House of Representatives but the fact it came from him foredoomed it. The British Parliament in 1872 passed the first Pacific Islanders Protection Act, which empowered Australian courts to accept native evidence and try any British subject caught blackbirding. Until then only the evidence of another European was admitted. But the blackbirders were barely incommoded by this new enactment.
One of the worst cases had occurred in 1871 with the brig Karl when Dr James Patrick Murray quarrelled with two of his partners in a Fiji plantation. Put ashore by him in the New Hebrides, they were killed and then cannibalised. Dr Murray sailed on to Bougainville and captured eighty natives with the inventive measure of dropping lumps of iron through their canoes as they came alongside. During the voyage, when the natives tried to escape from the hold, Dr Murray and the crew drilled holes through the bulkhead and fired their revolvers into the natives below. About seventy natives were shot and thrown overboard whether dead or wounded. But when word got out, Murray turned Queen’s evidence and saw many of his associates sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in Sydney. Murray, returned to Melbourne, would vanish from history.
Naturally, blackbirding put Europeans living in the islands in danger. Anglican Bishop Paterson of Vanuatu knew his life was in constant danger from natives because blackbirding ships often impersonated missionary ships. In October 1871 when he landed alone on the island of Nukapuj, he was clubbed to death by the inhabitants, and two of his companions waiting offshore in a boat were killed with poisoned arrows.
KIPLING OF THE PACIFIC
Louis Becke, once hailed as the ‘Rudyard Kipling of the Pacific’ and read by Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, was typical of the raw entrepreneurship trading in natives in the South Pacific. Born in Port Macquarie in 1855, before he was out of his teens he stood trial in a Brisbane court as the accomplice of the notorious Captain ‘Bully’ Hayes, a piratical American blackbirder.
William Henry Hayes had been born in Cleveland, Ohio and was in his robust late thirties when Becke first joined the crew of his vessel Leonora in the Marshall Islands. Before taking to the trade in natives, Bully had been in Darlinghurst Gaol for debt, had involved himself with a minstrel troupe in the Hunter Valley, sailed around New Zealand in various craft, and then in May 1866 acquired the Rona and became a trader and blackbi
rder. The Rona was sunk off the Cook Islands, a disaster in which Bully lost his wife Amelia and his children, but in 1874 he was given the command of the American blackbirder Leonora, on which Becke travelled as supercargo, that is, as the manager of the ship’s store which exchanged manufactured goods for island products.
The Leonora was the most notorious blackbirding vessel in history. A brilliant white, beautifully trim yacht, she was armed with two guns on each side and carried a sizeable crew of thirty men. But it was in her dark forehold that true crowding occurred—as many as 200 kidnapped natives could be stowed there at a time. In the main cabin Bully Hayes entertained the most attractive of the captured native girls. Becke would claim that he rejected Hayes’ offer of one of these women. The government agents Becke met on the blackbirding vessels he sailed on were no better than the rest of the crew. ‘Drunk nine days out of ten, did as much recruiting as the recruiters themselves, and drew . . . thumping bonuses from the planters sub rosa!’
The Leonora at last sank on a reef off Kosrae in the present Micronesia, stranding the survivors there. Leonora had been swiftly abandoned by the crew, but islander men and women were left to their own devices in waters which were reputed to be plentiful in sharks. Ashore, writes Becke cryptically, ‘[m]any a tragedy resulted, for . . . mutiny, treachery, murder, and sudden death was the outcome of the wreck of the Leonora’. Hayes and Becke set up a station on the island and collaborated with King Togusa in a palm-oil extraction business. But the routine bored young Louis. After a fight with Hayes, Becke went to live on the other side of the island in a native village.
When the British warship Rosario arrived six months later, Bully escaped action by Captain Palmer by flitting on a fourteen-foot boat heading for the open ocean. Young Becke was arrested on a charge of stealing a competing ketch, the E.A. Williams. Acquitted in Brisbane, he took a number of jobs, working variously as a bank clerk and Palmer River prospector, but by 1880 he was in the Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu), had married an islander and was trading in his own store at Nukufetau. For him as for Bully Hayes it was not a business bereft of peril. Later that year he lost everything in a shipwreck.
Hayes, meanwhile, set up a trading station in the Caroline Islands and terrorised the natives, again escaping an inspection by the Rosario in a small boat with one companion. He was picked up by an American whaler and landed in the North Pacific at Guam in February 1875. In April 1877, commanding the Lotus in the Marshall Islands, he was killed by a mutinous sailor with an iron bar and his body was cast overboard. His tale would attract Rolf Boldrewood, who would recount it in a novel named A Modern Buccaneer (1894), based on one of Louis Becke’s manuscripts. He would later feature as a principal character in Becke’s own Tales of the South Seas.
Becke had a further significance when it came to the relationship of the Australian colonies to the South Sea islands. While working as a storekeeper in Rabaul, he became conscious of the activities of a fraudster of heroic scale, the Marquis de Rays, a Frenchman who had begun advertising a Nouvelle France on the island of New Ireland, declaring himself King Charles over an unclaimed archipelago, and attracting 570 German, Italian and French settlers to buy unsuitable sections of land in what he named—to honour his Breton birth—the Colonie Libre de Port Breton. The colonists arrived in 1881 and 1882 and realised that the land they had bought had been fraudulently described to them. The realities of malaria and swamp-dwelling quickly drove most of them to flee to New Caledonia or Australia. De Rays would first be imprisoned and then perish in a French asylum, but his activities might have helped motivate Queensland to seize New Guinea.
Becke returned home in 1886. His island wife having been lost at sea, he married Bessie Maunsell, daughter of a Port Macquarie settler. He became subject to recurrent fevers and could no longer find work in the islands. He was labouring in Sydney, digging up tree stumps, when he met the editor of the Bulletin, the eccentric but passionate J.F. Archibald, and began to tell him some of his stories about life in the South Seas. Archibald urged him to write them down. Though Becke objected he had never written a story, Archibald advised him, ‘Write just as you are telling me the tales now.’ When he died in 1913 at the Hotel York in Sydney, Becke was penniless, however. Though he had a literary repute, his rampaging in the Pacific had availed him little.
STEAMING TO AUSTRALIA
Immigration to Australia, and mail and freight to and from Australia, had become more predictable because of steamships. The first regular steamship to Australia was the Chusan, which had come to Melbourne in 1852 after a seventy-five-day voyage from Southampton. In 1857 the new iron steamship Royal Charter established the record for the England–Australia run, fifty-nine days. When the Suez Canal opened in 1869 steam voyages of thirty-three to thirty-five days became normal. In 1877 the Orient line’s new steamer Lusitania brought 1000 passengers—more than Phillip’s 1788 penal fleet transported—in forty days. The new ships offered better accommodation too. On the Orient, a 9500-ton iron ship, even the third-class accommodation had only two berths to a cabin, allowing for an incredible amount of personal room by comparison with the cramped space, the crammed-together bunks, the staleness of the bilges experienced by steerage passengers such as young Henry Parkes and his wife Clarinda only a decade or two before.
On the new steamships morality was honoured in a way that might have bemused the pragmatic captains of a previous generation. Single women had the exclusive use of the after cabin and the poop deck and were not permitted to mix with the crew or the single males on board. On arrival, free passes were given to those immigrants who wished to travel inland to take up advertised jobs. When arriving at the country town to begin his employment, the immigrant was to hand in the pass at the police station and receive in return free board and lodging for at least two days.
In Sydney many single women immigrants were still accommodated at the Hyde Park Barracks, part of which was also being used as an asylum for aged women. Generally, the girls quickly found jobs as servants to middle-class families. Their job conditions varied according to the temperament of their employers, but if they dreamed of going home again even in this age of steam, it was often a futile hope. Of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who came to Australia in the nineteenth century, as little as one in ten ever got to see ‘Home’ again.
In the early 1860s the new Queensland government had found it hard to persuade ships to sail to that colony instead of to the more profitable southern ports. The Queensland agent-general in London was able to organise two shiploads of immigrants, but to attract shipping, conditions imposed on ship owners as regards space and diet were eased. When the mortality aboard ships in the early 1860s was high, the requirements hammered out over more than two decades by the gentlemen of the London-based British government Colonial Land and Emigration Commission to recruit and ship off colonists to Australia were reimposed. So the commission was able to charter only twenty-seven ships for Queensland between 1860 and 1867, but the Queensland government showed its spirit of independence in working independently of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission and continuing to charter its own ships as well.
Two shipping groups, James Baines and T.M. Mackay & Company, both agreed to transport immigrants to Queensland according to the rules and free of charge in return for a land grant to them of 18 acres for each person landed. The migrants recruited were offered not only a free voyage but they themselves were promised by the Queensland government a grant of 12 acres after a period of continuous residence. Hence, 11 000 immigrants, many of them laid-off hand-loom weavers from Manchester, arrived in Queensland over two years, and the ship owners acquired 200 000 acres.
On arrival in Queensland in the mid-1860s, the migrants were put in the old military barracks in Brisbane. Many families found it so uncomfortable and unclean, and the sewage so bad, that they moved away and camped under trees. Their rations in the meantime were of very poor quality—flour, ‘salt chunk of
a consistency of the material comprised of a blucher boot’, and tea. Tradesmen and professional men had to go on the road looking for agricultural work. Of one such family an immigrant wrote, ‘That is what too many of our poor English come to . . . he, and other deluded villagers, agree to rush out to Australia, only to scrape on as best they can . . . little better all of them than walking skeletons, living in a mere log hut, and lamenting having left their English home.’ Some accounts give the impression that Australia could never have been populated if the journey back home had been affordable.
In the early 1860s a number of English railway workers and their families were brought to Queensland to build the coastal lines, but in 1867, due to recession, the men were dismissed. They descended on Brisbane in protest and the authorities defused potential revolution by giving them free passage to Rockhampton and other coastal towns. For the length of the depression the assisted-migration scheme was dropped. Nonetheless, Queensland advertised in 1868 for migrants who could pay their own way and offered in return 80 acres of ‘best agricultural land’, or 160 acres of pastoral land at a nominal rent for five years, after which they would be granted the freehold. Assisted migration resumed in the 1870s and a new immigrant depot was built, with sub-depots in ports such as Maryborough, Rockhampton and Townsville and even at some inland towns.
Many immigrants to the colonies brought the latest industrial and technical crafts with them, which helped accelerate Australian industrial growth. But the return of disappointed gold diggers to the cities put pressure on jobs. Former officers and clergymen who had immigrated could be found labouring on the roads, the clergymen insisting still on wearing their white neck cloths. One of the friends of the diarist C. Stretton, brother of a member of the House of Commons, worked on the roads for two months to earn his fare home. An immigrant named William Howitt scarcely recognised another of his fellow passengers, a doctor and biologist, now in rags, nearly blind and with a running ulcer on his nose.