Blackbirding was the trade in indentured labourers from the Pacific in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is often described as a form of slavery, despite the Slave Trade Act 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire, including Australia. The trade frequently relied on coercion, deception, and kidnapping to transport tens of thousands of indigenous people from islands in the Pacific Ocean to Australia, other European colonies, and independent countries of the Pacific and Central and South America, often to work on plantations in conditions similar to the Atlantic slave trade. These blackbirded people, known in Australia as Kanakas or South Sea Islanders, were taken from places such as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, Easter Island, the Gilbert Islands, Tuvalu and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, amongst others.
The owners, captains, and crews of the ships involved in the acquisition of these labourers were termed blackbirders. Blackbirding ships began operations in the Pacific from the 1840s and continued, in some cases, into the 1930s. The demand for this kind of cheap labour principally came from sugar cane, cotton, and coffee plantations in New South Wales, Queensland, Samoa, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, and Hawaii.Reid Mortensen, (2009), "Slaving In Australian Courts: Blackbirding Cases, 1869–1871" , Journal of South Pacific Law, 13:1, accessed 7 October 2010 In Auckland, a small group of South Sea Islanders worked in flax mills. Examples of blackbirding outside the South Pacific include the early days of the pearling industry in Western Australia at Nickol Bay and Broome, where Aboriginal Australians were blackbirded from the surrounding areas. In Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere in the Americas, blackbirders sought workers for their haciendas and to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands.
Australia
New South Wales The first major blackbirding operation in the Pacific was conducted out of Twofold Bay in New South Wales. A shipload of 65 Melanesian labourers arrived in Boyd Town on 16 April 1847 on board Velocity, a vessel under the command of Captain Kirsopp and chartered by Benjamin Boyd. Boyd was a Scottish colonist who wanted cheap labourers to work at his large pastoral leaseholds in the colony of New South Wales. He financed two more procurements of South Sea Islanders, 70 of which arrived in Sydney in September 1847, and another 57 in October of that same year. Many of these Islanders soon absconded from their workplaces and were observed starving and destitute on the streets of Sydney. Reports of violence, kidnap and murder used during the recruitment of these labourers surfaced in 1848 with a closed-door enquiry choosing not to take any action against Boyd or Kirsopp. The experiment of exploiting Melanesian labour was discontinued in Australia until Robert Towns recommenced the practice in Queensland when he fitted out the schooner Don Juan and, in August 1863, despatched her on a recruiting voyage under the command of Captain Greuber.
Queensland
The Queensland labour trade in South Sea Islanders, who were commonly known as Kanakas, was in operation from 1863 to 1908. Some 55,000 to 62,500 labourers were brought to Australia, most being recruited or blackbirded from islands in Melanesia, such as the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), the Solomon Islands and the islands around New Guinea.Tracey Flanagan, Meredith Wilkie, and Susanna Iuliano. "Australian South Sea Islanders: A Century of Race Discrimination under Australian Law" , Australian Human Rights Commission.
The process of acquiring these labourers varied from violent kidnapping at gunpoint to relatively acceptable negotiation, although most of the people affiliated with the trade were regarded as blackbirders nonetheless.Mortensen, Reid, 2000. "Slaving in Australian courts: Blackbirding cases, 1869-1871." Journal of South Pacific Law, 4, pp.7-37: "Between 1863 and 1904, over 62,000 people from the Melanesian archipelagos provided the colony of Queensland with indentured labour for its emerging agricultural industries. [...] Although by the latter nineteenth century, abolitionism had ended both the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in European colonies, indentured labourers (or libres engagés) were sought as an alternative: working under limited term contracts and wages but otherwise, on occasion, similar conditions to the slaves."McDonald, Willa, 2023. "Blackbirding, Subjectivity and the Unseeing 'I'." Literary Journalism in Colonial Australia, pp. 189-216. Cham: Springer International Publishing: "Whether or not the Pacific Island labour trade was a form of slavery is still being debated in Australia. On the one hand, unlike slavery, the indenture contracts were of limited duration, the Islanders were paid, and the rights of the plantation owners over the labourers were extensive but not absolute. [...] As Brooke Kroeger says, the blackbirding trade, if not slavery itself, was at least slavery's 'just-as-evil twin'." The majority of those taken were male and around one quarter were under the age of sixteen. In total, approximately 15,000 Kanakas (30%) died while working in Queensland – excluding those who died in transit or were killed in the recruitment process – mostly during three-year contracts. This is also similar to the estimated 33% death rate for enslaved Africans in the first three years of arriving in the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean; the conditions were often comparable to those in the Atlantic slave trade.
Robert Towns and the first shipments
In 1863, Robert Towns, a British sandalwood and whaling merchant residing in Sydney, wanted to profit from the world-wide cotton shortage due to the American Civil War. He bought a property he named Townsvale on the Logan River south of Brisbane, and planted of cotton. Towns wanted cheap labour to harvest and prepare the cotton and decided to import Melanesian labour from the Loyalty Islands and the New Hebrides. Captain Grueber together with labour recruiter Henry Ross Lewin aboard Don Juan, brought 67 South Sea Islanders to the port of Brisbane on 17 August 1863. Towns specifically wanted adolescent males. Recruitment and kidnapping were reportedly employed in obtaining these boys.
Over the following two years, Towns imported around 400 more Melanesians to Townsvale on one to three year terms of labour. They came on Uncle Tom (Captain Archer Smith) and Black Dog (Captain Linklater). In 1865, Towns obtained large land leases in Far North Queensland and funded the establishment of the port of Townsville. He organised the first importation of South Sea Islander labour to that port in 1866. They came aboard Blue Bell under Captain Edwards.
Towns paid many of his Kanaka labourers in goods instead of cash at the end of their working terms. His agent claimed that blackbirded labourers were "savages who did not know the use of money" and therefore did not deserve cash wages. Apart from a small amount of Melanesian labour imported for the beche-de-mer trade around Bowen, Robert Towns was the primary exploiter of blackbirded labour up until 1867, when Captain Whish, formerly an officer in H.M. Light Dragoons and subsequently the owner of a plantation near Brisbane was a leading exploiter of Melanesian labour.
Captain Louis Hope applied Melanesian labour to his twenty acres of sugar cane at Ormiston, Queensland, and later on his farm near the Coomera River. By 1868, the extent of the cultivation of sugar cane exceeded that of cotton; which increased the demand for labour. Licences for recruiting ships were issued by Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, as well as Fiji.
Expansion of labour recruitment for Queensland
The high demand for very cheap labour in the sugar and pastoral industries of Queensland resulted in Towns' main labour recruiter, Henry Ross Lewin, and John Crossley, another recruiter, opening their services to other land-owners. In 1867, King Oscar, Spunkie, Fanny Nicholson and Prima Donna returned with close to 1,000 Kanakas who were offloaded in the ports of Brisbane, Bowen and Mackay. This influx, together with information that the recently arrived labourers were being sold for £2 each and that kidnapping was at least partially used during recruitment, raised fears of a burgeoning new slave trade.See: These fears were realised when French officials in New Caledonia complained that Crossley had stolen half the inhabitants of a village in Lifou, and in 1868 a scandal evolved when Captain McEachern of Syren anchored in Brisbane with 24 dead islander recruits and reports that the remaining ninety on board were taken by force and deception. Despite the controversy, no action was taken against McEachern or Crossley.
In early 1868, fears of a new slave trade and the absence of legislation governing imported non-European labour led to some public opposition to the trade in Brisbane, including a committee chaired by Joshua Jeays and a petition to Queen Victoria. The wording of the petition indicates that the opposition was motivated by a combination of indignation at the unethical treatment of the forced labour, racist views on immigration, and fears of retaliation.
Many members of the Queensland government were already either invested in the labour trade or had Kanakas actively working on their land holdings. The Polynesian Labourers Act of 1868, which they enacted in response to the Syren incident, required every ship to be licensed and carry a government agent to observe the recruitment process, but had few adequate protections and was poorly enforced. Government agents were often corrupted by bonuses paid for the numbers of labourers "recruited", and did little or nothing to prevent recruiters from tricking islanders on-board or otherwise engaging in kidnapping. The Act stipulated that the Kanakas were to be contracted for no more than three years and paid £18 for their work – an extremely low wage that was only paid at the end of their indenture. Islanders were also heavily influenced to buy overpriced goods of poor quality at designated shops before they returned home, which further deprived them of income. The Act, instead of protecting the South Sea Islanders, was criticised for giving legitimacy to a kind of slavery in Queensland.
The Kanaka trade in the 1870s