Slavery and Disease on Easter Island

Easter Island's earliest contacts with the outside world occurred before 1800; after that time, whalers began to stop at the island, looking for fresh vegetables and women. They left behind venereal diseases. In 1808, after a bloody battle, an American ship, Nancy, kidnapped 12 men and 10 women with the intent of taking them to the Juan Fernandez Islands to work as slaves in seal-hunting efforts there. Three days' sail from Rapa Nui the captain allowed the captives to come out of the hold; they promptly leaped overboard and began swimming away. Attempts to recapture them failed. The ship sailed onward, leaving the islanders to drown at sea.

Such cruel acts had their affect; many arriving ships were greeted with hostility. In return, islanders were shot, sometimes for the sport of it. Atrocities such as these changed the islanders perceptions of the strangers who appeared on their horizon. While the first few explorers were received as strange but wonderful sources of clothing and goods, subsequent raids and vicious acts perpetrated against the Rapanui made them wary of foreigners. Unfortunately, it was only the beginning.

The most traumatic set of events occurred in the 1860's when the Peruvian slave raids began. It was at this time that Peruvians were experiencing labor shortages and they came to regard the Pacific as a vast source of free labor. Slavers raided islands as far away as Micronesia. But Easter Island was much closer and became a prime target.

Easter Island Map

In December of 1862 eight Peruvian ships landed their crewmen and between bribery and outright violence they captured some 1000 Easter Islanders, including the king, his son, and the ritual priests (one of the reasons for so many gaps in our knowledge of the ancient ways).It has been estimated that a total of 2000 Easter Islanders were captured over a period of years. Those who survived to arrive in Peru were poorly treated, overworked, and exposed to diseases. Ninety percent of the Rapa Nui died within one or two years of capture.

Eventually the Bishop of Tahiti caused a public outcry and an embarrassed Peru rounded up the few survivors to return them. A shipload headed to Easter Island, but smallpox broke out en route and only 15 arrived to the island. They were put ashore. The resulting smallpox epidemic nearly wiped out the remaining population.

Missionaries came to the island and rapid conversion to Catholicism further obscured the ancient life ways. The ship captain that had brought the missionaries, Jean Baptiste Onexime Dutrou-Bornier, decided that the island had possibilities for becoming a sheep ranch. He traded for some land and eventually became a power in the island society. With fire and gun he intimidated the missionaries, who eventually gave up and fled the island. Bornier then declared himself king By 1877, only 110 disheartened Rapa Nui inhabitants remained, some employed in Bornier's sheep raising activities. Bornier, a violent man, was murdered by the abused islanders.

(source: Easter Island)

The Hawaiian Illusion

The Hawaiian illusion

Pacific Islands Appeal to UK for 'Slave Voyages'

Pacific islands appeal to UK for 'slave voyages' compensation: Cheap labour from Vanuatu laid basis of sugar fortunes, by David Fickling in Sydney for The Guardian, 13 April 2004.

The government of the Pacific country of Vanuatu is to appeal to Britain and France for compensation for 19th century "slave voyages" which saw 62,000 Melanesians uprooted to work in the sugarcane fields of Queensland and Fiji.

Thousands of Pacific islanders were kidnapped or tricked by European and South American traders and taken away for manual labour in Pacific colonies in the late 19th century.

Labourers were sold to plantation owners for £6 to £9 a head and were typically paid £6 a year to work six days a week in cane plantations, where at times the death rate was as high as one in 10.

Traders got round anti-slavery laws by forcing or coercing Pacific islanders to sign contracts guaranteeing a limited term of indentured labour.

Vanuatu's foreign minister, Moana Carcasses, told the Guardian that he was in contact with local groups demanding compensation, and planned to raise the issue with the British and French governments later this year.

"The group who are speaking to me had about 1,000 families. It's quite big numbers who are claiming, and of course there are others who are claiming whom I have not spoken with," he said.

An appeal to the Australian government has been rebuffed: "They said that's a long time ago, why should they be responsible? I respect that way of seeing things, but it won't stop me knocking on the door."

The move follows a billion-dollar claim launched in New York last month against the shipping insurer Lloyd's of London and two American companies accused of profiting from the transatlantic slave trade.

A class action is also being prepared in Australia after it was revealed in February that the New South Wales government had taken an estimated £30m in "stolen wages" held in trust funds and never distributed to the Aborigines who earned it.

More than 30,000 people were taken from Vanuatu to work in Queensland, New Caledonia and Fiji in the late 19th century, and 870 labour trade voyages between 1863 and 1904 provided the bulk of the workforce on which Queensland's cane industry was built.

The trade was stopped in 1906 when the newly independent Australian government deported thousands of Melanesians from tropical Queensland because of fears that they might swamp the country's white population.

Among the most notorious of the so-called "blackbirders" was Ross Lewin, who often adopted the guise of an Anglican bishop to entice islanders on to his ship. Others ambushed villages or took people from beaches by force.

James Murray, an infamous blackbirder of the early 1870s, encouraged villagers to paddle their canoes out to his schooner with promises of trade in beads, paint, pipes and tobacco, before holing their boats with pig-iron weights and throwing the "rescued" survivors in the hold.

Clive Moore, an associate professor at the University of Queensland and an expert on the trade, said that Vanuatu was right to pursue the claims, but could run into difficulties proving how much of the trade was forced.

"There's force and there's deception, and some very cruel things happened," he said. "Europeans were using these people as cheap labour, but it's insulting to the intelligence of Melanesians to believe that they stood on their beaches for decade after decade allowing themselves to be captured.

"In the first 10 years or so that labour was taken from any island, it was largely by kidnapping or deception. But then what occurs is [the people originally kidnapped] come back again and explain to the ones about to leave what it involves. So physical kidnapping stops, but it's still a type of cultural kidnapping."

Mr Carcasses said many of the families who had contacted him were prepared to take legal action if negotiations failed. But he admitted that Vanuatu, an aid-dependent archipelago of about 80 islands with a population of 200,000 and a gross domestic product of £300m, had slender means to pursue such an action.

"I've said to the people here that I will try my best, of course if that fails the families have the right to use legal means," he said. "What I say to them is, don't take your expectation too high. Don't expect you're going to receive billions of dollars. Maybe the English government will say sorry. Maybe they'll give you a hospital and that's it."

Serial Enslavers

Blood, sweat, tears and sugar

An 1886 cartoon depicting a slave trader using coconuts as a lure to entice buyers for his "niggers".

The caption reads: “South Sea Island Trader: ‘Now gentlemen, give me a start. What shall we say for this ‘ere cocoanut – and the nigger thrown in? Five pounds only bid for this cocoanut. Five pounds; five o’ny; five – did I hear six? No advance; going at five; gone. Next nigger; I mean next cocoanut.’ ”

From Green Left Weekly issue 198, website, this article "Blood, sweat, tears and sugar: The Big Picture: Sugar Slaves," published on 16 August 1995, by Norm Dixon, discusses a documentary on Australia's Queensland sugar industry and Pacific Islander slavery. They call it "blackbirding," but it's more akin to "blackjacking," kinda like carjacking only its about abducting/kidnapping black bodies to work on the sugar cane fields. The Aussies get really sensitive about the word "slavery" there have been a number of lawsuits regarding slavery, so they preform linguistic gymnastics to call their labor practices anything but enslavement. I'm still looking for this documentary, I can only find non-downloadable clips, thus far, but I'm still looking. -- Ron Edwards, US Slave.

Norm Dixon writes: The sugar industry in Australia generates around $2 billion a year, and Australia recently surpassed Cuba as the world's largest exporter of raw sugar. Plantation, refinery and distillery owners amassed huge fortunes from the blood, sweat and tears of enslaved Pacific islanders, as this compelling documentary proves.

In 1863 — 30 years after the British parliament abolished slavery in the British Empire and at the height of the civil war to end slavery that United States — the first shipload of kidnapped South Sea Islanders (as the islander community today prefers to be known) arrived in Brisbane to open a sad new era of forced labour that is largely glossed over in the history books. Those first "Kanakas" were offered for sale at $7 a head.

Sugar Slaves is a timely reminder that Australian capitalism was partly built on the exploitation of the people of the Pacific islands. Australian capitalism's birth was as brutal and unjust as any other capitalism on this planet. As historian Clive Moore says, "Queensland could not have developed as quick as it did in the 19th century without the use of cheap Melanesian labour".

Between 1863 and 1904, more than 50,000 islanders were transported to Queensland to labour in the cane fields. Men, women and children were seized from villages and beaches throughout the Pacific by sea "traders". On Pentecost Island, in Vanuatu, whole villages were captured, causing areas, inhabited for generations, to revert to jungle. Families were separated and all contact with their stolen relatives lost.

Life on the plantations was harsh. Technically, the South Sea Islanders were not slaves but were paid wages 80% less than those paid to Australian workers. After arrival in Queensland, islanders were sent straight to the plantations, given a set of clothes and set to work clearing fields or cutting cane. They were watched by often brutal overseers on horseback who needed little encouragement to set upon the hapless labourers with whip or boot.

Back-breaking work, disease, and poor and too little food led to death rates 400% higher than for Europeans. The "lucky" ones were buried in unmarked graves away from the cemeteries housing good, white Christians. Many others were buried in the fields where they dropped.

Opposition to the slave trade — euphemistically dubbed the "Queensland labour system" — was strong in the southern Australian colonies. It was also opposed within the Queensland labour movement.

In 1868, Queensland's parliament, though dominated by pastoralists and plantation owners, was forced to modify the system. Employers were now bound to provide food, clothing and lodging, and pay a wage of $6 per year. South Sea Islanders were to be employed by contract for a maximum of three years, after which the employer had to pay their fare home. In Britain too, the slave system in Queensland was a scandal, and in 1872 the British parliament passed a law to outlaw kidnapping of islanders in the Pacific.

The sea "traders" now relied more on "persuasion" rather than brute force to lure islanders to the cane fields. By law, Melanesians were forbidden to strike or "desert" their employer on pain of three months' imprisonment.

The labor movement's response was thoroughly selfish and racist. Unions argued that islanders undercut "white" wages, yet refused to organise them or permit them to join. Labour movement newspapers like the Worker and the Boomerang published racist caricatures of islanders, depicting them as threatening the "purity" of white women. After federation, despite the vehement opposition of the plantation owners, the white Australia policy outlawed further use of islander labour. All islanders were to be deported in 1906.

After considerable agitation by South Sea Islanders opposed to deportation, the government allowed elderly islanders, those married to Aborigines or to Australian citizens and those who had been resident for over 20 years to remain. Despite this, fewer than 2000 were permitted to remain legally. The deportations caused terrible pain and disruption, with families being split up, never to be reunited. To escape deportation, some jumped ship, and some even walked to Sydney!

Following the deportations, the Australian Workers Union launched a despicable crusade to eliminate South Sea Islanders from the sugar industry. The federal government paid a bounty to farms that employed only whites. In 1919, Melanesians were excluded by law from working on farms, although many farmers secretly allowed islanders to cut cane at night for a pittance. To survive, islanders returned to a traditional lifestyle of growing gardens and catching fish. Only during World War II were islanders again allowed to work in the sugar industry.

South Sea Islander men and children under a tree in Cairns c1906
Departure of the first shipment of deported Polynesians from Cairns under the Commonwealth Act: the muster at the Court House for medical examinations. (Description supplied with photograph). A large group of South Sea Islanders queueing for medical examinations prior to deportation from Cairns, 1906.

Today, the 20,000 descendants of South Sea Islanders are a distinct community which is rediscovering its heritage and demanding recognition of the role their ancestors played in building the Queensland and Australian economy. In the words of Noah Sabbo: "I'm proud to be a 'Kanaka'". To most Australians, people like Ken Negus and Mal Meninga are known as sports superstars not as South Sea Islanders, something the islander community wants to see changed.

But the documentary also makes it plain that South Sea Islanders now in many ways have more in common with fellow Australian workers than they do with their long-lost relatives in the Pacific. This painful discovery was made by Joe and Monica Leo as they returned to Pentecost Island, from which Joe's grandparents and Monica's father were kidnapped 100 years ago. In a heart-rending scene, the old chief of Joe's grandfather's now deserted village urges Joe to return to Pentecost so the village can be re-established. Joe cannot find the words to explain that he has too many ties in Australia, not least a job driving a council grader, to return, and he lapses into a tearful silence. --Norm Dixon, Green Left Weekly

Serial Enslavers: Guest Worker Scam