“Thou hast had a bitter sorrow, Kala-hoi.” “Aye, a bitter sorrow. But yet in my dreams I see them all. And sometimes, even in my work, as I make my nets, I hear the boys' voices, quarrelling, and my wife saying, 'Be still, ye boys, lest I call thy father to chastise thee both '.”
As the girls brought us the kava Marsh put his hand on the old, smooth, brown pate, and saw that the eyes of the net-maker were filled with tears.
CHAPTER XI ~ THE KANAKA LABOUR TRADE IN THE PACIFIC
The fiat has gone forth from the Australian Commonwealth, and the Kanaka labour trade, as far as the Australian Colonies are concerned, has ceased to exist. For, during the month of November, 1906, the Queensland Government began to deport to their various islands in the Solomon and New Hebrides Groups, the last of the Melanesian native labourers employed on the Queensland sugar plantations.
The Kanaka labour traffic, generally termed “black-birding,” began about 1863, when sugar and cotton planters found that natives of the South Sea Islands could be secured at a much less cost than Chinese or Indian coolies. The genesis of the traffic was a tragedy, and filled the world with horror.
Three armed Peruvian ships, manned by gangs of cut-throats, appeared in the South Pacific, and seized over four hundred unfortunate natives in the old African slave-trading fashion, and carried them away to work the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands. Not a score of them returned to their island homes—the rest perished under the lash and brutality of their cruel taskmasters.
Towards 1870 the demand for South Sea Islanders became very great. They were wanted in the Sandwich Islands, in Tahiti and Samoa; for, naturally enough, with their ample food supply, the natives of these islands do not like plantation work, or if employed demand a high rate of pay. Then, too, the Queensland and Fijian sugar planters joined in the quest, and at one time there were over fifty vessels engaged in securing Kanakas from the Gilbert Islands, the Solomon and New Hebrides Groups, and the great islands near New Guinea.
At that time there was no Government supervision of the traffic. Any irresponsible person could fit out a ship, and bring a cargo of human beings into port—obtained by means fair or foul—and no questions were asked.
Very soon came the news of the infamous story of the brig Carl and her fiendish owner, a Dr. Murray, who with half a dozen other scoundrels committed the most awful crimes—shooting down in cold blood scores of natives who refused to be coerced into “recruiting”. Some of these ruffians went to the scaffold or to long terms of imprisonment; and from that time the British Government in a maundering way set to work to effect some sort of supervision of the British ships employed in the “blackbirding” trade.