Rascals in Paradise

  The New Zealand residents were sympathetic to the bereaved captain, but the mortgagor of the Black Diamond was demanding his money, and a whaleboat full of special constables sailed to Croisselles Bay and there boarded and seized the vessel. Bully, taken unawares, could do little more than turn the air blue with inquiries concerning the reason for this early-morning call. The Black Diamond was sailed to the nearby port of Nelson and was lost to him, but on October 2 he sneaked out of town on the Phoebe, despite a writ against him from a laborer to whom he owed money for chopping firewood.

  Where did he hide? Probably only Bully Hayes would have adopted the scheme, for he rejoined the Glogskis and toured with their show, The Buckingham Family, which must have aroused guilty feelings in Roma’s widower, if anything could.

  But Hayes did not stick with the troupe for long. He had often boasted in bars that one of his strongest points was his ability to pick up a ship when he needed one, and a beautiful young stewardess to keep him company. In the little coastal town of Akaroa he stole the tiny cutter Wave and lured on board a sixteen-year-old Irish orphan named Helen Murray, his come-on being that she would accompany him to the port of Lyttelton to join some other girls whom he was taking on an important theatrical tour of China.

  But little Helen Murray was more than a match for Bully. A storm overtook the cutter as it headed up the coast, and for several days the girl fought off Hayes’s courtship, screaming to be put ashore. She would not go below with him and remained on deck even when gales blew, clinging to the mast during one bad spell when waves washed the deck.

  Hayes resorted to violent language, threatening that she must go below with him or he would throw her off the ship. When she persisted in defying him, testified one disgusted witness to his brutality, “he dragged her most violently, tore off her clothes, and eventually lifted her into a boat to take her ashore. The night was wet and cold, and with a view to compel her to go on board again on his own terms he represented her to the pilot as a character that no respectable man would admit to his house.”

  Another boatload of constables caught up with Hayes in January, 1865, but he talked his way clear of charges that he had abducted Helen Murray and had stolen the Wave. However, his reputation suffered a damaging blow when one of the constables noted that the buccaneer carried in his cabin a pair of curling irons that presumably were in constant use to curl the long locks that covered his ears.

  On February 1, 1865, as the Civil War was drawing to a close in America, Hayes walked into the ship registry office in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and claimed sole ownership of the schooner Shamrock. This so astonished the officials that they started inquiries to find out how this amazing man had acquired a new ship. It was discovered that Bully had been paying wild court to a New Zealand lovely who had put up the needed £500. She was widely known to the saloon trade, a contemporary newspaper confided, as “The Bull Pup.”

  Hayes and his new ship disappeared for a few months, then returned with a cargo of oranges, lemons, pigs and hand-carved curios. On his next appearance he offered the people of Lyttelton more oranges and lemons, some coconuts, grown hogs, rich shells, imitation canoes, colorful hunks of coral, long-tipped spears, war clubs and well-woven house mats. And thus it was discovered that Bully Hayes had finally worked the region where his fame would never die. He had been to the South Sea Islands.

  Apparently he traded well, for he now imitated his earlier rich experience in Fremantle, Australia. He moved ashore at the port of Lyttelton as a respected sea captain, tasted the joys of a refined society and married his fourth wife, Emily Mary Butler, by whom he quickly had twin daughters. The babies were named Laurina Helen Jessie and Leonora Harriett Mary and were reared in Apia, the sweet, somnolent capital of British Samoa. Both girls later married. Undoubtedly Bully Hayes has grandchildren living in the Pacific region today. A son, Fred, later born to the couple, was to try to carry on his father’s trading business in the South Seas.

  To celebrate the birth of his twins on May 2, 1866, Hayes sold the Shamrock and bought the sturdy brig Rona, which he mortgaged for £970—a sum which, of course, he never paid. He made a quick trip to Fiji and another to Rarotonga, but as he was unloading this cargo the mortgagors of his ship caught up with him. It was the last day of 1866, and the port officials decided to allow him to celebrate New Year’s Day a free man, which he did by auctioning off his entire cargo for cash, unloading it at night and slipping out of the harbor while those ashore were engaged in year-end festivities.

  At this time the Maori War, which ravaged New Zealand for years, flared up, and Hayes made a tidy sum by smuggling powder and lead to the natives at hidden coastal anchorages. To mislead searchers, he stowed the powder under the ship’s cabin and littered the floor with straw. A single dropped spark would have blown the Rona to bits, so no one ever thought of looking there for live powder. After a particularly successful blockade-running cruise, Hayes pocketed his profits and left New Zealand for good. It is said that the entire shipping industry sighed with relief.

  He soon appeared at Savage Island, south of Samoa, where the missionary ship John Williams had been wrecked on January 8, 1867. Hayes bought the wreck for $500 gained in running guns, but was unable to get the ship afloat. The salvaged cargo, however, made the buccaneer a good profit. He then agreed, for a price, to carry the surviving missionaries to their island posts. On the voyage Bully ordered his mate to go aloft, and when that seaman began swearing audibly, Hayes bellowed: “Come down, you rat! Don’t you know you are on board a missionary ship? If there’s any swearing to be done here, I’ll do it all!”

  The Reverend James Chalmers wrote later in his autobiography that on this trip Bully was “a perfect host and a thorough gentleman.” But he reported that several times the skipper lost his temper and did highly unusual things, “acting under the influence of passion more like a madman than a sane man.” Chalmers then related how Bully nearly killed his supercargo during a quarrel by battering him about the head with a bag containing several hundred silver dollars, final payment of the missionaries’ fares. Hayes then pitched the money disgustedly into the sea, shouting that it was not fit for a decent man to keep since it had touched such a skunk as his supercargo!

  Bully Hayes was now thirty-eight years old, an intrepid sea captain and a confirmed confidence man. He probably could have continued for years, stealing ships and mulcting chandlers, but he was about to launch upon a new kind of adventure that would account for his principal fame throughout the Pacific. All that had transpired up to now, lurid though it was, served merely as preliminary to the main action of his life, and as he stands poised at his personal crossroads, let us try to reconstruct the man as his contemporaries saw him.

  The only picture of Hayes that may be authentic is a color sketch made in 1912 by the famed Australian artist and novelist Norman Lindsay, which Louis Becke, the Australian writer who lived on Hayes’s ship for months, agreed was a faithful likeness. It shows a muscular, bull-necked man with dark hair, mustache and beard, and the face of a determined pugilist. We are not even sure of the exact color of the hair. Becke said it was black; but others say it was brown, and one book consistently calls him a “blond giant.” However, most of the accounts by those who knew Bully personally do agree on other main features.

  Becke recalled that at his first meeting with Hayes he saw “a tremendously powerful man, with a heavy and carefully trimmed beard.… I noticed that he had wonderfully bright blue eyes that seemed full of fun and laughter.”

  Wrote Edward Reeves in 1898: “I remember Hayes in New Zealand in the sixties.… He enjoyed stealing a few pounds as much as seizing a merchant ship and making crew and passengers walk the plank.… He was a stout, bald, pleasant-looking man of good manners, chivalrous, with a certain, or rather uncertain, code of honor of his own—loyal to anyone who did him a good turn; gentle to animals, fond of all kinds of pets, especially of birds.” But George Britt, who once arrested Hayes, remarked: “He was
a bad-looking man—a fine, well built man, but there was something bad about his eyes. You could not move without their following your slightest motion.”

  Other descriptions, from people who did not know him at first hand, include a passage from Frederick J. Moss: “ ‘Hayes was a great, big-bearded, bald-headed man,’ said one of my Ponape informants, ‘weighing 236 pounds, with a soft voice and persuading ways.’ He was an American, and must have been of what Americans call the magnetic type. ‘Mad as a hatter at times,’ said one of the men who sailed with him.”

  Stonehewer Cooper wrote: “Captain Hayes was a handsome man of above the middle height, with a long brown beard always in perfect order. He had a charming manner, dressed always in the perfection of taste, and could cut a confiding friend’s throat or scuttle his ship with a grace which, at any rate in the Pacific, was unequalled.”

  Miss Carolyn Gordon-Camming, an English lady who was visiting in Apia, Samoa, at the time of Bully’s death, saw in the French convent there the twin daughters of “the notorious Bully Hayes, of whose piratical exploits I have heard many a highly seasoned yarn from the older residents of Fiji, where he occasionally appeared, as he did in all the other groups, as a very erratic comet, coming, and especially vanishing, when least expected, each time in a different ship, of which by some means he had contrived to get possession; always engaged in successful trade with stolen goods; ever bland and winning in manner, dressed like a gentleman, decidedly handsome, with long silky brown beard; with a temper rarely ruffled, but with an iron will, for a more thoroughgoing scoundrel never sailed the seas.”

  W. B. Churchward, consul at Samoa in 1881–85, remarked: “My informants told me that although more brutal than any beast when enraged, this pirate could, when he liked, assume a courteous behavior and address positively fascinating, and calculated to deceive even the greatest skeptic. Although self-educated, he could converse fluently and cleverly on all ordinary topics and if he were judged by his handsome and gentlemanly personal appearance, the lie direct would be given to the multitudinous reports of his lawless career. To see in 1876 an elderly, well-dressed man in missionary black frock coat and tall hat with a flowing gray beard sweeping his expansive chest, above which smiled a handsome and benevolent countenance fit for a bishop, and be told that the entire person was that of an undoubted pirate who was far from being free of having committed murder, would astonish any man in his sober senses. Yet such was Bully Hayes in his best rig on shore in the colonies. In spite of his many ruffianisms, some of which were of so gross a nature as to preclude mention, Hayes had many friends, even among those whom he had swindled, at all events in Samoa. Hayes was commonly believed to have indulged somewhat in murder.… Yet I never heard in any conversation a positive statement of his having done so.”

  Perhaps the best conclusion comes from Charles Elson, who was mate aboard the little ship Lotus when Bully met his death: “Despite his evil life Hayes carried something big in his soul. Nature used the extremes of emotion when she molded him. To the student of human nature Bully Hayes is a pathetic figure. Only fifty years of age when slain, he might have attained an honorable career had he but learned self-discipline early in life. He was indeed a strange mixture of a man.”

  It was in 1867 that Bully delivered the missionaries to their appropriate islands, and thereafter for some months the outer world had no news of the buccaneer, who seemed to have disappeared. It was rumored that he had run a valuable cargo to Hawaii, but Honolulu had heard nothing of him, and was glad. Others claimed that he was back in China, but those ports did not see him, and no one in Swatow regretted his absence. There were other rumors, and then the ugly news broke.

  In December, 1868, Hayes’s ship Rona arrived at Papeete, the languid capital city of Tahiti, where Bully announced in a loud voice that below decks he had 150 prime natives for sale as contract laborers. With this he kicked open the hatches, and in the hold the planters of Tahiti saw the first cramped, sick and struggling mass of virtual slaves that Hayes would steal in the remaining years of his life. He had gone into the blackbird business, recruiting South Sea natives to serve as plantation hands.

  He summoned the whimpering Savage Islanders on deck and they filed forth, blinking in the sun, their long black hair straggling to their brown shoulders, with despair marking their normally happy faces. It was as if they had been grabbed from the Stone Age and hauled unwillingly into the dollar economy of the present. They had no idea where they were, nor for what reasons, nor for how long. All these Polynesian men and women knew was that for every one who lived to reach this strange, soft port, another had died, either from white men’s diseases or from the fiery sticks that shot death or from beatings or from lack of food on the long voyage eastward from their island.

  They were among the first blackbirds stolen from Savage Island and their captor, Bully Hayes, was about to become the greatest of the blackbirders.

  Slavery reached the Pacific just as it was about to die out in the United States, for it was our Civil War that disrupted the world cotton trade and made cotton growing in northern Australia enormously profitable. Therefore in the 1860’s Australia suddenly required many hands to work the cotton fields. When the cotton boom was over, many more blackbirds were needed for the Queensland sugar plantations. Toward 1870 the demand for Kanakas became very great, from Hawaii to Queensland, from Tahiti to Fiji, and at one time there were more than fifty vessels in the trade of blackbirding. The abuses became so horrifying that the British government put five small gunboats on patrol to overhaul ships that might have unwilling slaves aboard. When this failed, the Queensland government ordered that every labor ship have an official aboard to see that the law was observed; but at least one member of the blackbird trade stated that many government observers were drunk nine days out of ten and did as much recruiting as anybody, collecting good bonuses from labor-hungry plantation owners.

  The laborers were recruited—for a pretense of legality was scrupulously maintained—by adventurous sea captains who were supposed to roam the islands inviting strong young men to work on a distant plantation. No force was to be used, the incoming islander was called a contract laborer, and when his term was over he was supposed to be sent back home to the island of his origin.

  The classic example of how these ground rules were observed came in 1871 when a respectable and even pious Melbourne doctor, James Patrick Murray, chartered the brig Carl in order to go among the South Sea Islands recruiting help for the plantations of Fiji.

  The doctor was one of the first to use the trick of having his men reverse their collars, carry black books under their arms and go ashore disguised as missionaries. When the congregation was assembled to hear the word of God, the good doctor flashed his guns, drove the islanders into his boats and bolted them under his ship’s hatches.

  When this device no longer worked, he had his crew lash stout ropes to cannon butts, anchors and other heavy objects. Then, by displaying trade goods, he lured dozens of native canoes to the side of his ship, whereupon his sailors dropped the anchors and cannons plumb through the canoes, destroying them. The ropes were belayed, however, so that the iron weights could be retrieved and dropped next time.

  Meanwhile, boat crews sped among the capsized natives and dragged them in as prime bodies for the canefields. If a man was clearly wounded from the falling iron, so that he would be of little use as a field hand, he was allowed to drown, or was even struck over the head with an oar so that he might not swim back to shore.

  With his hold full of Solomon Island natives—there was barely room for each man to lie down—Dr. Murray sailed off toward Fiji to market them. But on the hot, rolling passage to the southeast, the men below decks became frightened and started to cry out. Moreover, they were starving, for the customary ration was one old coconut every other day for each two men. Their complaining voices were annoying to the crew, and the natives also banged on the locked hatches with bunk poles.

  One morning a tough crew member
casually asked Dr. Murray: “What would people say to my killing twelve niggers before breakfast?”

  “My word!” the doctor laughed. “That’s the way to pop them off.”

  The crew took revolvers and shot the natives in the dark hold. Whenever a black head could be spotted, a bullet was sent through it.

  “Shoot them! Shoot them!” the pleased doctor encouraged his men. “Shoot every one of them!”

  Whenever a noise came from the hold, another fusillade was launched, but by this time such panic reigned below decks that the doctor felt he ought to teach the black men a permanent lesson. Accordingly he grabbed an auger and bored holes through the bulkheads of the fore cabin, whence he and his crew used revolvers to fire right into the heart of the mob, picking off any natives who looked as if they might cause trouble. It is recorded that during the massacre the doctor encouraged his fellow hunters by lustily chanting “Marching Through Georgia.”

  When the morning’s shoot was ended, the doctor ordered breakfast, and when the meal was served, offered prayers, as was his custom.

  After the food had been removed, a ladder was lowered into the hold and those natives still alive were allowed to crawl on deck, where Dr. Murray had them lined up for medical inspection. Coldly he went down the line and studied the wounds.

  “This man is worth saving,” he said. “This man is not.”

  When the natives were divided into two groups, Dr. Murray said in a clear voice, pointing to the maimed who would probably not bring a good price at the slave marts, “Throw them over.”