This Chinese story, like many others, was probably circulated by Bully himself to show his smartness. One of his most goggle-eyed listeners was W. Akerstein, who led the party that took the Black Diamond from Hayes in 1864. Bully hinted to Akerstein then that Hayes was not his real name, that he made a voyage to Sydney in the Sir Charles Napier in 1842 and that he served a prison term from 1843 to 1848 in Van Diemen’s Land for forgery. He said that once he was in a boat with £500,000 worth of gold and no food, as a survivor of the famed Madagascar, a ship which cleared Melbourne for London on August 12, 1853, with ninety passengers and a cargo that included 64,660 ounces of gold, and was never heard of again.
Another frequently heard legend—which Bully certainly would not have helped to circulate—is the yarn of the barber of Arrowtown. This New Zealand gold diggings provided little in the way of entertainment, and bets were rife concerning the question of whether Hayes, then running the United States Hotel, had one ear or two—one had presumably been cut off in his early years by a loser in a poker game who accused Bully of cheating. A half-starved little cockney was set up in business on Main Street behind a striped pole, and one day word spread around that Bully was in the chair.
After a bit of chatter, during which Hayes expressed a strong preference for long locks over the sides of the head, the barber daringly snipped off the hair that concealed the stump of Bully’s left ear. All the bloods of the town had been listening in with delight, and rescued the terrified barber from instant pulverization, while Bully went wild and wrecked the shop.
A few days later, the variety company of the Buckinghams, angry because Bully had married their leading lady, put on an act called “The Barbarous Barber,” in which Bully’s humiliation was parodied and vaudevillized into a comedy classic; during the show, the audience chanted in unison what were supposed to be Bully’s words: “A little off the top—you can leave the sides as they are!” One modern Hayes expert comments on this episode: “Probably the only correct statement in the foregoing is that Hayes had only one ear, but he may have been born minus that organ.”
But we must get back to the facts. And 1874 is a good year to pick up the story, for it not only represented the height of Bully’s prosperity, but it was also the year when he signed aboard an Australian lad of eighteen who would later become the foremost chronicler of the South Sea trader and Bully’s personal Boswell. It is from the accounts of this gifted youth, Louis Becke, that we know how Bully lived at the peak of his power.
Hayes had made a few changes on his ship since the days when Captain Ben Pease stalked the quarter-deck of the brig. Topside the Leonora was flush-decked, with sleek, yachtlike lines. All ropes, all gear were meticulously ordered, while below the trade room, to which Hayes invited island chiefs when mulcting them of their coconuts and turtle shell, was kept like an ultra-neat country store. The hold, of course, was a horrible place where the blackbirds were stowed, and many Caroline and Solomon and Line Island natives died there on the long voyages and were pitched feet first into the consoling Pacific.
A feature of the Leonora was the main cabin, luxuriously fitted out with a fine collection of ancient and modern arms, the former for ornament, the latter for instant use. From his youth Hayes had been fond of old weapons and now he was rich enough to indulge his fancy, his artistic eye enabling him to display them effectively. And to liven the ship, Hayes usually carried with him one or two French poodles, which he spoiled outrageously.
The ship was kept spotlessly white by a polyglot crew of thirty, an unusually large number, since spare hands were required to kidnap natives, cut out canoes or storm island beaches in search of copra to be highjacked. The men were allowed two privileges that were rare at sea: they could buy as much gin, beer and rum as they could drink; and each man could have one native woman along, except the Chinese carpenter—he had two.
At sea the heavy hand of Hayes kept order and by means of the severest punishment prevented insubordination, but as soon as the anchor was down he allowed utter riot to take over the ship, and it always did. The clamor of yells, oaths and blows rose from the gambling circles in the forecastle, while women’s wild screams sounded throughout the ship.
In these days Captain Hayes always had one or two young native girls with him, changing them from island to island. He was a rugged man and his fine figure relieved the monotony of atoll life, so that he never had trouble convincing island belles to cruise with him for a month or so; but since he rarely put back in to the same island before tiring of the girls he had picked up, his castoffs dotted the Pacific. But as in the Marquesas, he always endeavored to hook up any dismissed island beauty with some onshore lover who would at least give her a place to sleep.
In the notorious Leonora, heavy with arms, trading goods and women, Bully was aimlessly prowling the South Pacific toward the end of 1873, and at the beginning of the new year crossed the Equator and put into Mili Atoll, one-time refuge of the Globe mutineers. It was here that he signed on Louis Becke.
In the southern Gilbert Islands, where Bully hoped to steal coconuts, he found the natives gripped in a famine. So he gave them food, and the first five who came aboard ate so furiously that they died. Then Bully, rationing his gifts, took more than one hundred starving men aboard his ship and transported them, at their request, to work on the German plantations at Ponape, where there was food. Before departing the starvation islands, however, he gave the remaining people nearly a ton of rice and many casks of biscuits, saying beatifically, “You can pay me when the sky of brass has broken, the rain falls, and the land is fertile once more.”
One morning in March, Bully’s men sighted the high and verdant hills of Kusaie rising from the sea miles in the distance and their spirits lifted, for this was one of the loveliest islands in the Pacific. Set apart from other groups, nobler by far than the atolls, this considerable island contained pleasant valleys as well as excellent harbors, which were favorite stopping places for the whale ships of the world. Sailors loved Kusaie, and Bully’s men were no exceptions.
But when the Leonora put into the spacious harbor of Lele, the crew found the island in an uproar. Five white men, accompanied by a gang of savage natives from ill-named Pleasant Island to the south, had backed the wrong side in an uprising on Pleasant and had been banished in whaleboats. Ultimately they had reached Kusaie, whose natives were famed for their gentleness, and had reduced the island to a shambles.
The Pleasant invaders were savage fighters, each clothed only in a thin girdle of leaves and armed with a Snider carbine and a short stabbing knife. Their women, who had shared banishment in the whaleboats, were tall, handsome and even more deadly in brawls than the men. With nothing better to do, these dreadful savages, led by their five white companions, were systematically killing off the Kusaie men, raping their women and taking over their plantations.
This was the kind of situation Bully Hayes loved. After consulting with wizened old King Togusa ashore, Hayes wrapped himself in pugnacious dignity and, facing the five ruffians, delivered his ultimatum. Either they would stop this disgraceful behavior and release every Kusaie woman, unharmed, or the Leonora’s heavy guns would blow the marauders to bits. When the gangsters capitulated, Bully charged the king a hefty fee, payable in coconut oil, for his services. Then, in an aside to one of the traders, speaking in Spanish, Bully explained that he was not going to betray his fellow merchants, but they ought to cut out the rioting—and as for his fee, he might as well earn the king’s oil as let the missionaries have it. Then, in a further gesture of comradeship, he agreed to haul the whole troop of invaders to Eniwetok, where they could collect coconut oil for him.
Thus at one swoop Bully rescued an island, got a free cargo of oil and enlisted a group of traders to work for him on Eniwetok.
But two nights later, as the overloaded Leonora sought temporary shelter in another bay before her departure for Eniwetok, a monstrous hurricane overwhelmed the harbor, and Bully, with his ship hemmed inshore by two Yankee
whalers, could not maneuver her into the gale. Unable to run out to sea, the proud and lovely Leonora, one of the finest brigs that ever sailed the Pacific, was dismasted and shattered on the jaws of the reef, and then pounded her heart out and sank in fourteen fathoms of stormy sea.
Thanks to Bully’s excellent seamanship and personal bravery, most of the passengers and crew escaped, including Louis Becke, who helped get ashore a considerable amount of stores, especially liquor, arms and ammunition.
At first Bully was all business. He smothered his grief over the loss of the Leonora by building a big house that would serve as a combined trading station and harem. Then he presented the king of Kusaie with a formal bill for 48,000 coconuts in compensation for damages he had suffered when the natives stole goods drifting ashore from the wreck.
On sunny days Bully would stand at the door of his spacious dwelling and command his subjects like an emperor. His salvaged boats scurried along the shore to collect the tribute of nuts, which were unloaded at the stone wharf he had built. In the middle of a tree-lined plaza, also constructed by Bully, the women from Pleasant Island would husk the nuts, split them open and pulp the kernel. The pulp was then put in troughs and allowed to rot, while the oil percolated into casks set below.
But a few weeks of this placid operation bored Bully, and in his tedium he indulged in violent brawls with the five white traders he had earlier subdued. Then, in irritation at his enforced stay on Kusaie, he began to plunder the island as it had never been plundered before. He ordered young girls abducted and hauled into his harem. He stole everything of value he could find. He swore and raged and indulged in the most violent behavior.
Then he began to suspect treachery—for indeed it was strange that he was not assassinated—and in fits of extreme rage had some of his crew flogged until their backs were raw meat. One day he started out alone and declared war, unarmed, upon an entire village, driving the natives before him like sheep, felling with one great blow of his fist any man that tried to resist him. Then he personally captured half a dozen young girls and herded them along the beach to the quarters of his men, advising them to keep the girls until their families ransomed them.
Spurred by such behavior on the part of their leader, the lives of the Leonora’s men degenerated into a seven-month orgy of pandemonium, mutiny, violence and the most horrible oppression of the gentle brown-skinned natives. Hayes and his men outdid anything that even New England whalers had accomplished on this languorous island.
Those were the days when an American missionary, like some prophet of Israel, lamented: “Murdered men’s bodies were picked up on the beach every morning … and the poor natives of Lele fled in terror of their lives.”
The debacle at Kusaie ended dramatically when the British steam corvette H. M. S. Rosario put smartly into the harbor. Captain Hayes dressed in his best, combed his long side locks and went aboard to pay his respects to Captain A. E. Dupuis. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said expansively. “I am Captain Hayes of the brig Leonora, cast away on this island.”
Captain Dupuis coldly studied the American and said stiffly: “Indeed! Then you are the very man I am looking for. Consider yourself my prisoner.”
Becke later reported: “Bully was arrested on ninety-seven charges—every count, I believe, except leprosy.”
Hearings were held before Captain Dupuis. Mr. B. G. Snow, representative of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, advised the captain that “the course you contemplate in taking him to Sydney and delivering him up to the American authorities there will not only be approved, but applauded. It will certainly relieve our Micronesian seas of one of the greatest sources of annoyance we have had during the twenty and more years I have been a resident missionary on these islands.”
Aside from that of annoying Mr. Snow, few charges could be supported against the redoubtable Bully. The disgruntled Danish ex-mate of the Leonora, N. Nahnsen, who had been dumped ashore at Kusaie by Hayes, deposed that at Pingelap in March, 1872, Bully had held a chief as a hostage for the delivery of two girls and 7000 coconuts, but had magnanimously settled for one girl and 5000 coconuts. An American, Henry Gardiner, and the Leonora’s halfcaste Fijian second mate, Bill Hicks, swore that, at Providence Island in July, 1872, Hayes had taken a ten-year-old Pingelap girl ashore and had violated her with brutality. But the charges were not proved.
When Hayes was no longer around, King Togusa of Kusaie supported the prosecution with the following letter:
Strong’s Island, Sept. 30, 1874 To Capt. A. E. Dupuis, Kaptin Inglish Man of Wa Rosario: My Kind Friend,—I am glad to see your ship to my island at this time. I think because you come Kaptin Hayes he go. I am very glad for this. What for he fraid mon o wa? Spose he good man he no fraid. We think Kaptin Hayes one bad man. Spose he no run away, I like very much you take him on board your ship and carry him off.…
Togusa (X his mark),
King of Strong’s Island
But Dupuis found that Hayes was so greatly feared by white and brown people alike that none would accuse him of criminal acts, and Dupuis would have exceeded his instructions by taking off an American on such charges as cruelty to native girls, who in those days had no rights whatever. It was doubly dangerous for a British warship to arrest a Yankee in 1875, when England had recently paid compensation of £300,000 to America for a breach of international law in the Alabama case. Hence Dupuis was remarkably careless in guarding Bully Hayes, and was not at all sorry to hear that Bully had escaped from Kusaie on the night of September 27, heading for Pingelap with another American, Harry Mulholland, in a fourteen-foot oak-built boat, one of those saved from the wreck of the Leonora.
Before departing Kusaie, Hayes wrote letters to various of his traders to tell them about his situation. The following of September 26 to Marshall, his agent on one of the Ellice group, is a sample of the unedited Hayes prose:
Friend Marshall,—I have lost my vessel on this last March, and I have never seen a sail since tel now. I am sezed heer by a ship of war; am goion to Sydney. But they cannot do anything with me I am sure. If not, I will be with you soon again. I have given to Mr. Beck, late clerk at Mrs. Macfarlan’s stor, my power of attorney to settle with you.…
So Bully Hayes fled from Kusaie a free man, in an open boat with scant water and barely enough food to keep him going to the next islands. He was drifting north of Kusaie when he was spotted by an American whale ship, the Arctic, headed for the Spanish island of Guam.
Bully, strolling the rutted streets of this foreign colony, was now about forty-five years old, weighing well over two hundred despite his privations on the sea, sunburned, and graced by the long curls which hung about his ears. He would have to start his fortunes from scratch, for he lacked almost everything he needed. But he felt sure that this sleepy island would be a fertile new field for his business methods.
He was wrong. What happened next is the only incident in Hayes’s long career of which he appeared to be intensely ashamed. Twice in one day he was outsmarted, and instead of stealing a ship, he had one stolen from him. And all because of sentiment.
Drawing on credit, Bully purchased the fifty-ton schooner Arabia, which cleared Guam on April 8, 1875, on a trading mission to the south. The goods to be traded, it turned out, were escaped convicts who had paid Bully $24 a head in advance. Normally Hayes would have accepted the money and fled, but since these passengers were convicts, Bully felt a spiritual obligation to them and actually loitered off the island until they could reach his ship. A few could not make it that first night, so Hayes unwisely drifted offshore during the dark hours, intending to pick up the other convicts at dawn.
But someone had alerted the Spanish military, and twenty guards had remained hidden through the night, waiting for Hayes. When he rowed ashore for the last convicts, the soldiers jumped him. Blandly he explained that he always came ashore at dawn to take a bath in the surf, and he might have got away with this unlikely story, but the convicts aboard the Arabia,
uncontrolled in his absence, disclosed themselves and Hayes was plunked in jail, incommunicado.
The offshore convicts, seeing their captain taken and the soldiers about to send a boat out to recapture them, sensibly turned pirates. Cutting the cable and hoisting sail in a trice, they outdistanced the soldiers and struck for the high seas. Bully gazed his last on his new ship as it disappeared in the distance in the hands of the pirates. Later he heard that they had abandoned his schooner in the Palau group and made their way by other craft to Sydney, from which safe vantage they could revile the Spaniards freely.
Hayes was not so lucky. He was taken in chains to Manila, where a Spanish judge handed down a nine-month sentence for aiding escaped convicts, and it was while Bully was in the calaboose in that city that we have our most famous description of the buccaneer, and also the most uncharacteristic.
Captain Joshua Slocum passed through Manila on his solitary way around the world in the little yacht Spray; and as a courtesy to the doughty sailor the Spaniards showed him their prize prisoner, Hayes, the American pirate.
“Hayes,” reported Slocum, “became a chum of the governor of the prison, and also struck up a warm friendship with the priest, who baptized him in the Roman Catholic faith while he was locked up. Now that he was converted to the true faith, Hayes found an all-powerful friend in the Bishop of Manila. The buccaneer was a penitent, and he made a most impressive and moving figure. Fever had twisted and shrunken him until I recognized him only by his long beard and his unusual height and breadth. The light, free spring of his gait was gone, and he was a picture of the shuffling monk. To behold the old freebooter, penniless, reduced by sickness, tall, gaunt, with a flowing white beard half a fathom long, marching barefooted, at the head of a religious procession, and carrying the tallest candle of them all, softened the hearts of his enemies, if he had any in Manila. His accusers retracted their charges, and were covered with confusion. After his release Hayes obtained passage home from Manila on the ship Whittier, bound for San Francisco. The U. S. consul vouched for him as a destitute American seaman.”