Horror in Paradise (35 page)

AS BLACKBIRDERS, William Henry (Bully) Hayes, once of Cleveland, Ohio, and Benjamin Pease, formerly a lieutenant in the United States Navy, were apparently no worse, and perhaps no better, than scores of others in the trade. Yet these two picturesque, plausible, and daring ruffians stand out from the swarm of blackbirders, Australian, English, American, French, Peruvian, Chilean, who harried the Pacific Islands. Hayes in particular had a certain daredevil and dashing touch about his villainies that marked him off from the crowd of adventurers and riffraff that haunted the South Seas in his day. Like Pease and so many others, he was a stealer of men and of women.

He swept off the people of lonely islets to sell them into slavery. He was also a thorough-paced buccaneer, a sea-robber, a man of many disguises and of many moods. He ranged far and wide over the Pacific, turning up in the most unlikely places and doing the most unexpected things.

His career, too, lasted far longer than that of the usual South Seas pirate. From first to last he was active in the Pacific for nearly twenty years. He had something of the grand manner, and it is no wonder that a Bully Hayes legend has grown up around him.

Hayes was a tall, powerful, upstanding fellow, with a pleasant, open face. Like that stout, smiling contemporary villain of fiction, Count Fosco (whom he resembled in his love of canaries), he went bald early. One sinister touch about him was that the top of his right ear had been bitten off. This fact, however, was concealed by the fact that he wore his hair long and covered his ears. Though he was bald on top of the head he had a luxuriant growth of brown hair at the sides. And he wore a full beard.

Hayes was always well-dressed in the sea-going fashion of the day. Unlike most of the blackbirders he did not drink. He used to say that he could not have made the reputation that he had, and have escaped justice for so long, if he had not been strictly temperate. He had a friendly, plausible manner except when he fell into fits of ungovernable rage. These became more frequent in his later years. Towards the end of his career he shot, it is said, several persons in these accesses of temper. He always professed a becoming sorrow after these events.

A writer who saw Hayes when he brought the brig
Rona
into Hokitika, New Zealand, in 1864—quite early in his Pacific career—describes him as a “stout, bald, pleasant-looking man of good manners.” He pictures this dreaded blackbirder and buccaneer as walking about the wharf followed by three white poodle dogs. He was fond of pets, especially of small birds. Like his partner, Pease, Hayes was a marrying man. This observer states that in the cabin of the
Rona
sat the two white wives of Hayes, each with a child.

The elder Hayes is said to have been a bargeman on the Mississippi. And it has been asserted that William Henry worked with his father till he was a strapping lad of eighteen. Then, longing for wider waters than the Mississippi, he ran away to sea. With him went $4,000 from his father’s strong box. Where he went for several years and what he did is not recorded. In 1858 he appeared at Hawaii, having been put ashore, perhaps with good reason, from the ship
Orestes.
Early in 1859 he went to San Francisco. Two months later he came to Kahului, on the island of Maui, in command of a brig bound for New Caledonia. While bargaining for cattle he was taken in charge by Treadway the sheriff for having entered a closed port without a permit.

Hayes put the blame on his mate for not telling him that it was necessary to enter at Lahaina before coming on to Kahului. He invited Treadway to dinner on the brig, and asked if he would pilot the vessel to Lahaina. Once outside the harbour, Hayes coolly told Treadway that he could either come to New Caledonia or go ashore in his boat, which was alongside. The sheriff went ashore. Next mail brought papers to the United States Consul authorizing the arrest of Hayes and the seizure of the brig.

Hayes had landed in Frisco with fifty dollars—borrowed when on the beach in Hawaii. With this as a basis of credit he had bought the brig, shipped a crew, and fitted the vessel for sea. His actual out-of-pocket expenses were thirteen dollars for water. For this he had to pay cash. This brig was later sunk off Wallis Island. Hayes and others made their way to Samoa in the boat.

Hayes seems to have been seldom long without a vessel. The brig
Rona,
in which he visited Hokitika in 1864, belonged to Lyttelton, New Zealand. It is said that Hayes bought her on terms in Wellington. He then persuaded a merchant in Auckland to fit her out with a cargo for the islands. The merchant’s son shipped as supercargo. When they were well out to sea Hayes turned his supercargo adrift in a dinghy. One of the tricks he played when he reached the islands was to kidnap two native chiefs and to keep them on board till the natives filled his vessel with copra. At Hokitika Hayes held a sale of South Sea Island goods and curios. He sold for cash and most of the goods were to be delivered next morning. But when the morning came the
Rona
had gone.

During 1868 Hayes, still master of the
Rona,
landed one hundred and fifty natives of Niue or Savage Island at Tahiti to work on plantations. Their removal from the island, and especially the clandestine departure of the women, was carried out against the laws of the island. The missionary on Savage Island, writing on October 20, 1868, mentions that Hayes was there in the
Rona.
His ostensible purpose was to buy pigs for Tahiti. But pigs were a secondary object, his primary purpose being to secure a cargo of men and women. Hayes had previously stolen a number of women, many of whom were mothers and wives, and children were left behind uncared for.

Hayes seems to have kept the
Rona
for a period quite without parallel in the case of his other vessels. He seems to have been a reckless navigator; it was a case of “easy come, easy go” with his craft. He usually stole the vessel and was given to piling it up on a reef before very long.

In 1869 we find Hayes associated with that other choice scoundrel, Benjamin Pease. It has been claimed for Pease that he was the first man to import island labor into Fiji. Hayes became master of the brig
Pioneer
(also called the
Leonora),
of which Pease was allegedly the owner. The two worked for a time in the North Pacific. Then their ways diverged.

But they met again at Samoa. Hayes was by this time in command of the schooner
Atlantic
and had been blackbirding and trading, in his own peculiar way, amongst the eastern islands. As a result of a specially audacious bit of blackbirding the
Atlantic
was seized by the British consul at Apia, John L. Williams.

In a report dated March 11, 1870, Williams tells us something of the blackbirding methods of Hayes. He had first of all kidnapped a score of natives of Danger Island, intending to sell them in Fiji. These natives were utterly useless as laborers, for when they could not get their accustomed food, consisting mostly of coconuts and fish, they died. Of the twenty whom Hayes had taken on board his schooner, seventeen were dead when he called at Apia and the other three were dying.

Hayes had then gone to Manihiki, where he had kidnapped a number of lads and girls, intending to sell them in Fiji. Apart from kidnapping these people Hayes had, the consul reported, robbed and defrauded them, taking coconuts, mats, and hats with no intention of paying for them. Promising to pay for the cargo at a neighboring island, Hayes had enticed a large number of natives, young and old, on board the
Atlantic
. He had then turned out of the vessel the older and less valuable natives.

A touch of compassion on the part of this hardened kidnapper proved his undoing. The evidence on which the consul acted in arresting Hayes and releasing his blackbirds was supplied by Moete, a Catholic native of Manihiki. Moete was a middle-aged native who with his wife and some of his children had gone on board the
Atlantic
to sell coconuts. When the schooner was about to make sail with the kidnapped lads and girls, Hayes ordered Moete and Toka to be sent ashore with the other older people. They loved their children so much that they could not bear the idea of being parted from them, perhaps for ever. So they begged to be taken into captivity with the children if the latter could not be released. Hayes allowed Moete and his wife to stay on board. Moete also told the consul that a teacher at Tahiti sent on board the schooner two little girls as a present to Hayes. Knowing that Hayes was a desperate and resourceful ruffian, Williams, who possessed no real force, did not quite know what to do with him. Williams desired to hold him until a war vessel arrived on which he could be sent to Sydney. In the meantime he did not venture to put Hayes in the calaboose but had him kept under surveillance. Just then Ben Pease arrived in the brig
Leonora,
or
Pioneer.
Hayes pointed out to the consul that the chronometers of the
Atlantic
required rating and secured permission to take them on board the
Leonora
for that purpose. When the consul woke up next day the
Leonora
had gone and so had Hayes. It was All Fools’ Day, April 1, 1870.

After describing how Hayes had escaped from Apia on April 1, 1870, in Pease’s brig, Williams says that the
Pioneer
visited Savage Island where Pease, by means of a forged order, obtained cotton and coconut fiber to the value of £300, the property of J. and T. Skinner of Sydney. After this robbery the two rascals called at Savau in Samoa, where they obtained three thousand yams from a British trader and left without paying for them. Hayes was in the habit of landing an armed party on any island where he could find coconut oil and taking it to his vessel, threatening to fire on any one who interfered.

The stolen goods seem to have been sold in Fiji. The
Leonora
turned up at Shanghai with both Hayes and Pease on board. Within ten days Pease was in prison, charged with murder. Hayes fitted the
Leonora
for sea. He paid only one bill, that for the spare mainyard. Then he went down the China coast, levying blackmail on the villages as he went. He put into Saigon, where he was chartered to carry a cargo of rice to Hong Kong, via ports. At one of these ports on the way, the owner of the rice went ashore on business. Hayes made sail, leaving the owner there, and sold the rice at Bangkok on his own account. A steamer with the owner of the rice on board made Bangkok just after Hayes had gone.

In due course Hayes drifted back to Samoa, where he was again arrested. This time the action was taken by Captain Meade of the United States cruiser
Narragansett.
As no evidence against him seemed to be forthcoming, Meade set Hayes free. Then Hayes persuaded Meade to give him a set of sails. A little earlier in his career Hayes commanded a black brig called the
Water Lily,
which may have been the
Pioneer
or
Leonora
under another name. He was blackbirding in the Western Pacific in her. It was suggested that he lent this vessel to headhunting natives, carrying them on their raids. Probably this accusation was unfounded.

Hayes seems to have had an objection to Frenchmen. He bargained with the French owner of the schooner
Giovanni Apiama
for a share in the vessel. Hayes was to pay a sum in cash and to throw in a share in certain trading stations. One day as they sailed past a lonely islet the Frenchman was struck from behind and stunned. He woke up on shore with the schooner standing away under full sail Hayes then, so it is said, entrusted the stolen schooner to a skipper named Pinkham, and never saw either the vessel or Pinkham again.

Hayes was caught napping after this episode. He was surprised by the Spaniards at Guam while bathing; he was made prisoner and sent to Manila, where he passed himself off as a devout Catholic. He soon escaped from Manila and turned up again at San Francisco, where he stole the schooner
Lotus.

Captain Moore, of H.M.S.
Barossa,
came across the track of Hayes in the Line Islands in 1872. A Frenchman named Lechat complained that Hayes had cheated him over the purchase of his vessel and over a proposed partnership in trepang stations. Finally he challenged Hayes to come on shore and fight a duel with revolvers, to which Hayes replied:

“Anyhow, I do not wish to see you any longer on my vessel; be off with you or I will throw you overboard.”

When Lechat replied that he was going but would meet Hayes again in China, he was knocked down the side ladder and stunned. When he came to himself his blood stained the deck. There was, Lechat said, a “concert of maledictions” against Hayes.

An Englishman with the remarkable name of Asia James Lowther, trading agent on the Mulgrave Islands for Towns and Company of Sydney, stated that Hayes offered him £20 down for his oil. When he said that the hogsheads containing the oil were not his, Hayes flew into a frightful rage and said:

“If Jesus Christ and God Almighty stood at the door I would fight for it.” Hayes took the oil and eight pigs and ordered Asia James off the station.

Captain Simpson of H.M.S.
Blanche
reported on June 6, 1872, that Hayes had apparently abandoned kidnapping and had established himself in the Marshall group, where he carried on a so-called legal trade but was constantly committing piratical depredations.

At an early stage in his Pacific career Hayes did a little to aid missionary enterprise. He was trading in the Hervey group in a fifty-ton schooner, said to have been stolen from Singapore, and agreed to take a party of missionaries from Apia to the Herveys. When they reached the islands the goods of the missionaries, to the value of between£200 and £300, were missing. Hayes swore that they had never been put on board. It was found later that he had bartered them away for copra in another part of the group.