The blackbirding schooner Daphne was seized by HMS Rosario in 1869, and its passengers freed[1] Blackbirding is the coercion of people through trickery and kidnapping to work as labourers. From the 1860s, blackbirding ships in the Pacific sought workers to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands in Peru.[2] In the 1870s, the blackbirding trade focused on supplying labourers to plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland and Fiji.[3][4] The first documented practice of a major blackbirding industry for sugar cane labourers occurred between 1842 and 1904. Those "blackbirded" were recruited from the indigenous populations of nearby Pacific islands or northern Queensland. In the early days of the pearling industry in Western Australia at Nickol Bay and Broome, local Aborigines were blackbirded from the surrounding areas.
Blackbirding has continued to the present day in developing countries. One example is the kidnapping and coercion at gunpoint of indigenous people in Central America to work as plantation labourers in the region, where they are exposed to heavy pesticide loads and do backbreaking work for very little pay.[5]
Etymology
The term may have been formed directly as a contraction of "blackbird catching"; "blackbird" was a slang term for the local indigenous people. It might also have derived from an earlier phrase, "blackbird shooting", which referred to recreational hunting of Australian Aboriginal people by early European settlers.[6]
Blackbirding in Polynesia in the 1860s
Polynesia is the largest of three major cultural areas in the Pacific Ocean. Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian triangle.
Geographic definition of Polynesia, surrounded by a pink line
For less than a year between 1862–63, Peruvian ships (and a few Chilean ships under the Peruvian flag) combed the smaller islands of Polynesia from Easter Island in the eastern Pacific to the Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu) and the southern atolls of the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati), seeking workers to fill the extreme labour shortage in Peru.[2]
In 1862 J. C. Byrne, an Irish speculator, persuaded countrymen to financially back a scheme to bring "colonists" from the New Hebrides to Peru as indentured agricultural workers. The first ship, Adelante, was fitted and on 15 June 1862 set out across the Pacific. Calling in at Tongareva (Penrhyn) in the northern Cook Islands, Byrne found the one island in the Pacific where the population was willing to leave because of a severe coconut famine. He took 253 recruits; by September, they were working in Peru as plantation workers and domestic household servants.
