Samoan idyllic jungle by FLickr user CanadaGood
Perhaps the greatest disgrace of the nineteenth century was the growth and power of wealth on a bedrock of slavery and poverty. It comes as no surprise that entire countries’ GDPs were a direct result of cheap or even free enforced labour.
We are all painfully aware of how the tragic African slave trade supplied industry and the wealthy in Europe, the Caribbean and the USA amongst other states. What is less well known is that in the mid- to late-nineteenth century Peru had huge sugar plantations, worked by Pacific islander slaves.
A favoured practice of these slave traders was to embark for the more remote islands of the Pacific where they could capture natives without reprisal. The outside world would not hear of their actions until they were long over. The practice became known as ‘blackbirding’.
Even the most advanced societies in the nineteenth century fostered terrible social injustice – huge wealth suppressing massive poverty with unequal distributions of wealth resources and the opportunities education makes available. It is tempting therefore, to see this practice of blackbirding as a product of those times. This would be to fail the millions still held in bondage by modern slavery.
What follows is an account of blackbirding in Samoa by Robert Gibbings, written at at time within living memory of these raids:
“The three islands of the Tokelau group, Fakaofu, Nukunono and Atafu, to which we were sailing, suffered grievously from slave-traders during the latter half of the ninteenth century. Between the years 1850 and 1870, and in particular during the period from 1862 to 1864, the islands were raided by ships from South America, ‘blackbirding’, for the guano islands and sugar plantations of Peru. The population of Samoa was almost erased. A native teacher, resident that time on Atafu wrote: ‘This is my letter. Our country is destroyed. All our people have been carried away in a foreign ship. They were deceived by offers of trading. The captain told them to take off to the ship coconuts and fowl to sell, and he produced some cloth along with a shirt and trousers, and said to the men, bring your coconuts and fowl to buy these things. Then I said, come ashore and purchase. The captain replied, I don’t wish to come ashore and trade; it will be better to buy aboard… All the people of this island are carried off. They have taken the chief, Oli, who was in Samoa, and thirty-four other men. All that remains here are women and children, and six male adults. Sir, it is most piteous to witness the grief of these women and children. They are weeping night and day; they do not eat, there is none left to provide food for them, or to climb the coconut trees. They will perish with hunger.’
“At about the same time two hundred and forty seven men, women and children were kidnapped from Fakaofu, of whom only one ever returned; many of the women were afr advanced in pregnancy, other were nursing children. Only eigthy inhabitants were left on Nukunono. It was a widespread traffic.”
Bibliography
Over the Reefs and Far Away, Robert Gibbings, EP Dutton, 1949
Far Green Fields, Ed. Bernard Share, Blackstaff Press, 1992
Modern Slavery facts
This article was posted on
Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at
05:05.
It is archived in History, Wild Places and tagged Culture, islands, pacific, slavery.
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reading about what the peruvian slavers did to my people has made me realise how much they
must have sufferd and to be taken away to a foreign country must have been terrifing.