Michael O’Leary

The Stolen Island: Searching for `Ata by Scott Hamilton (BWB Texts/Bridget Williams Books, 2016), 112 pp., $14.99

The term ‘blackbirding’ has usually been associated with the capture and enslavement of people in Africa to be transported to the United States for enforced labour and abuse in the southern states. However, The Oxford English Reference Dictionary defines it as ‘Blackbird: a kidnapped black or Polynesian on a slave ship’, and it is the history of Polynesian blackbirding that Scott Hamilton’s new book deals with. Previous publications have documented slavery of the nineteenth century in the Pacific, for example, Edward W. Docker’s 1970 book, The Blackbirders: A brutual story of the Kanaka slave-trade, which dealt with the ‘recruiting’ of South Seas labour for Queensland between 1863 and 1907. Also, in his 2007 book, The White Pacific, Gerald Horne reconstructs the history of blackbirding (slave trading) in the Pacific region. He examines the role of US citizens (many of them ex-slaveholders and ex-confederates) in the trade, and its roots in Civil War dislocations after emancipation of slaves. The origins of a White Australian policy and the rise of Japan as a Pacific power are also discussed. New Zealand played an active, if somewhat incidental, part in this human trafficking, with cutters, ketches, schooners and, later, larger ships leaving New Zealand ports for the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands, forcing or conning Islanders onto their vessels, then delivering them to planters in Queensland or Fiji. [Read more…]