How ‘Blackbirders’ Forced Tens of Thousands of Pacific Islanders Into Slavery After the Civil War

No Pacific Islander was safe from the “blackbirders,” slave traders who lured, coerced or outright kidnapped tens of thousands of people for forced labor in Australia and Fiji in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Some blackbirders disguised themselves as missionaries, going ashore with their collars reversed, books under their arms and the word of God on their tongues. Others enticed islanders to their ships with the promise of traded goods from far-off lands.

One man dressed in the costume of the Ku Klux Klan, a waterproof bag hidden under his robes, writes historian Gerald Horne in The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War. He would mesmerize a crowd by seemingly sucking saltwater into his growing belly. Then, when the man appeared to be on the brink of exploding, he’d tear off his costume, revealing the sleight of hand. The audience, so disarmed by the performance and startled by its finale, was said to be easy to snatch.

At times, slavers bypassed tricks altogether, arriving under the cover of night to ambush a village and kidnap its inhabitants. Locals referred to the raids as “blackbirding” because the perpetrators wore dark clothing when they crept ashore; the term also referenced a derogatory slang name for Pacific Islanders.

At the height of blackbirding, European powers occupied much of Oceania, the collective name for the islands scattered across the Pacific Ocean. With limited resources deployed over the vast distances between Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and other islands in the subregion of Melanesia (the main target of blackbirding), colonial governments found it virtually impossible to keep up with the slave trade. On one of the last frontiers of European and American expansion, blackbirders had little fear of being caught in the act.

“The [Pacific Islands’] relative isolation made it easier for unscrupulous frontier individuals to conduct themselves and their various operations in ways that were contrary to the laws of their own countries,” says Robert Nicole, a historian at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “Reports of abuses were slow to reach the governments and newspapers of these countries, and the criminal activities often went unpunished.”

Scholars’ estimates of the number of Indigenous people captured by blackbirders and forced to work on cotton and sugar plantations in Fiji and Australia vary widely. Horne cites figures ranging from 61,610 men, women and children to more than 100,000, all taken from their Pacific Island homes between 1863 and 1904. Young men and boys were especially prized: Sturdy and strong, they were the most likely to survive the backbreaking work, meager rations and physical abuse. But attractive women fetched the highest prices, due to their scarcity in mid- to late 19th-century settler communities.

While some individuals captured by blackbirders were promised a minimum annual wage of £3 and a return to their homeland after three years of labor, others were sold directly to planters or forced to continue working after their term was up. Such distinctions have historically cast doubt on whether this form of human trafficking was slavery or indentured servitude, in which individuals work for little or no pay for a set period of time as a way of repaying a debt.

The vast majority of those taken by blackbirders, however, had no debts to repay. Before being removed from their homes, they’d likely had little to no contact with foreign settlers. Blackbirding ships were commonly equipped with shackles and other means of preventing passengers from escaping, and they rarely had enough space or supplies to transport their human cargo—evidence that supports the argument that blackbirding was slavery rather than indentured servitude. If the islanders had signed contracts in good faith and received the necessary provisions, restraints wouldn’t have been necessary to keep them from jumping ship.

“This was employment enforced through the barrel of a gun or the crack of a whip,” says Nicole. “In this economy, foreign individuals and their associates create wealth for themselves on the backs of islanders who were given little or no choice in the matter.”

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The fact that the South Pacific slave trade arose just as the United States became embroiled in a conflict over slavery is no coincidence. Perhaps the biggest irony of the Civil War is that the December 6, 1865, ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery (except for convicted criminals) in the U.S., did not put a nail in the coffin of the global slave trade. Instead, its locus was simply transplanted to a new region.

The South Pacific slave trade grew out of cotton, or rather a lack thereof. In the early 1860s, plantations in the American South produced 75 percent of the cotton used around the globe. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 ground textile manufacturing to a halt but did not diminish demand for its output. In Great Britain and Europe, the price of cotton exploded.

Global powers had already started discussing the diversification of the cotton industry, especially as the U.S. slipped further and further toward conflict. As early as the 1850s, the British government experimented with Fiji and Australia as cotton-friendly alternatives to the American South. The results were promising, but the crop was labor intensive. Its production was only profitable in the U.S. because those who worked on plantations were enslaved, and the enslaved did not earn salaries.

Only by replicating the conditions pioneered in the U.S. could a South Pacific cotton industry be as lucrative as the one it was replacing. Unsurprisingly, white European settlers and Confederate refugees who sought respite from the Civil War in the South Pacific played a pivotal role in the new plantations’ development.

“The obvious source of labor to turn to was local Fijian labor, but very few Fijians were available or willing to work for planters under the exploitative conditions that often prevailed on these plantations,” says Nicole. “In 1864 and 1865, the first ships carrying laborers from Vanuatu arrived in Fiji, [and] before long, an entire labor trade emerged to service Fiji’s new plantations.”

Beyond Fiji, the British colonies of Queensland and New South Wales in Australia offered similarly attractive ecosystems for re-establishing the cotton industry. Sugar cane, another labor-intensive good whose production was disrupted by the Civil War, soon followed.

The blackbird trade was disjointed. Independent operators controlled the ships and set their routes without coordinating with one another or local authorities. Most blackbirders were citizens of the U.S. and Britain who’d come to the region as traders or settlers and found a lucrative business in trafficking human beings.

Although British law technically outlawed slavery in the empire’s colonies in the South Pacific, only a handful of Royal Navy ships patrolled the area. Even if a ship was suspected of blackbirding, the law could only be enforced against those of British origins, and even then, enslavers were rarely convicted due to the fine line between the definitions of indentured labor and enslavement.

In 1869, a Royal Navy ship seized the schooner Daphne on the suspicion that it was transporting enslaved laborers. Authorities found that the Daphne was carrying twice as many Pacific Islanders as it had been licensed to contract, in terrible conditions without sufficient supplies. The schooner’s South Australian owner escaped conviction on slavery charges because the prosecution didn’t have enough evidence to prove that working conditions at the ship’s destination of Fiji constituted slavery.

In truth, the Indigenous islanders blackbirded for plantation work in Fiji and Australia endured living conditions that, in many ways, mirrored the ones enslaved Americans had just escaped. Shelter was inadequate, food was limited and of poor quality, and hours were long. Workers faced violence and coercion from plantation owners and managers, and they had little access to medical care. Deaths from diseases to which they had no immunity were extremely frequent.

The South Pacific slave trade had an equally devastating effect on the communities targeted by blackbirders. “Robbed of their able-bodied men, the trade caused massive challenges for social cohesion on [enslaved people’s] home islands [that] took decades to rectify,” says Nicole. “Those who lost men had to rely on the elderly, on women and on the young to survive.” Familial relationships and cultural traditions practiced for centuries, like strategically arranged marriages between clans, disintegrated in the span of just a few decades.

Fiji’s cotton plantations rapidly declined in the early 1870s due to the industry’s resurgence in the American South. But both cotton and sugar cane remained significant industries in Queensland and New South Wales through the early 20th century, even after the fledgling Australian government passed federal legislation in 1901 requiring the deportation of Pacific Island laborers, including those who’d been blackbirded and their descendants, as part of a push to keep the country’s population white.

Deportations began in 1906, but not everyone who was given the choice trusted that they would be returned to their communities. In the past, individuals who’d been told they’d be brought home after their labor ended were dropped nowhere near the places from which they’d been taken—a situation that, due to conflict or a lack of resources, could result in death. At the same time, many wanted to remain in the country where they’d been forced to build new lives. Around 2,500 Pacific Islanders received exemptions or defied the order and stayed behind in Australia. Another 2,700 reportedly remained in Fiji in 1908.

After the mass deportations, Australia’s plantation workers were replaced by fairly paid white workers. Between 1919 and 1964, it was actually illegal for people of color to work in Queensland’s sugar industry.

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Today, the descendants of forced laborers are still suffering the consequences of their ancestors’ blackbirding. The Fiji Melanesians are considered one of the country’s most marginalized and disadvantaged groups due to decades of neglect by the British colonial government. Australian South Sea Islanders, or ASSI, experience greater economic disadvantages than members of non-ASSI communities, including fewer educational opportunities and higher unemployment rates.

“The [ASSI] community is struggling with the cost of living, accessing medication for chronic disease, putting food on the table and a roof over their head,” says Francis Bobongie-Harris, an ASSI scholar at Queensland University of Technology.

“Generational trauma sits in our DNA. It’s in our psyche,” says (Waskam) Emelda Davis, chair of the nonprofit Australian South Sea Islanders-Port Jackson organization. Slave traders captured her grandfather, Moses Enares, and two of his friends from a beach on the island of Tanna, in what is today Vanuatu, and forced them to cut sugar cane in Bundaberg on the coast of Queensland. Enares was just 12 years old at the time.

For descendants, even securing recognition of their distinct identity has proved to be a challenge. It was only in 1994 that the federal government acknowledged the existence of the ASSI community. As recently as 2020, then-Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison publicly claimed that “there was no slavery” in the country’s history—an assertion he quickly walked back.

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“It’s deeply unsettling that the Australian government has yet to fully acknowledge or accept the reality of our ancestors’ enslavement,” says Tracey Leo-Warcon, a member of the ASSI council in Rockhampton, Queensland. Her maternal grandfather was kidnapped from the shores of North Pentecost Island, in what is now Vanuatu, as a young boy and taken to Australia in leg chains. “Although they endured immense hardship, the narrative often presented by [non-ASSI] individuals misinterprets our history, suggesting that the majority of our people willingly migrated to Australia,” Leo-Warcon adds. “This notion is not only misleading but also profoundly insulting.”

Raeleen Willie, secretary of Rockhampton’s ASSI council, echoes this sentiment. “When you must continually tell people who we are and why we were brought to Australia,” that leaves an imprint on the community, she says. Blackbirders kidnapped Willie’s great-grandmother and her siblings from the beach on Oba Island in modern-day Vanuatu and forced them into plantation work in Queensland. The family lost seven children in a single day.

“Many people don’t even know about the White Australia policy,” the series of laws that severely limited non-white immigration to Australia between 1901 and the mid-1970s, Willie says, “let alone the history of blackbirding and indentured labor.”

Today, cotton and sugar are reminders of the blackbirding trade created to service them. Australia produces nearly five million tons of raw sugar a year and is the world’s third-largest exporter of cotton.

“For me personally, the resilience of my ancestors and my elders to work in those sugar plantations, cotton fields, working as domestics, gives me a sense of gratitude and being thankful,” says Willie. “I am here because of them. I have these opportunities because of them. I live a comfortable life because of them. I will never cut cane or pick cotton. I will never be anyone’s domestic.”

Shoshi Parks | READ MORE

Shoshi Parks is an anthropologist and freelance writer whose work on history, travel, food and the natural world has appeared in Atlas Obscura, Afar, NPR and a variety of other outlets. She lives in California's Bay Area.