The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

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The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 27, 2014 12:39 pm

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Tomgram: Greg Grandin, The Terror of Our Age
Posted by Greg Grandin at 4:00pm, January 26, 2014.
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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: It’s time for TD’s first book offer of 2014, The Empire of Necessity, a remarkable new history by Greg Grandin, author of the acclaimed Fordlandia. It’s the story of how the transnational slave trade reorganized our planet, of a dramatic slave revolt on board a ship, of Muslim Africans trekking across South America in chains, of ecological devastation, and of Herman Melville's terrifying vision of our future. The New York Times Book Review just hailed it as a “powerful new book... [and] a significant contribution to the largely impossible yet imperative effort to retrieve some trace of the countless lives that slavery consumed.” Of it, Toni Morrison says: "Scholarship at its best. Greg Grandin's deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry is compelling, brilliant, and necessary." I found it riveting, and you’ll get a sense of the power of Grandin’s writing from his post today. In return for a contribution to this site of $100 (or more), Grandin will sign a personalized copy of his new book for you. The offer will only last a week, so check it out at our donation page as soon as possible. Tom]

Okay, Big Oil's latest quarterly profits weren’t the highest in history. That would be the combined $51.5 billion the top six companies hauled in during a single quarter in 2008. In the third quarter of 2013, thanks to somewhat lower oil prices, the Big Five made a mere $23 billion in profits or $175,000 a minute -- slightly lower, in fact, than the same quarter in 2012. In a similar spirit, the average temperature for 2013 set no records either. It was in the range of 58.12 to 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (depending on how you do the figuring), indicating that the year will fall somewhere between fourth and seventh hottest since global records began being kept in 1880.

In other words, it was just another humdrum year for the oil executives powering the most profitable corporations in history, as they continue to lend a hand to the warming of the only inhabited planet we know of. In the meantime, a recent draft report from the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that we have just 15 years left to rein in fossil fuel carbon emissions -- which could be considered the effluent of energy industry profits -- before a global crisis looms that will be “virtually impossible to solve with current technologies.”

So on the one hand, profit; on the other, destruction at an almost unimaginable level, involving the very habitability of this planet. The pitilessly profit-driven logic of those energy execs, TomDispatch regular Greg Grandin points out, is hardly a new phenomenon. In fact, he’s just written a stunning new history, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, that lays out how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a similar logic drove other kinds of extractive destruction in what was then known as “the age of freedom,” the period in which millions of Indians and Africans were chewed up in the transnational slave trade. Think of Grandin’s tale as an old one with a distinctly modern twist, or as the O. Henry story from hell. Tom

The Two Faces of Empire
Melville Knew Them, We Still Live With Them
By Greg Grandin

A captain ready to drive himself and all around him to ruin in the hunt for a white whale. It’s a well-known story, and over the years, mad Ahab in Herman Melville’s most famous novel, Moby-Dick, has been used as an exemplar of unhinged American power, most recently of George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq.

But what’s really frightening isn't our Ahabs, the hawks who periodically want to bomb some poor country, be it Vietnam or Afghanistan, back to the Stone Age. The respectable types are the true “terror of our age,” as Noam Chomsky called them collectively nearly 50 years ago. The really scary characters are our soberest politicians, scholars, journalists, professionals, and managers, men and women (though mostly men) who imagine themselves as morally serious, and then enable the wars, devastate the planet, and rationalize the atrocities. They are a type that has been with us for a long time. More than a century and a half ago, Melville, who had a captain for every face of empire, found their perfect expression -- for his moment and ours.

For the last six years, I’ve been researching the life of an American seal killer, a ship captain named Amasa Delano who, in the 1790s, was among the earliest New Englanders to sail into the South Pacific. Money was flush, seals were many, and Delano and his fellow ship captains established the first unofficial U.S. colonies on islands off the coast of Chile. They operated under an informal council of captains, divvied up territory, enforced debt contracts, celebrated the Fourth of July, and set up ad hoc courts of law. When no bible was available, the collected works of William Shakespeare, found in the libraries of most ships, were used to swear oaths.

From his first expedition, Delano took hundreds of thousands of sealskins to China, where he traded them for spices, ceramics, and tea to bring back to Boston. During a second, failed voyage, however, an event took place that would make Amasa notorious -- at least among the readers of the fiction of Herman Melville.

Here’s what happened: One day in February 1805 in the South Pacific, Amasa Delano spent nearly a full day on board a battered Spanish slave ship, conversing with its captain, helping with repairs, and distributing food and water to its thirsty and starving voyagers, a handful of Spaniards and about 70 West African men and women he thought were slaves. They weren’t.

Those West Africans had rebelled weeks earlier, killing most of the Spanish crew, along with the slaver taking them to Peru to be sold, and demanded to be returned to Senegal. When they spotted Delano’s ship, they came up with a plan: let him board and act as if they were still slaves, buying time to seize the sealer’s vessel and supplies. Remarkably, for nine hours, Delano, an experienced mariner and distant relative of future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was convinced that he was on a distressed but otherwise normally functioning slave ship.

Having barely survived the encounter, he wrote about the experience in his memoir, which Melville read and turned into what many consider his “other” masterpiece. Published in 1855, on the eve of the Civil War, Benito Cereno is one of the darkest stories in American literature. It’s told from the perspective of Amasa Delano as he wanders lost through a shadow world of his own racial prejudices.

One of the things that attracted Melville to the historical Amasa was undoubtedly the juxtaposition between his cheerful self-regard -- he considers himself a modern man, a liberal opposed to slavery -- and his complete obliviousness to the social world around him. The real Amasa was well meaning, judicious, temperate, and modest.

In other words, he was no Ahab, whose vengeful pursuit of a metaphysical whale has been used as an allegory for every American excess, every catastrophic war, every disastrous environmental policy, from Vietnam and Iraq to the explosion of the BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Ahab, whose peg-legged pacing of the quarterdeck of his doomed ship enters the dreams of his men sleeping below like the “crunching teeth of sharks.” Ahab, whose monomania is an extension of the individualism born out of American expansion and whose rage is that of an ego that refuses to be limited by nature’s frontier. “Our Ahab,” as a soldier in Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon calls a ruthless sergeant who senselessly murders innocent Vietnamese.

Ahab is certainly one face of American power. In the course of writing a book on the history that inspired Benito Cereno, I’ve come to think of it as not the most frightening -- or even the most destructive of American faces. Consider Amasa.

Killing Seals

Since the end of the Cold War, extractive capitalism has spread over our post-industrialized world with a predatory force that would shock even Karl Marx. From the mineral-rich Congo to the open-pit gold mines of Guatemala, from Chile’s until recently pristine Patagonia to the fracking fields of Pennsylvania and the melting Arctic north, there is no crevice where some useful rock, liquid, or gas can hide, no jungle forbidden enough to keep out the oil rigs and elephant killers, no citadel-like glacier, no hard-baked shale that can’t be cracked open, no ocean that can’t be poisoned.

And Amasa was there at the beginning. Seal fur may not have been the world’s first valuable natural resource, but sealing represented one of young America’s first experiences of boom-and-bust resource extraction beyond its borders.

With increasing frequency starting in the early 1790s and then in a mad rush beginning in 1798, ships left New Haven, Norwich, Stonington, New London, and Boston, heading for the great half-moon archipelago of remote islands running from Argentina in the Atlantic to Chile in the Pacific. They were on the hunt for the fur seal, which wears a layer of velvety down like an undergarment just below an outer coat of stiff gray-black hair.

In Moby-Dick, Melville portrayed whaling as the American industry. Brutal and bloody but also humanizing, work on a whale ship required intense coordination and camaraderie. Out of the gruesomeness of the hunt, the peeling of the whale’s skin from its carcass, and the hellish boil of the blubber or fat, something sublime emerged: human solidarity among the workers. And like the whale oil that lit the lamps of the world, divinity itself glowed from the labor: “Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God.”

Sealing was something else entirely. It called to mind not industrial democracy but the isolation and violence of conquest, settler colonialism, and warfare. Whaling took place in a watery commons open to all. Sealing took place on land. Sealers seized territory, fought one another to keep it, and pulled out what wealth they could as fast as they could before abandoning their empty and wasted island claims. The process pitted desperate sailors against equally desperate officers in as all-or-nothing a system of labor relations as can be imagined.

In other words, whaling may have represented the promethean power of proto-industrialism, with all the good (solidarity, interconnectedness, and democracy) and bad (the exploitation of men and nature) that went with it, but sealing better predicted today’s postindustrial extracted, hunted, drilled, fracked, hot, and strip-mined world.

Seals were killed by the millions and with a shocking casualness. A group of sealers would get between the water and the rookeries and simply start clubbing. A single seal makes a noise like a cow or a dog, but tens of thousands of them together, so witnesses testified, sound like a Pacific cyclone. Once we “began the work of death,” one sealer remembered, “the battle caused me considerable terror.”

South Pacific beaches came to look like Dante’s Inferno. As the clubbing proceeded, mountains of skinned, reeking carcasses piled up and the sands ran red with torrents of blood. The killing was unceasing, continuing into the night by the light of bonfires kindled with the corpses of seals and penguins.

And keep in mind that this massive kill-off took place not for something like whale oil, used by all for light and fire. Seal fur was harvested to warm the wealthy and meet a demand created by a new phase of capitalism: conspicuous consumption. Pelts were used for ladies’ capes, coats, muffs, and mittens, and gentlemen’s waistcoats. The fur of baby pups wasn’t much valued, so some beaches were simply turned into seal orphanages, with thousands of newborns left to starve to death. In a pinch though, their downy fur, too, could be used -- to make wallets.

Occasionally, elephant seals would be taken for their oil in an even more horrific manner: when they opened their mouths to bellow, their hunters would toss rocks in and then begin to stab them with long lances. Pierced in multiple places like Saint Sebastian, the animals’ high-pressured circulatory system gushed “fountains of blood, spouting to a considerable distance.”

At first the frenetic pace of the killing didn’t matter: there were so many seals. On one island alone, Amasa Delano estimated, there were “two to three millions of them” when New Englanders first arrived to make “a business of killing seals.”

“If many of them were killed in a night,” wrote one observer, “they would not be missed in the morning.” It did indeed seem as if you could kill every one in sight one day, then start afresh the next. Within just a few years, though, Amasa and his fellow sealers had taken so many seal skins to China that Canton’s warehouses couldn’t hold them. They began to pile up on the docks, rotting in the rain, and their market price crashed.

To make up the margin, sealers further accelerated the pace of the killing -- until there was nothing left to kill. In this way, oversupply and extinction went hand in hand. In the process, cooperation among sealers gave way to bloody battles over thinning rookeries. Previously, it only took a few weeks and a handful of men to fill a ship’s hold with skins. As those rookeries began to disappear, however, more and more men were needed to find and kill the required number of seals and they were often left on desolate islands for two- or three-year stretches, living alone in miserable huts in dreary weather, wondering if their ships were ever going to return for them.

“On island after island, coast after coast,” one historian wrote, “the seals had been destroyed to the last available pup, on the supposition that if sealer Tom did not kill every seal in sight, sealer Dick or sealer Harry would not be so squeamish.” By 1804, on the very island where Amasa estimated that there had been millions of seals, there were more sailors than prey. Two years later, there were no seals at all.

The Machinery of Civilization

There exists a near perfect inverse symmetry between the real Amasa and the fictional Ahab, with each representing a face of the American Empire. Amasa is virtuous, Ahab vengeful. Amasa seems trapped by the shallowness of his perception of the world. Ahab is profound; he peers into the depths. Amasa can’t see evil (especially his own). Ahab sees only nature’s “intangible malignity.”

Both are representatives of the most predatory industries of their day, their ships carrying what Delano once called the “machinery of civilization” to the Pacific, using steel, iron, and fire to kill animals and transform their corpses into value on the spot.

Yet Ahab is the exception, a rebel who hunts his white whale against all rational economic logic. He has hijacked the “machinery” that his ship represents and rioted against “civilization.” He pursues his quixotic chase in violation of the contract he has with his employers. When his first mate, Starbuck, insists that his obsession will hurt the profits of the ship’s owners, Ahab dismisses the concern: “Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, Owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience.”

Insurgents like Ahab, however dangerous to the people around them, are not the primary drivers of destruction. They are not the ones who will hunt animals to near extinction -- or who are today forcing the world to the brink. Those would be the men who never dissent, who either at the frontlines of extraction or in the corporate backrooms administer the destruction of the planet, day in, day out, inexorably, unsensationally without notice, their actions controlled by an ever greater series of financial abstractions and calculations made in the stock exchanges of New York, London, and Shanghai.

If Ahab is still the exception, Delano is still the rule. Throughout his long memoir, he reveals himself as ever faithful to the customs and institutions of maritime law, unwilling to take any action that would injure the interests of his investors and insurers. “All bad consequences,” he wrote, describing the importance of protecting property rights, “may be avoided by one who has a knowledge of his duty, and is disposed faithfully to obey its dictates.”

It is in Delano’s reaction to the West African rebels, once he finally realizes he has been the target of an elaborately staged con, that the distinction separating the sealer from the whaler becomes clear. The mesmeric Ahab -- the “thunder-cloven old oak” -- has been taken as a prototype of the twentieth-century totalitarian, a one-legged Hitler or Stalin who uses an emotional magnetism to convince his men to willingly follow him on his doomed hunt for Moby Dick.

Delano is not a demagogue. His authority is rooted in a much more common form of power: the control of labor and the conversion of diminishing natural resources into marketable items. As seals disappeared, however, so too did his authority. His men first began to grouse and then conspire. In turn, Delano had to rely ever more on physical punishment, on floggings even for the most minor of offences, to maintain control of his ship -- until, that is, he came across the Spanish slaver. Delano might have been personally opposed to slavery, yet once he realized he had been played for a fool, he organized his men to retake the slave ship and violently pacify the rebels. In the process, they disemboweled some of the rebels and left them writhing in their viscera, using their sealing lances, which Delano described as “exceedingly sharp and as bright as a gentleman’s sword.”

Caught in the pincers of supply and demand, trapped in the vortex of ecological exhaustion, with no seals left to kill, no money to be made, and his own crew on the brink of mutiny, Delano rallied his men to the chase -- not of a white whale but of black rebels. In the process, he reestablished his fraying authority. As for the surviving rebels, Delano re-enslaved them. Propriety, of course, meant returning them and the ship to its owners.

Our Amasas, Ourselves

With Ahab, Melville looked to the past, basing his obsessed captain on Lucifer, the fallen angel in revolt against the heavens, and associating him with America’s “manifest destiny,” with the nation’s restless drive beyond its borders. With Amasa, Melville glimpsed the future. Drawing on the memoirs of a real captain, he created a new literary archetype, a moral man sure of his righteousness yet unable to link cause to effect, oblivious to the consequences of his actions even as he careens toward catastrophe.

They are still with us, our Amasas. They have knowledge of their duty and are disposed faithfully to follow its dictates, even unto the ends of the Earth.



Not black and white

The real story behind Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"
Jan 18th 2014 | From the print edition


The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. By Greg Grandin. Metropolitan Books; 360 pages; $30. Buy from Amazon.com

HOW come the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery? Greg Grandin, an American historian, wrestles with a paradox: the way slavery expanded after the Enlightenment and at a time when cries of freedom were still reverberating from the American and French revolutions.


His new book, “The Empire of Necessity”, is inspired by Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”, an imaginative account by the man who wrote “Moby Dick” of a bloody slave revolt aboard a Spanish ship in the South Pacific in 1805. Led by a man called Babo and his son, Mori, the slaves murdered many of the Spanish crew and took control of the ship. When the vessel subsequently got into distress, the west Africans deceived their rescuer, Captain Amasa Delano, an American seal-hunter and a distant relative of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pretending they were still slaves. They forced the ship’s captain and the few surviving members of its crew to play the role of their masters.

As well as correcting the factual errors in Melville’s book, Mr Grandin uses Captain Delano’s account of this and other incidents to explore the complexities and ambiguities of the Atlantic slave trade. It was not just, as is commonly supposed, a matter of white villains and black victims. The crews of naval and merchant fleets of the time included “men of colour”—even, in a few instances, as captains.

When, as happened during the Napoleonic wars, a slaver’s ship was captured by French privateers, the blacks aboard were often treated more carefully than the white seamen. The blacks were prized goods and their worth soared as commodity-based booms in the New World overwhelmed the sentiments of liberty, equality and fraternity. Once enslaved, the Africans were valuable as “investments (purchased and then rented out as labourers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital, making them an odd mix of abstract and concrete values.”

Blacks as well as whites profited from the Atlantic slave trade. The shippers and retailers of slaves were mostly Europeans or white Americans, but the wholesalers were often black. Slavery existed throughout west Africa, and during the wars that convulsed the upper Niger valley in the early 19th century prisoners seized during the fighting were sold to Europeans by African rulers.

In describing the awfulness of their fate, Mr Grandin recalls the observations of a slave-ship’s surgeon. Cargo bays were poorly ventilated and baked under the equatorial sun, leading to festering and putrefaction. Slave ships could be smelled from miles away. Sometimes the floors of the holds would become so covered with “blood and mucus” that they resembled a slaughter house. “It is not”, the surgeon said, “in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting.”

Unfortunately, the horrors in Mr Grandin’s history are unrelenting. His is a book without heroes. The brave battlers against the gruesome slave business hardly get a look in, although it was they who eventually prevailed. Prominent among them were William Wilberforce and other evangelical Christians. Along with their Quaker allies, they led the campaign that persuaded Britain’s Parliament to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Credit is also due, but is hardly given by Mr Grandin, to the anti-slavery patrols of the Royal Navy which freed at least 150,000 west Africans from slave ships during the 19th century.

Yet the efforts of the slave traders to hide their captives from the Royal Navy and to pretend that they were shipping only general merchandise still echo in a common saying in Brazil about deliberate attempts to deceive: para inglês ver (for the English to see). A better balanced history would have included the good guys, too.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 07, 2016 10:24 am

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 07, 2016

Counting the victims

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As The Stolen Island gets some attention from the media I'm receiving a mixture of positive and negative responses to the book. My account of the slave raids on the Tongan islands of 'Ata and Niuafo'ou has pleased some people and angered others.

On a Tongan website one person left a comment accusing me of being a descendant of the men who raided the island of 'Ata and enslaved half its people. I'm not worried about this type of comment, but I am concerned by the palangi rednecks who are either accusing me of inventing many of the details in The Stolen Island or else claiming that the book is unnecessary. These deeply conservative and rather paranoid people are convinced that there is some sort of conspiracy afoot to tarnish colonial New Zealand and the 'white race' in general, and believe that my little book is part of this grand conspiracy.

So far the conservative palangi critics of The Stolen Island have used two types of argument. The first sort of argument implicitly accepts that the slave raid on 'Ata occurred, but questions whether the raid is worth remembering today. Here's a comment that makes the argument for the insignificance of the raid:

This book is claptrap. A small incident blown out of all proportion when the real history of the Pacific is read. Journalistic excess.


I'd like to invite the people making this sort of argument to come and drink kava with some of the Tongan community in Auckland. Last Sunday I visited the kava hall attached to the Onehunga Methodist church, and listened to the Tongans gathered there talk about 'Ata. I was humbled when speakers thanked me for writing The Stolen Island, and for pushing the story of 'Ata into the consciousness of palangi New Zealanders. Nobody in the kava hall thought the enslavement of half of 'Ata's citizens a 'small incident' that had been 'blown out of proportion'. Many had ancestors who were either trapped aboard Thomas McGrath's slave ship or else forced to watch from the shore as the slavers did their work.

The raid on 'Ata was a colossal disaster for nineteenth century Tonga. In 1863 the kingdom had about twenty thousand inhabitants, so the 144 men, women, and children taken from 'Ata represented a loss of about 0.7% of its population. To take an equivalent toll a disaster in twenty-first century New Zealand would have to cost thirty thousand lives.

King Tupou I was forced to evacuate the survivors of the raid from 'Ata. The abandonment of the island was a grave setback for him, because he and his government had been trying hard to maintain Tonga's independence from European powers and the United States.

Tupou I was aware that the colonisation of many Pacific islands and archipelagoes had been justified by the claim that the indigenous authorities in those places had been incapable of protecting their people from palangi slavers and planters. He was anxious to prove that his control extended over all the islands of Tonga. He had put government representatives on almost every island, to register the ships of palangi who stopped there and to impose customs duties on them. But the raid on 'Ata forced him to withdraw his people from the southern frontier of his kingdom.

The Stolen Island also discusses the wider Pacific slave trade, which moved tens of thousands of islanders from their homelands to the plantations of Queensland, Fiji, New Caledonia, and elsewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century. This slave trade is anything but a trivial detail. Without it the Pacific would look very different.


Continues at: http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2016 ... ctims.html
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 12, 2016 9:57 pm

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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 13, 2016 9:17 pm

https://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/magazine/sold-slavery

Sold into slavery

A treacherous affair during the little-known 19th-century Pacific Island slave trade has a southern New Zealand link, historian Dr Scott Hamilton tells Bruce Munro.

Who it was who chose to publish the article about Captain Thomas McGrath on the front page of the December 14, 1863, edition of the Invercargill Times will probably never be known.

That individual’s decision, however, has had repercussions that are still being felt today.

"The profitable nature of the infamous practice of kidnapping the natives of the South Sea Islands, and carrying them as slaves to Peru, has at length proven sufficiently tempting to induce a British subject, an Irishman, sailing from an Australian colony — Tasmania — to dare the dangers associated with the traffic."

This was the dramatic first sentence of the front-page story printed in the Southland newspaper almost exactly 153 years ago.

"This we learn from a seaman, John Turner, now in this port, who, along with eight others, left the vessel in which he shipped on the understanding that she was going on a whaling voyage, as soon as they learned that it was the purpose of the captain to take part in the Peruvian slave trade ...

"Instead of directing his attention to whaling, the captain proceeded to the South Sea Islands. On the 17th of May he proposed to the crew they should enter upon the slave trade as being more profitable."

The story, which had first appeared in the Melbourne Age at the end of November, was a devastating blow to Capt McGrath, who had only recently been arrested in nearby Bluff on tax evasion charges, says historian Dr Scott Hamilton. And the article’s significance has endured, drawing attention to New Zealand’s oft-neglected involvement in the Pacific Islands slave trade, known as blackbirding, as well as setting the record straight for people who have carried a burden of shame for several generations.

Dr Hamilton has been chasing the story of the slavery raid on the tiny Polynesian island, ’Ata, in 1863, since first stumbling across it in a remote Tongan village three years ago. Now, he has published The Stolen Island: Searching for ’Ata, detailing his research into this terrible and tragic incident.

The pivotal figure is Capt McGrath, Dr Hamilton says.

"McGrath almost haunted me; a sort of satanic figure who in some ways took over the book," Dr Hamilton says.

"What an extraordinary life. A son of a British deportee, and then McGrath himself was deported to Tasmania at the age of 16. So, he knows what it is like to suffer deportation, to be ripped away from his home. Yet he goes on to do it himself. How could he do that?

"And then, when he is confronted with clear evidence [in the newspaper article] of what he has done, he shamelessly paints himself in the most self-pitying terms. So, for me he was a grotesque character but also a completely compelling character ... a victim who becomes a victimiser."

Dr Hamilton got on the trail of Capt McGrath in 2013 after hearing tantalising details of what happened a century and a-half ago on forgotten ’Ata island, 150km south of Tonga’s main island, Tongatapu, and 2000km north of New Zealand. While leading a field trip to ’Eua Island, near Tongatapu, Dr Hamilton was approached by a young local woman who said her parents refused to talk about the island her people had come from but that schoolmates had teased her and claimed her ancestors had sold their own people to palangi, Europeans.

The allegation was that Paula Vehi, the Tupouata, or chief, of ’Ata, had colluded with McGrath to lure his people aboard the brig Grecian.

There were also whispers that some of the ’Atans, after being sold into slavery, had survived and flourished in South America.

Dr Hamilton says he became obsessed with ’Ata, McGrath and the challenge of finding out what really happened. The next couple of years were spent on repeated trips to Tongatapu and ’Eua, sitting in kava circles listening to people retelling oral histories, spending days leafing through old texts in New Zealand libraries and online mining the rich resource of digitised archives such as Papers Past.

What resulted — and was in no small part aided by the discovery of the December 14, 1863, newspaper article — was The Stolen Island; a clear evidence-based picture of the lead-up to, and aftermath of, a shameful moment in time.Drawing on his research, Dr Hamilton also reconstructed the events as they played out on ’Ata when Capt McGrath and his crew, mostly from the Chatham Islands, turned up intent on kidnapping for profit.

EXCERPT

McGrath and his crewmates could see waves falling on the stones of ‘Ata’s little beach, and boulders stacked at either end of that beach, and cliffs that separated the beach from ’Ata’s plateau. Dozens of caves opened in the cliffs. They were long and narrow, like the mouths of whales.People appeared on the cliffs, and began to descend them. Men and women and children stepped through shrubs and slid over rocks on their way down to the beach.

An American whaler who had visited ‘Ata in 1840 had been impressed by the ease with which the locals navigated their cliffs. In the account of ‘Ata he published in the Massachusetts newspaper the Daily Mercury, he described how islanders would leap from rock to rock and slide down the loamy steeps, even while they carried loads on their shoulders. It was as though each had a pair of wings in reserve in case their foothold should fail.The American was also impressed by the riches the ‘Atans could wring from their island. The plateau where they kept their village and gardens seemed not much larger than the deck of a whaling ship, but it contained a field of sugarcane, a plantation of bananas, and a beautiful grove of waving coconut trees, along with many small patches of potatoes, yams, and melons ...‘Atans hurried through the water towards the Grecian. Some of them may have paddled canoes, but many would have swum. Even the island’s small children were strong swimmers. Their elders had taught them about the rhythm of the sea that broke against their beach. It would throw two or three big waves at the stones in quick succession, then level out for a few seconds, before offering a new series of waves. ‘Atans would climb onto the boulders at the edge of their beach, wait until the sea was briefly calm, then dive under the water and swim beyond the surf line before the big waves had returned ...Altogether at least 144 men, women and children boarded the Grecian to trade with Thomas McGrath. They would have outnumbered the ship’s crew by almost ten to one. Many probably arrived with trade goods — baskets of yams, or suckling pigs, or chickens — dripping under their arms.

McGrath told them that, before they traded with him, they should have something to eat. The Grecian’s cook, a man named John Bryan, had prepared a feast, and it waited for them below the deck. McGrath’s crew opened several heavy trapdoors, and the islanders descended steep and narrow staircases to the ship’s hold. The ‘Atans were soon busy with their meals, though we do not know what they ate ... With the ‘Atans below deck and distracted by their meals, McGrath and his crew went to work. They pulled down and locked the trapdoors on the deck.The ‘Atans heard the trapdoors slam down, then the locks slam shut. They leaped up from their meals. The daylight that had been falling through the hatches had gone, and the islanders stumbled and pushed against each other as they rushed the dark steps that ended at locked doors. They smashed their fists and their shoulders and their heads against the wood and iron of the doors, and against the walls and floor of the Grecian’s hold. They shouted. They cried. They prayed. They heard the anchor of the Grecian splash out of the sea and slide up the side of the ship.


McGrath then sailed west and north trying to kidnap more people. The ship’s cook, Mr Bryan, demanded to be allowed to leave. He then travelled to Samoa, where he gave Mr Turner his eyewitness account of the ’Ata slave raid, which was later relayed to the Melbourne Age reporter.

Still in the Tongan island group, Capt McGrath tricked 30 young men from Niuafo’ou Island into coming aboard, bringing the number of hostages crammed in the ship’s dark hold to at least 174.

The entire human cargo was sold to a more experienced slave trade ship, the General Prim, which set sail for Peru.

A few months later, Capt McGrath and the remaining crew of the Grecian turned up at Rakiura, Stewart Island. He probably hoped it was still a lawless place, which would have been "the perfect place for him", Dr Hamilton says. But it was not long before Capt McGrath came to the notice of officials, and then was placed directly in the spotlight by the Invercargill Times article. That put paid to Capt McGrath’s plans, but there is no evidence he was ever tried for slave trading.

"We find records of him again in the newspaper shipping lists ... There is a death certificate from Tahiti which says he died there ... It is frustrating that he was never brought to justice for what he did."

The General Prim took its cargo of slaves to Peru. In the meantime, however, Abraham Lincoln and the French Government had pressured the Peruvians to outlaw slavery.

'DISAPPEAR FROM HISTORY'

Hundreds of Polynesian slaves, including the ’Atans, were held in a dank warehouse at the port. There was an outbreak of smallpox. The Government gave slavers the job of returning the people to their homelands, "an appalling idea", Dr Hamilton says.

The slave traders took 429 Pacific Islanders north and dumped them on an island off the coast of Costa Rica. Many more died of disease and starvation before a Peruvian naval vessel took the 38 survivors to the northern port of Paita.

"That is where they disappear from history," Dr Hamilton says.

"One of the great mysteries of this story is what happened to these people. There are legends on ’Eua [where those not captured in the ’Ata raid were repatriated] that they founded a society in South America. It is possible that they intermarried and had descendants."

For some of those ’Ata descendants on ’Eua, Dr Hamilton’s research, and particularly the 1863 newspaper article, is having a profound effect. On visits to ‘Eua, he has distributed many copies of the article for people to read and keep.

"Traditionally it was a bad thing to come from this island [’Ata]," he says.

"The Vehi family, whose ancestor was the leader of the community, he was blamed for conspiring with the slavers. Using this article, and other texts, it’s possible to cast a lot of doubt on those accusations.

"So these old articles can actually have quite a radical, liberating effect on people today. It is already having that effect ... There is suddenly a sense of pride emerging in being ’Atan."

Dr Hamilton hopes his book, and the article that has been so foundational, will also transform minds in New Zealand.

"When you combine this incident with the evidence of blackbirding by boats like the [Dunedin-funded] Wainui, what we see is that New Zealand had a really significant role in the 19th-century slave trade."

In the late 1860s, at least 16 New Zealand ships were engaged in blackbirding in the Fiji islands alone. But New Zealanders often prefer to think their country has not been involved in large-scale slavery or gross mistreatment of others, an exception compared with historic practices in countries such as the United States and Australia, Dr Hamilton says.

"There are cryptic notes, but very little frontal treatment of it.

"It’s a dark chapter in New Zealand’s history that has not really been explored and discussed at length.

"I just hope other researchers will fill the breach and start doing some of this stuff."
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 27, 2016 10:03 pm

The ship from Dunedin and the tragedies on Nukapu

Image

My interview with Christchurch radio station RDU has gone online. Host James Dann asked me not only about the raid on 'Ata Island but about the wider Pacific slave trade and its links with New Zealand. I mentioned the Dunedin-based steamship Wainui, which played a seminal role in the most infamous and misunderstood episode of the entire slave trade.

The Wainui's captain and crew stole men and women from Melanesia and sold them in Queensland or Fiji to the owners of sugar plantations. In August 1870 the Wainui approached Savo, one of the Reef Islands of the Solomons, and encountered a group of men and women in canoes. The captain of the Wainui steered his ship into the little vessels; their passengers went screaming into the water. The crew of the Wainui lowered a whaleboat into the sea, rowed towards the flailing bodies, and pulled them to safety, and into slavery.

But the Wainui's captain did not realise that his latest captives included both the wife and daughter of the chief of Savo Island. The people of the island were enraged, and its sole white inhabitant, a beachcomber and small trader, had to barricade himself in his hut.

Nukapu is one of the Reef Islands, and its people are related to their Savo neighbours by centuries of marriage. They shared the anger of their relatives at the abduction of the chief of Savo's family.

A few weeks after the raid on Savo John Coleridge Patteson, the Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, approached Nukapu on the missionary ship Southern Cross. For sixteen years Patteson had been landing on the beaches of Melanesia. By 1871, he could preach in twenty-three of Melanesia's thousand languages. On island after island, the bishop left Bibles and medicines and sailed away with young men, who learned to read and pray at Anglican schools on Norfolk Island and in Auckland.

Patteson was popular in some places, and slavers took to imitating him. They would anchor off islands, don black garments, and holding Bibles aloft on the decks of their ships. The Bishop of Melanesia became a meticulous opponent of the slave trade, collecting stories of raids and writing long memoranda to the governments of Australasia and Britain.

Patteson landed on Nukapu in a Melanesian canoe given to him by some of his students. Hours later he drifted back towards the Southern Cross on the same vessel. There were arrows and axe marks in his torso, and the right side of his head had collapsed. The bishop had become Nukapu's message to the white world.

Image


Continues at: http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2016 ... es-on.html
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 22, 2017 8:56 pm

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2017 ... munro.html

'Sometimes, the silence screams': Bruce Munro on New Zealand's slaving history

Publishing a book is like putting a message into a bottle and throwing the bottle into the sea. One is never sure whether or where the bottle will wash up; one is grateful if anyone finds it, and reads the text it has been carrying.

I've been delighted with the response to The Stolen Island over the last couple of months. Beachcombers in New Zealand, Tonga, Australia and New Caledonia have unbottled my message, and discussed it in print, on the internet, and over the radio.

I'm particularly pleased about two articles that Bruce Munro published in last weekend's Otago Daily Times. Munro wrote about The Stolen Island a month or so ago, and noticed the book's call for more research into New Zealand's role in the nineteenth century Pacific slave trade. He has been busy researching.

In an article called 'Document Confirms a Slaver's Character' Munro introduce readers to Edith Cromie, from Waihao Downs in South Canterbury. Cromie is the custodian of a fragile letter, handed down through her family, that was composed by Phyllis Seal, who in 1863 was the widow of one of Hobart's wealthiest shipowners.

Seal had entrusted the ship the Grecian to Thomas McGrath, a veteran Tasmanian whaler, but instead of cruising the Pacific for a year and returning to Hobart with barrels of whale oil McGrath had dumped most of the ship's crew, recruited new hands, and raided the Tongan islands of 'Ata and Niuafo'ou in search of slaves. After selling Tongan captives to a slave ship bound for Peru, McGrath uses his cash to buy large quantities of liquor and food. He took the Grecian down the western side of New Zealand, avoiding busy ports, and landed quietly on the remote Stewart Island, which had only recently been annexed by New Zealand.

When she wrote her letter, Phyllis Seal did not know about Thomas McGrath's slave raids; she only knew that he had vanished with her property. A rage at the whaler's impudence can be detected behind the letter's circuitous, often decorous sentences.

McGrath eventually visited Campbelltown, the port that is nowadays known as Bluff, where he was arrested and charged with customs offences and with appropriating the Grecian. The ship was returned to Tasmania, and to the Seal family. McGrath was found guilty of stealing the Grecian and breaches of customs law, and spent time in prison, but he was never brought to justice for his slave trading.

In a longer article called 'Chained to a Sorry Trade', Munro reports on his research into Otago's connections with the Pacific slave trade of the late 1860s and early 1870s. He refers to a couple of texts listed in the bibliography of The Stolen Island, but he has made new discoveries in the vast online Papers Past archive. Munro describes how the Dunedin steamship the Wainui would ram and destroy smaller ships then pull the survivors of its attacks from the water and into captivity. He names Charles Clark, a Dunedin businessman, as the owner of the Wainui, and links the ship's raids with the slaying of John Coleridge Patteson, the first Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, in 1871. Munro introduces two other Otago-based ships, the Lismore and the Queen of the Isles, that also carried slaves.

In his article's eloquent conclusion, Munro describes the eeriness of encountering history in old newspapers:

[T]he digitisation of newspaper archives means the link [with the past] is restored. The reports of ships' crews kidnapping people, the talk of buying niggers, the clamour for the trade to be stopped is now all continually available, soundlessly waiting, bending the important, horrific events of 1871 towards the present day for anyone who cares to seek them.

Sometimes, the silence screams.
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby Grizzly » Mon Jan 23, 2017 1:27 am

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby Elvis » Mon Jan 23, 2017 4:33 am

Grizzly » Sun Jan 22, 2017 10:27 pm wrote:http://www.garynorth.com/public/14403.cfm


Interesting, and mostly pretty much correct, except —

6. Welfare State. At least one-third of all male Athenians were on the government's payroll in the time of Pericles.


Athens was not a welfare state. Gary North, bless his heart, just had to work "welfare state" in there somewhere. He doesn't take into account the nature of citizenship in Classical Athens. "One-third" is probably conservative. Men were paid by the state for serving in a variety of rotating public jobs in the councils & courts, etc. Juries were like 300 people, that's a lot of jury duty pay alone. Any citizen's turn might come up to serve two days, e.g., as some sort of muncipal magistrate; Athenian citizens played a much more direct role in their government back then. Official jobs were less specialized, everyone got a taste of experience in government. Plus, all men over 18 were expected to fight in the army; war was a pretty regular thing and doubtless some military positions came with salaries. This participatory government has some appeals for today. Best of all, THEY HAD NO PRESIDENT.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 5:10 am

Was the point supposed to be that slavery is universal?
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 17, 2017 9:29 am

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2017 ... lling.html

Snatching and killing

Few histories of New Zealand rugby mention the first international fixture played in this country. The game in question took place in June 1870, on an uneven, muddy paddock that is now central Auckland’s Albert Park. A group of locals took on a team picked from the crew of the British warship HMS Rosario. The British brought the ball, and also the goalposts. We don’t know whether they won the game.

The Rosario had stopped in Auckland to stuff its hold with hard biscuits and potatoes. By the winter of 1870 the ship was a year and a half into an impossible commission. The faraway British government had instructed the Rosario to end the Pacific slave trade.

In 1870 the law abolishing slavery in Britain was more than three and a half decades old, and the blacks of America’s south had been free for five years. But scores of ships were crossing the Pacific with shackled islanders in their holds.

The Pacific slave trade had begun in 1862, when the Peruvian government had invited ships to collect ‘colonists’ from the Pacific Islands, and to sell these captives at the port of Callao.

Opportunistic captains soon raided almost every island society from Rapa Nui in the east to Kiribati in the west of the Pacific. In the middle of 1863 the Peruvians responded to international condemnation and rescinded their law; by that time more than three thousand islanders had vanished into Callao, a place they nicknamed ‘the jaws of hell’. Only a couple of hundred islanders returned, but they carried, to their already decimated homelands, the gifts of civilisation: smallpox, dysentery, and tuberculosis.

Lincoln’s war on the Confederate States of America may have emancipated the slaves of that nation, but it invigorated the Pacific labour trade. As Lincoln’s army burned the crops and mansions of southern plantation owners, it made cotton a scarce and valuable commodity, and also made inevitable a diaspora of ruined and unrepentantly racist Confederates.

Confederate refugees landed in the South Seas, where they bought or stole land, planted cotton, sugar, and tobacco, and sought a new supply of slaves. The men who gave Peru its slaves had provoked European powers by raiding islands under colonial control. The slavers of the late 1860s were cannier: they targeted Melanesia, a region not yet digested by empires.

The planters paid well for slaves. An adult male could fetch nine pounds; women and children could change hands for six pounds. Slaving became popularly known as blackbirding; slavers were blackbirders. Soon Queensland was being nicknamed ‘the second Louisiana’, because of its sugar plantations where blacks toiled, and Confederate planters on Fiji were founding a branch of the Ku Klux Klan to terrorise locals unwilling to pick cotton for free.

Image

The Rosario was a fast, modern vessel. A steam engine complemented its sails, and its mechanised cannons were efficiently deadly. But the Rosario was working alone, against an industry.

Even when the British intercepted a ship, unsympathetic colonial governments and courts could undo their work.

In June 1869 the Rosario’s Captain George Palmer boarded a Queensland schooner called Daphne, and found more than one hundred ni-Vanuatu men in its small hold. Palmer freed these slaves, and brought Daphne’s captain to Sydney for trial; the chief justice of New South Wales threw the case out, explaining that Britain’s anti-slavery laws did not apply in the Pacific.

*

Slavers may not have had much to fear from the British navy, but they soon began to dread the warriors of Melanesia. The young men of the New Hebrides and the Solomons learned to withdraw from the beach when tall ships appeared. They hid in trees or behind stones beside the steep and muddy paths that led to the interiors of their islands, and waited with bows and spears and darts for exhausted white men.

Sometimes Melanesians pretended to be eager to sail away from their islands. Smiling, they climbed aboard the small boats that slavers sent through reefs and estuaries. On the decks of the big ships they pulled tomahawks from under their skirts and blankets.

Some stretches of coast, like the eastern edge of the large island of Malaita, became notorious. It was off eastern Malaita that several canoeloads of islanders stormed Kenneth McKenzie’s slave ship the Borealis. McKenzie was one of several sailors from the Scottish settlement of Waipu who had profited by shipping Melanesians to Queensland and Fiji in the 1860s and ‘70s. He was on a small boat, headed for the coast of Malaita, when warriors began to leap from their canoes and climb the steep sides of the Borealis. McKenzie fled from his ship, leaving half a dozen members of his crew, including his son Willie, to face the attackers.

After reaching a group of other slave ships a few miles up the coast and holding a ‘council of war’, Kenneth McKenzie returned to the Borealis with reinforcements. He found the ship deserted. There was ‘blood all over the deck’ and brain fluid was ‘scattered on the windlass’; there were ‘axe marks all over the bulwarks’. The Malaitans had withdrawn to their island, and taken the bodies of Willie and his fellow sailors with them.

Melanesian resistance forced slavers to improvise new tactics. Some ships, like the Dunedin-based screw steamer Wainui, began to hunt in open seas, away from the lagoons and jungles that had become so dangerous. The Anglican mariner John Jacob described the Wainui ploughing into a group of small canoes in deep water off the island of Savo. The canoes spilt their paddlers and passengers; the Wainui’s crew pulled the islanders to safety, then made them into slaves.

Other slavers began to outsource the most dangerous parts of their jobs. Melanesia was a region of small-scale, decentralised societies, whose language groups and clans and lineages made and broke alliances with one another as their circumstances and interests changed. Some blackbirders learned to play one group of Melanesians off against another.

In certain parts of Melanesia, like New Georgia and Makira, chiefs collected the heads of their enemies, and built special houses where, arranged one after another along rafters and on shelves, these trophies could be admired and mocked. Soon white men were also becoming enthusiastic headhunters.

In 1870 two Anglican missionaries in the Nggela Islands saw a group of local men go out in a canoe to trade with a vessel that had anchored offshore. The ship was called the Water Lily; its crew were, at first, friendly towards the islanders, and seemed keen to trade. Suddenly, though, one of the white men jumped into the canoe, and others reached down with long oars and began to beat its riders. One of the five islanders leapt overboard and swam to safety. Before he had reached shore, though, he had seen his four friends beheaded with tomahawks in the bloody hollow of their canoe.

Melanesians began to talk about ‘kill kill’ as well as ‘snatch snatch’ ships. Blackbirders had discovered that the chiefs of New Georgia and other regions would supply labour parties for Queensland, in return for the heads of their traditional enemies.

*

Some slavers fearful of showers of arrows began to impersonate the only white man who was widely liked in Melanesia. They would anchor off islands that had been visited by John Coleridge Patteson, the first Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, don black garments, hold Bibles aloft on the decks of their ships, and wait for locals to paddle or swim towards them.

For sixteen years Patteson landed on Pacific beaches. By 1871, the great-nephew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge could preach in twenty-three of Melanesia's thousand languages. On island after island, the bishop left Bibles and medicines and sailed away with young men, who learned to read and pray at Anglican schools on Norfolk Island and in Auckland.

After hearing about his imitators, the Bishop of Melanesia became a meticulous opponent of the slave trade. He collected stories of raids, chains, and whippings, and wrote long memoranda to the governments of Australasia and Britain.

In September 1871 Bishop Patteson landed on Nukapu, one of the Reef Islands in the northern Solomons. Nukapu covers nearly three quarters of a square kilometre, and is surrounded by a teardrop-shaped lagoon and a reef. In the months before the Southern Cross' visit, the island had been repeatedly raided by blackbirders. Nukapuans were not happy to see another exotic ship.

Image

Patteson crossed Nukapu’s reef in a Melanesian canoe given to him by some of his students. Hours later he drifted back towards the Southern Cross on the same vessel. There were arrows and axe marks in his torso, and the right side of his face had collapsed. The bishop had become Nukapu's message to the white world.

Patteson became the first Pacific martyr of the Anglican church. Today his certificate of ordination is displayed as a sacred relic at Auckland's Anglican cathedral. On a window in a church in a Surrey village called Kingswood there is a portrait of the martyr serenely contemplating his Bible while two copper-coloured savages carrying clubs approach him.

In a letter published in many Australasian newspapers Captain Jacobs, who had brought Patteson to Nukapu, blamed the bishop’s death on blackbirding. Memorial meetings in the towns of New Zealand and the Australian colonies agreed. A gathering in Auckland’s Choral Hall unanimously urged the British and Australasian governments to place ‘the so-called labour trade…under effective control’. But after the slaying of Patteson, the Rosario’s mission changed. The ship had first been charged with stopping the Pacific slave trade: now it was ordered to take vengeance on the victims of that trade.

On November the 29th, 1871, nearly three months after the slaying of Bishop Patteson, the Rosario anchored outside Nukapu’s lagoon, and sent four small boats through its reef wall. Scores of men began what George Palmer described as a ‘war dance’ on the distant beach, then fired arrows in the direction of the small boats. The Rosario’s canons opened up, and the men in the small boats added ‘hundreds of rounds’ of rifle and pistol fire, until the Nukapuans retreated into the coconut groves beyond their beach. The invaders followed them, and found, in a clearing near the centre of the island, a village whose wooden huts had been fortified with slabs of beachrock. They shot their way through the village, set each of its dwellings ablaze, and withdrew over the lagoon and through the reef to the Rosario, where they continued to snipe at the islanders.

A corporal surnamed Marcus was one of several men wounded on Nukapu; he had been crossing the island’s beach when an arrow had grazed his arm. Back on the Rosario Marcus seemed to have recovered from his injury. His captain remembered him doing ‘some capital shooting’ at the remnants of the Nukapuan force. When Marcus noticed five natives gathering ‘on a point of their land with their canoes’ he ‘lodged a shell in the midst of them’, causing ‘most terrible havoc’. But Marcus’ recovery was illusory. The arrow that had cut him was tipped with poison. The corporal would die three and a half weeks after the raid on Nukapu.

Image

As the Rosario steamed away from Nukapu, the ‘natives were seen at work trying to extinguish the fire that covered their island. Despite their efforts, Palmer reported, the shadows of flames ‘could be seen for three hours’ as the Rosario travelled south. George Palmer estimated that ‘twenty to thirty natives’ had been killed by his men. A ship that had been charged with protecting Pacific islanders had devastated the island of Nukapu.

*

In the tropical Pacific the days of slavery have not been forgotten. When I was researching my book The Stolen Island, which describes the slave raids on two Tongan islands and their aftermath, I sat around kava bowls and heard men talk about the nineteenth century as though it were our own.

When I visited Vanuatu last year I noticed how closely that nation’s identity is connected to blackbirding. Vanuatu’s national language is Bislama, a creole brought back from the sugar fields of Queensland; the government organises ceremonies to remember the theft of so many ni-Vanuatu, and demands an apology from Australia.

Australia is yet to apologise to Vanuatu, but it has recognised the South Sea Islander community, whose twelve thousand members are the descendants of ‘sugar slaves’ who never returned to their homelands, as a distinct ethnic community, and some New South Wales and Queensland schools now teach the history of blackbirding.

In New Zealand, though, the memory of the Pacific slave trade has been almost successfully repressed.

Our government has belatedly created an annual day of remembrance for the Land Wars of the nineteenth century. Perhaps we also need a day to remember the Pacific slave trade, and the warfare that the trade brought to islands like Nukapu.


[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby KUAN » Wed May 17, 2017 4:14 am

I'm looking forward to the next world
I'm looking forward to the next world
I'm looking forward to the next world
I'm looking forward to the next world
I'm looking forward to the next world
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby Elvis » Wed May 17, 2017 4:33 am

You're soaking in it.

:partyhat
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby American Dream » Wed May 17, 2017 1:41 pm

Injustices past and present help shine a light on the larger whole:

SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 2015
'Savage garbage gatherers': the New Zealand Herald on our local slaves

Image

When he shot nine African Americans in a South Carolina church, the baby-faced white supremacist Dylann Roof was hoping to incite a race war; instead, he has prompted a loud discussion about the meaning and legacy of the Confederate States of America, the ramshackle and short-lived slaveholders' republic whose battle flag still adorns many public places in the American south.

New Zealanders tend to see the American south, with its history of slavery and secession and its ongoing racial agonies, as a distant and alien part of the world. As I've argued in the past, though, there are surprising and troubling connections between the Confederate creed of slavery and the South Pacific. In the second half of the nineteenth century slavery flourished in the Pacific, as thousands of islanders were abducted and sailed to plantations in Queensland, Fiji, and even New Zealand. After their defeat and ruin at the hands of the north, a number of Confederates fled to the Pacific, and tried to create a new pigmentopia in the region. The Ku Klux Klan had a branch in Fiji.

Next month I'll be travelling to Tonga, to share some of my research into the slave raid on the island of 'Ata; when I return from the Friendly Islands I'll be taking up a residency on Waiheke and writing a short book about New Zealand's contribution to the Pacific slave trade.

Here's one of the fascinating but disturbing documents I've been recovering from New Zealand's nineteenth century newspapers, as I pursue my research into slavery. It is an editorial published in the New Zealand Herald on the 21st of September, 1870, nearly four months after a schooner named the Lulu landed at Auckland carrying twenty-seven men from the island of Efate. As the captain of the Lulu admitted in an article for the Auckland press, the men had been recruited with the help of bribes paid to Efatean chiefs. They were bound by 'contracts' that promised them ten pounds in exchange for three years of hard labour, and were soon put to work in flax mills.

The Efateans were by no means the only indentured labourers to arrive in New Zealand in the nineteenth century. I've found evidence that significant numbers of bonded domestic servants were being brought from Fiji and the New Hebrides to toil in the homes of Auckland's elite during the 1870s.

Like many other New Zealand papers and a number of prominent politicians, the New Zealand Herald opposed the bringing of indentured labourers to these islands. As the editorial reproduced below shows, though, this opposition was motivated less by anti-racism than by a fear that Melanesians would contaminate the 'Britain of the south' that colonists were constructing in New Zealand.

During the 1860s and '70s Pakeha were preoccupied with recruiting new colonists from the old country. Only by attracting huge numbers of new settlers could they occupy the land they had taken from Maori after the Waikato War, and create a viable market for the industries that struggled in little cities like Auckland. But new settlers would not be attracted to a country where plantations took up most of the good farmland, where slave labour drove down wages, and where the 'abominable fetishes' of Melanesian 'niggers' were visible.


Read more at: http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2015 ... aland.html
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Re: The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

Postby American Dream » Tue May 23, 2017 8:31 am

Civilization vs Solidarity: Louise Michel and the Kanaks

by Carolyn J. Eichner

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In 1871, the French military slaughtered approximately 25,000 people in the streets of Paris. Ferociously repressing the 72-day long revolutionary civil war known as the Paris Commune, the French government intended to obliterate and make examples of the socialist, anarchist, and feminist movements that sparked and sustained the insurrection. Of those escaping the massacre, over 35,000 were arrested, approximately one-third of whom were condemned by court martial. To ensure the eradication of the revolutionary stain, France deported nearly 4,500 of the insurgents to New Caledonia, its South Pacific penal colony one thousand miles off the Australian coast, confining the convicts to cages during the four-month sea voyage. Once in the archipelago, the Communards experienced harsh living conditions, pitiless guards, physical deprivation, psychological and emotional isolation, and intense boredom. Most lived in a “prison without walls” on the arid Ducos Peninsula, exiled by their government to an unforgiving carceral world more than 10,000 miles from their homes.

Five years into these former revolutionaries’ internment, allied tribes of New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanak population rose up against the French colonial authority. Nearly every Communard sided with France and against the Kanak. Dozens of deportees voluntarily took up arms to defend the same government that had slaughtered their comrades, crushed their revolution, flattened their neighborhoods, demonized their communities, and sent them into exile. The vast majority of the others stayed silent or expressed support for France. Abandoning the radical politics for which they had risked everything and sacrificed their freedom in 1871, these deportees instead prioritized whiteness, Frenchness, and the idea of civilization. Embracing a racialized nationalism and imperialism, these condemned revolutionaries now defended the conservative, monarchist-led French government and its brutal colonial policies and actions.

Louise Michel did not. The notorious, celebrated anarchist feminist veteran of the Commune supported the Kanak. Famously, she tore in half the red Commune scarf that she had managed to hide through her arrest, imprisonment, trial, and deportation, and gave one piece to two Kanak as they headed to battle. Writing later of her fellow French exiles, Michel explained that she “had the greatest esteem for them, but at that point, they disgusted me.”

Michel stood in bold relief against the rest of her comrades, taking a stance that today seems logical and politically consistent. Yet she emerged from the same intellectually and politically intense milieu of late 1860s-early 1870s Paris. She and the other Commune participants had been shaped by France’s collapsing Second Empire; the disastrous Franco-Prussian war, including a four-month siege of Paris; the temporarily triumphant Paris Commune, in which leftist intellectuals and workers rose up and claimed the city of Paris in history’s first essentially socialist revolution; and the state-sponsored blood bath that spectacularly quashed the revolt. All the deported Communards had embraced similar liberatory ideologies, had similar contempt for the extant government, and followed similar paths into revolutionary engagement. And yet with Michel as virtually the only exception, they defended the French state in 1878.

The revolt began when an alliance of Kanak tribes attacked colonial settlements. In two days they killed a hundred people, slaughtered livestock, and burned crops. The surprise assault was consistent with the Kanak guerilla war culture of quick incursions, but was considered evidence of Kanak savagery by the French. The French responded with escalation and months of retaliation. Seeing an opportunity to strike their traditional enemies, other Kanak tribes joined the French. Like the dozens of Communard exiles, nearly half of the Algerian Kabyle, who were also deported to New Caledonia after the French crushed their anti-imperial insurrection in 1871, allied with that same French colonial power in 1878, fighting to crush the Kanak’s uprising. On September first, Ataï, the renowned Kanak chief from the La Foa region, was ambushed and beheaded by members of the longtime rival Canala tribe; Louise Michel later explained in her Memoires, “Ataï was struck down by a traitor.” The colonial governor sent Ataï’s head to Paris, where it was studied, dissected, displayed, and only finally returned home to New Caledonia in 2014. By the end of 1878, the insurgency lay dead.

Ataï and his allies had risen to drive the colonizers out of their archipelago, to reclaim their stolen land, to eradicate the European-introduced livestock that destroyed their crops, and to rescue their culture and the texture of their lives. France “took possession” of New Caledonia in 1853, about sixty years after initial European contact, an encounter that resulted in the French sailors denigrating the Kanak for their unwillingness to trade, their “ugliness,” and Kanak women’s sexual unavailability. (Indeed, they accused the indigenous women of immorality because of their chastity.) During this period, the French constructed a racialized dichotomy among South Pacific Islanders, creating the idea of two distinct regions and peoples: Polynesians and Melanesians. The French labeled Polynesians “white,” and thus superior, and Melanisians “black,” and therefore inferior (a racialized distinction that persists today). Ranking the Kanak among the lowest of their colonized peoples, and, having fashioned them savages, as the historian Alice Bullard has argued, the French justified a brutal and repressive colonization.

So when the Kanak rose against the colonial power, it made sense both that that power would respond thunderously, and that the relatively few free European colonists would join it in arms to defend “their” property – from those from whom they had expropriated it. The rival Kanak tribes sided with the French for complex, still-debated, internecine reasons, as did the Kabyle deportees. But the alliance of the Communards with the French state seems incomprehensible. Yet they did ally, to varying degrees. Isolated, deprived, homesick, unsure when or if they would return to France, the violent cleavage pushed the exiled Communards to pick a side. It forced them to identify with either the French or the Kanak. And so they eschewed political solidarity with their fellow subjects of French oppression, because it would have meant turning their backs on being French and joining the savages. It would have meant abandoning whiteness in favor of blackness. After five brutal years of struggling to remain Parisian in a rural tropical archipelago, virtually none of them could do it.

Except Louise Michel. But why did she champion the Kanak? Why was she the only Communard to unambiguously express support for the colonized indigenous people?

A number of Communards had formed acquaintanceships and, a few, friendships with some Kanak in the years before the uprising, but only Michel attempted to understand and engage with their world. Particularly fascinated by Kanak languages, lore, and cosmology, she met a Westernized, French-speaking Kanak man named Daoumi who became her primary connection. In her Memoires, Michel wrote of their relationship, “He told me tribal legends and taught me his vocabulary, and I tried to reciprocate by telling him things that I believed were the most necessary for him to know.” More than two individuals exchanging cultural knowledge, for Michel, this sort of association exemplified how Europeans and Kanak could develop mutually beneficial relationships.

Disillusioned by the factionalized leadership and devastation of the Commune, Michel had become an anarchist on the prison ship Virginie during the voyage to New Caledonia. She abandoned her top-down, conspiratorial socialism. In its place, she embraced a radically egalitarian, anti-individualist, anti-hierarchical politics that advocated eradicating barriers of state, religion, race, class, and sex. Her New Caledonian experience wrought these ideas into an anti-imperialist, revolutionary anarchist feminist politics. She literally devoted her life to these goals: agitating by writing political essays, novels, and poetry; drawing huge crowds as a speaker in Europe and Algeria; practicing radical pedagogy in schools in France, New Caledonia, and England; and theorizing paths to anarchism. Michel worked closely with anarchists, feminists, and socialists throughout her life, but never fully affiliated with a particular group. Frequently imprisoned, shot while speaking, pilloried by the right, venerated by the radical left, and acclaimed in poems by both Paul Verlaine and Victor Hugo, she became a living legend.


Continues at: http://salvage.zone/in-print/civilizati ... he-kanaks/
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