PAC Books
Dark Days And Memorable Men
A great niece seeks the truth about Macleod of the New Hebrides.
The Making of a Rebel; Captain Donald Macleod of the New He-brides. By Katherine Stirling Kerr Cawsey. Published by the Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. 589 pages.
A period of about 30 years from the late 1860s was a dark era for Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. Some unscrupulous sailing ship skippers roamed the islands recruiting labour for the plantations of Queensland and Fiji.
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Recruiting? They were really slavers, tricking men aboard and then carrying them away to their plantation owner customers. The blackbirding trade, as it was called, became a late 19th century scandal put down finally by British warships in response to public indignation in Britain and Australia.
As a labour recruiter, ship owner, trader and businessman, Captain Donald Macleod, was an important figure of those times.
Macleod’s recruiting made him a target for missionaries who regarded him as an intrusion on territory they regarded as being solely theirs.
Until the end of his days Macleod denied being a blackbirder, writes his great niece, Katherine Stirling Kerr Cawsey, in defence of her ancestor. Macleod complied strictly with rules set down by the New Caledonia government, she writes in her book.
Recruits had to agree freely to a one-year contract, be issued with ration, given medical treatment, and given a return passage home at the end of their contract. “He was thus involved in the only centrally organised and government-run recruiting scheme in the South Pacific. To the end of his life he would insist that in recruiting for the French he never behaved illegally or inhumanely.”
Cawsey, a research librarian, became intrigued by family paper references to Macleod’s blackbirding reputation. She didn’t set out to write a defence for him. But years of meticulous research did produce a convincing portrait of him as being an honourable man and acknowledged as such by his contemporaries.
The Making of a Rebel, is a “must” addition to the shelves of collectors of Pacific Islands history. She lifts a curtain on tropically exotic, eccentric and rip-roaring frontier times peopled by so memorably bad and memorably good characters.
Macleod is buried at Noumea, New Caledonia, where he died in 1898 at the age of 50, apparently from the effects of malaria.
