During the
1860s, a flamboyant American named Captain William Henry ‘Bully’ Hayes blazed a
path across Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, he acquired ships through pseudo-legal
legerdemain, vanished over various horizons to avoid large liabilities, got
engaged to one woman, married another, was sued for abduction and attempted
seduction, and managed a circus. In Otago, New Zealand, he continued his
scandal-ridden theatrical career until his past caught up with him. In Nelson,
he was accused of murdering his family; in Akaroa, it was claimed that he
abducted yet another girl; in Wellington, he acquired yet another ship by
nefarious means; and in Auckland he bilked yet another impressively large
number of merchants. And throughout, his
combination of flamboyant showbiz and commercial chicanery never failed to pull
headlines, because his antics made such compulsive reading.
A retreat
to the tropics was by no means the end of newsworthiness. Hayes went in for the disreputable ‘blackbirding’
trade — he was one of the captains who transported natives from various islands
to the labour markets of Tahiti, Fiji and Samoa, the draw being the head money paid
by plantation owners who were anxious for a cheap workforce. Some of the
Islanders were happy about it — they were glad to escape the restrictions of
the missionaries, and have fun and make money on the sugar plantations. Others
met a miserable fate. Hayes, as it happens, was not one of the monsters of the
business. Indeed, whether he was any good at it is open to question. In one of
the many farcical episodes of his career he was arrested by a Samoan chief with
a band of mighty warriors, who then seized his ship, along with the men and
women on board.
Confined at
large in Apia (because there was no prison), Hayes staged another of his
breathtaking escapes, this time by absconding on a ship owned by one of the
really nasty men of the time, Captain Ben Pease — and he rewarded Pease by
stealing his ship, painting her white and giving her a new name. Thus the ship
that had belonged to another rogue became the infamous Leanora. Hayes, as the raconteurs would say, probably chuckled as
pirates characteristically chuckle. Dissolute
beachcombers were picked up as crew, and all about the north-western Pacific lonely
copra traders were robbed of their stock. No less than eight British navy
ironclads roamed the seas in search of the notorious Hayes, but still he
remained at large. It took a sailor with a grudge to put an end to the man, by
knocking him over the head and then tossing the body overboard. Which should
have been the last of the story — but instead Captain William Henry ‘Bully’
Hayes became the Pirate of the Pacific.
Not only
did he become the Pirate of the Pacific, but he became the Romantic Pirate of the Pacific, the predecessor of Captain Jack Sparrow
of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ fame. Somehow, Bully Hayes has gone down in
history as a famous buccaneer. No book
about the Pacific is complete without him. Documentaries include far-fetched
yarns attributed to his name, and fiction writers revel in bloodcurdling tales.
No one is even sure what he looked like, and yet Hayes stars in a number of
swashbuckling films. His name is used to promote shirts, pubs, restaurants, and
exotic holiday destinations.
Throughout
my writing life, I have specialised in the stories of the unusual people who
roamed the world under sail — the captains’ wives, the children on board, whaling
surgeons and female pirates, the Polynesians who sailed for adventure. Of these, the Bully Hayes saga has to be one
of the most bizarre. Was he a real
pirate, or just a smooth-talking crook who attracted sensational headlines? He never boarded a ship with a sword in his
hand and a knife between his teeth. He
never killed a man. He didn’t even
drink! But still he is ‘the last of the
pirates’, a legendary corsair, the leading man of a myth that endures today.
A friend in
America said to me, ‘Bully Hayes would make a fantastic nonfiction book — if
you succeed in the formidable task of separating fact from fiction.’ To which I
lamely concurred, ‘There was certainly a lot of garbage written about him.’ So
that has been my job — to sort out the
facts by reporting what was written about him in his day (often by men with
their own agenda), and to solve the mystery of his mythic status by exploring
what has been written since.
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