Five Thousand Years of Slavery
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From the thirteenth century on, slaves were traded inside India, and slavery continued there well into the nineteenth century, when the British were the colonial power. The British tried to curb the slave trade, which had been illegal in Britain’s West Indian colonies since 1808. In 1843, they passed a law that appeared to make slavery illegal, but it was not publicized. Permanent slavery diminished, but debt bondage persists in India even today.
Southeast Asia
From the sixteenth century on, Western nations fought to control Southeast Asia – the area from the south of China to the north of Australia, and as far east as New Guinea, including parts of the Chinese mainland and many island nations. Spain maintained control of the Philippines until 1898. The Dutch and British fought over parts of what is today Indonesia for many years, but by 1824, Indonesia belonged to the Dutch. The British claimed Singapore in 1819, and in 1842 a treaty gave Britain control over Hong Kong, which it held until 1997, when the territory was returned to China.
Whether people owned debt slaves or chattel slaves, the relationship between slave and owner was usually closer in Southeast Asia than in the Americas. Slaves could earn money by hiring themselves out, and their children could hope for a chance to move up the social ladder. Still, slaves remained slaves with no control over their lives; there was always the worry that they would be given away as gifts, sold, or passed on to the owner’s children.
Slaves did a wide range of jobs. They were potters, scribes, soldiers, sailors, messengers, traders, or interpreters. Both men and women cleaned and cooked in their owners’ homes, or planted and harvested rice. Women were especially valued as concubines, and as dancers and singers.
Enter Islam
Islam became established in Southeast Asia around 1400. Because Muslims could not legally enslave other Muslims, slave traders traveled inland or by ship to capture non-Muslims in order to satisfy the demand for workers.
In the Malay Peninsula (today’s Malaysia), the people living on the coast commonly raided the Orang Asli, Malay for “original peoples,” who lived in the foothills or mountains or along inland rivers. A century-old account describes how the coastal Malays carried out their raids:
He would build himself a small shelter, and never leave it until he had discovered … where they [the Orang Asli] usually spent the night. Accompanied by a few accomplices, he would then repair to the spot at nightfall, and the party, concealing themselves until dark, would wait … until the “hill-men” were asleep. The Malays would then fire several rifle shots, spreading terror and confusion in every family, whose breaking up made them an easy prey to their assailants, who would promptly make a rush for the spot where they heard the shrieks of the women and children. The girls were, as a rule, at once knocked on the head, and the boys were carried off and sold as slaves.
Boys were the preferred prey, but women and girls were also sold as slaves. The adult men were usually killed. Some Orang Asli cooperated with the Malays, kidnapping children to sell them. The standard price? Two rolls of coarse cloth, a hatchet, a chopper, and an iron cooking pot.
The Dutch Arrive
In the early 1600s, when the Dutch colonized Southeast Asia, they set up the Dutch East India Company to trade in rice, salt, precious woods, silks, porcelain, pepper, nutmeg – and human beings. They opened a trading post in Jakarta, which they called Batavia, and by the eighteenth century they had control of all of Java. The Javanese had owned slaves whom they considered to be a part of their families. Not so the Dutch slave owners, so their slaves felt less loyal and were more likely to run away.
Christina was the slave of a Dutch East India Company merchant, Abraham Walburg, and his wife, Sara, in 1776. Christina wanted to live with her boyfriend, Samuel Brandt, and under traditional Southeast Asian customs she probably could have arranged this. She tried to bargain for her freedom, telling the Walburgs that Samuel was willing to buy her. To win them over, she introduced them to Samuel. Sara hired him to repair two silver dog collars, a gold flower hairpin, diamond earrings, and even gold buttons belonging to another slave, but Samuel could not convince the Walburgs to sell Christina. Even when he offered to rent her and teach her how to embroider and make bridal veils – a skill that would make her a valuable money-earner for the Walburgs – they refused.
A BRIDE AND HER FIFTY-NINE SLAVES
Life in the colonies must have seemed luxurious to the Dutch colonists. One couple had fifty-nine servants to wait on them – several young men and maids to accompany them when they left the house, a slave at the entrance to run errands, and slaves to groom the horses, cook, work in the dairy, do the sewing, and tend the garden. They had slaves to stand behind their chairs at meals, and a slave orchestra to entertain them on the harp, viol, and bassoon as they ate.
Finally, Christina escaped. Her mistress sent her slaves to Samuel’s house and he pretended to look for her, but in time Samuel too ran off. For nineteen months the couple lived secretly in a hut next to his brother’s house. Samuel closed off the door to hide Christina, who ventured out rarely, and only at night. But then a suspicious neighbor tipped off the authorities, who raided the house. We have no record of the punishment meted out to Christina and Samuel, but in another case of runaways the man was sentenced to a flogging with a cat-o’-nine-tails, branding, and twenty-five years of hard labor, and the woman to a beating and a year of serving her master in chains. Did Christina and Samuel suffer the same fate?
The Malay Maritime World
Not all Dutch were slave owners. Some became slaves themselves. C. Z. Pieters was captain of the Dutch ship Petronella, which was sailing through the Celebes Sea in June 1838 when another ship approached. Pieters shouted to its crew but no one answered. He called again, but there was still no reply as the vessel pulled nearer the Petronella. A final time Pieters called out. This time the ship came so close that he could see that Balangingi pirates were pursuing him. The Balangingi, from the Sulu Archipelago, were in the business of slave raiding.
The pirate ship fired its cannon and flashed a light, signaling other ships to approach. Soon, ten boats surrounded the Petronella, and they followed the Dutch ship all night. In the morning the pirates fired more shots, killing two crewmen and badly injuring two others. Captain Pieters was carried off into slavery.
Piracy was big business on the Sulu and Celebes Seas, where the Philippines are today. Slave trading already existed there, but it became a booming business as the need for laborers grew. Everyone in the west wanted tea from China, but all they had to offer in exchange was silver, which was expensive. If European and American merchants could get less expensive products like mother-of-pearl, cinnamon, and birds’ nests (for soup-making) from the Sulu Islands, they could trade them to the Chinese for tea. The problem was that the Europeans and Americans needed workers to harvest the precious resources. From the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, two groups of people – the Balangingi and Iranun – would stop at nothing to provide those workers. They raided the waterways and coastal settlements of today’s Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia for people and for the contents of their ships.
The garay was a broad, swift-moving slave-raiding vessel that carried as many as a hundred people. With an enormous sail and sixty oars in two rows, the boat could travel over water at speeds better than ten knots, or about eleven miles per hour (18 kph).
Photo Credit 11.1
The voyage to Sulu sometimes took months. The captives were fed little, bound with strips of rattan, and often forced to work on board the ship, as one reported:
They sat there … on the deck of the boat under the scorching heat of the sun, the rain, and in the wind’s eye. Some simply collapsed over their oar, dying. Others were untied just on the verge of passing out, in order to regain consciousness, only to be tied up once again to the oar.
The Balangingi sometimes forced captives to go with them on their raids. Francisco Thomas was just twelve years old when the Balangingi killed his brother an
d father and captured him. Weeks later, they made him take the oars of a slave-raiding ship, a garay. In the boat was the very man who had killed his father.
Raiders traded slaves all along the Sulu Archipelago and even as far away as Borneo, where some of the most unfortunate became victims of human sacrifice. Slaves who arrived in Sulu usually did unskilled work on farms and in forests, fisheries, and salt fields. Educated captives were put to work as bureaucrats, scribes, translators, or tutors, as slave owners wanted to take advantage of their skills. Pieters, the captain of the Petronella, was spared heavy labor because he had some knowledge of medicine:
One day my master and his wife asked me to what kind of work I was accustomed. I said that I could not work and that my former master had only employed me in looking after his goods, accounts and dollars, and giving medicine to sick people. When they learnt this from me, my master went and told everyone that he had a slave who could cure all kinds of sickness.
People were eager for Pieters’s help. He asked to be paid in rice and sweet potatoes, which he shared with other captives. One woman promised him two slaves and freedom if he could cure her husband. The man recovered but he did not keep his wife’s promise.
A small number of slaves became wealthy, and eventually free, as rewards for good service. Some compared their lives to what they had had before and felt they were no worse off. A Malay man who was selling coconuts told one traveler that he was a captive and had no wish to change:
I enquired why he did not profit by the opportunity to escape and revisit his country. “Why should I?” he replied, “there is something to regret everywhere; here I am well enough, my master treats me as if I were one of his kindred, I am well paid, and could save money if I wished; in my own country I know I could not do better, and perhaps should not fare as well; therefore, I prefer remaining here.”
Nevertheless, being a slave meant you could be sold over and over again, and abused at the hands of cruel owners. Small wonder that slaves risked death to escape. They fled in canoes to foreign ships, where sailors gave them asylum, or they found refuge on neighboring islands, or a friend or family member paid ransom for them. European ship captains often paid for captives, who worked off the price as crew members.
Captain Pieters was desperate to escape. He met a friendly woman on board a trading vessel and gave her a letter for other ship captains that explained his situation. While he waited for a reply, he got his owner to agree to sell him. His owner didn’t know about the letter, but he wanted to make a profit, so he tried to sell Pieters to the very captain who had received the letter! The sale almost fell through. The price for Pieters was a thousand dollars, so high that the captain had to say no. Pieters had to find a way to get the price lowered so he decided to pretend to be ill, and refused all food. “I felt really indisposed on the third day, which I was not sorry for,” he said, “as I thought it was better to die than to live at the mercy of people who could do with me as they pleased.” The next morning, he learned that the captain had purchased him for the bargain price of three hundred dollars.
This well-armed Iranun pirate wears a vest of red quilted cotton, and carries a dagger, a spear, and a sword decorated with human hair.
Photo Credit 11.2
From 1770 to 1870, the Iranun and Balangingi captured as many as 300,000 people. By the 1870s, however, the Spanish navy was sailing those waters, and it was too strong a force for the Sulu. Their slave trade ended.
But neither piracy nor slavery was over for good. By the 1970s, pirates and other criminals were reappearing on those seas, which were busy with fishing vessels, boats filled with refugees from Indochina, and tankers and other commercial vessels. Today, raiders are still seizing ships and capturing innocent people.
In the islands of the Southern Pacific, slavery existed long before the Europeans arrived. Captives of war were enslaved in Tahiti. In what is now New Zealand, when the Maori were victorious in battle, they enslaved the losers, sacrificing some of them and eating others. In Hawaii the slaves were a separate class known as the kauwā. They lived apart from other people and were often distinguished from them by a tattoo on their foreheads.
Blackbirding
After the Europeans arrived, the market for slaves changed. The island of Fiji needed workers for its sugar and cotton plantations, and the Australian adventurer and doctor James Patrick Murray wanted money. He bought a ship, the Carl, in 1871 and traveled to the islands of New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). As islanders approached the ship in their canoes, the crew lured them closer by showing off beads and pipes and other temptations. But Murray had no interest in buying and selling trinkets. He wanted men. His crew quickly threw iron weights onto the canoes, forcing them to overturn or sink and making it easy for the sailors to grab the astonished passengers.
Willing or not, the people of New Hebrides would become laborers in Fiji. One night, these reluctant passengers rebelled. The Carl’s ruthless crew used guns and daggers against them and threw the wounded captives into the sea, killing more than seventy. Only twenty men survived, and the crew sold them in Fiji.
Murray was a blackbirder, someone who kidnapped Pacific islanders and transported them to Fiji, Australia, Hawaii, and other lands to work. Some blackbirders enticed their prey with false promises of jobs, but the name “blackbirders” came from one of their nastiest tactics: they left their ships late at night, dressed all in black, so the islanders would not see them before they were whisked away.
In the mid-1800s, when blackbirding was most common, the raiders targeted villages along the coast. They took the youngest and healthiest men, leaving the others behind to try to survive without their strongest workers.
COOLIES: SLAVES BY ANY OTHER NAME?
Two young men left New Bedford, Massachusetts, on a whaling ship around 1850. When they wrote about their adventures, they described seeing slave traders from Peru taking Chinese workers to a miserable life in the mines in South America. They wrote that the Chinese were promised well-paying jobs in a rich country. Instead:
As soon as they get them on shipboard, a guard is stationed over them, with orders to shoot down the first one that shows any signs of resistance. Being kept such close prisoners, and on the coarsest food, they are naturally joyous at the sight of land, and leave the vessel with glad hearts, only to enter the slavery of the Peruvian mines. This species of slave-trade is, like the African slave-trade in our own land, forbidden by the laws of the country, but secretly connived and winked at.
These Chinese workers were known as coolies, a word that, in written Chinese, meant “bitter labor.” It was a perfect description of their lot.
Most coolies were transported to Latin America between the 1840s and the 1870s, when the Atlantic slave trade had ended and cheap labor was scarce. Although some were kidnapped, many were tricked into signing on. Desperate to escape poverty, war, and famine, they left southern Chinese ports to work in sugar plantations or mines. Unlike African slaves, they earned some pay, though far less than local workers. Conditions on the ocean crossing, known as the “Pacific Passage,” were at least as dreadful as on the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. In the 1850s about 40 percent of the Chinese died on the way to Peru. Although the coolies were technically not slaves because they came with contracts for five to eight years of labor, many didn’t survive that long. Because of their wretched treatment on Cuban sugar plantations, for example, 75 percent died before their contracts expired. Word got back to China, and with the Chinese government’s intervention, the coolie trade was abolished in 1874.
Blackbirding Trials
The British government was sensitive to charges that seamen on British ships were capturing natives. They sent George Palmer, the captain of the Rosario, to investigate. In 1869 he was patrolling the seas when he saw the ship Daphne headed for Fiji. Palmer had served in West Africa, and he knew how to recognize a slave ship. The Daphne made him suspicious. The Rosario intercepted the ship, which was supposed to carry only fifty-eight
passengers but had more than one hundred people from New Hebrides on board. “They were stark naked,” Palmer said, “and had not even a mat to lie upon; the shelves were just the same as might be knocked up for a lot of pigs, – no bunks or partitions of any sort being fitted.”
Palmer brought the ship’s American skipper and Australian owner to the Sydney Water Police Court but failed to convince the judges to try them for piracy. The judges claimed that there was not enough evidence to show that the people had been taken against their will. Next, Palmer tried to have the Daphne condemned as a slave ship, but the judge ruled that the law against the slave trade didn’t apply in the South Pacific. Palmer later wrote a book, Kidnapping in the South Seas, which opened people’s eyes to the outrages of blackbirding.
The Australian territory of Queensland depended on people of the South Pacific to work on its sugar plantations, and actively recruited them in the 1860s. Demand remained high in 1895, when this photo was taken, and laws were in effect to end blackbirding.
Photo Credit 11.3
In Fiji, the trial of a man named Kapitani also stirred public sentiment. Kapitani had been kidnapped by an American, Achilles Underwood, who had forced him to work long hours, flogged him, and “struck him with a hot iron, searing and burning into his skin.” He had even locked Kapitani and others into a small shack where they couldn’t lie down, and where they were given water only twice a day. After four days Kapitani escaped, grabbed an ax, and killed Underwood.