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Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Life in a lighthouse


"All had a tale to tell, and most were expert embroiderers."

In the early Seventies I worked as a lighthouse keeper on three islands off the west coast of Scotland. I was between art schools and before taking the job I didn’t really think through what a lighthouse keeper actually did. I was attracted by the romantic notion of sitting on a rock, writing haikus and dashing off the occasional watercolour. The light itself didn’t seem important: it might have been some weird coastal decoration, like candles on a Christmas tree, intended to bring cheer to those living in the more remote parts of the country.

I was 19 when I was interviewed for the job of relief keeper by the Commissioners of the Northern Lights in the New Town of Edinburgh. My hair hung well below my shoulders. I had a great set of Captain Beefheart records and I walked about with a permanent grin on my face as I had recently, finally, lost my virginity. I rolled my own cigarettes, was a member of Amnesty International and had just read Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. In short, I was eminently suitable for the job.

At the time, there was a shortage of lighthouse keepers. This was not because the lights were being automated – that would come later – but because most of the men who would traditionally have entered the service were finding better wages building and manning oil-rigs in the North Sea. I turned 20 around the time I received the letter telling me how to get to my first posting. It read like something out of a Graham Greene novel. I was to purchase a second-class rail ticket and travel to Glasgow, staying overnight at the Seamen’s Mission. From there I was to take the local train to Girvan, a ferry to the island of Arran, and in ever-diminishing steps involving buses, a tractor and a rowing boat, I would eventually come, they promised, to the tiny uninhabited island of Pladda, and there would be initiated by three seasoned keepers into the ancient art of keeping watch.

I was greeted by the three of them on the jetty. One was in his sixties and clutched a black Bible in his potato-like fist. Another was middle-aged and wiry. The third, in his thirties, had a little corgi by his side, and was one of the few bachelors I met during my time on the lights. He often blamed the dog for making it difficult to form a lasting relationship with a woman, but I could never see the connection.

The three of us and the dog hopped onto an old trailer while the principal keeper started up the Massey Ferguson tractor and pulled us up a steep hill to the beacon. To my relief, I found that the tower of the light was surrounded by numerous outhouses in which we would live, eat and sleep. Later, I would hear tales of other lights, such as the legendary Skerryvore where the keeper lived in a tower: the bedroom walls were cylindrical and there was a circular hole in the floor and ceiling to allow the enormous metal weight which turned the reflectors to be winched up and down at 30-minute intervals throughout the night.

Over the coming weeks the keepers would teach me how to shear sheep, build roads, construct a jetty, fish for mackerel and lay lobster creels. They would also teach me the true function of the lighthouse keeper. The principal keeper, an elderly Gaelic speaker and a member of the Wee Free Church, took me aside and encouraged me, in an avuncular way, to stop referring to the four-hour watches we all undertook twice every 24 hours as ‘shifts’. This lapse was a hangover from my previous summer working in the Pig and Whistle bar at Butlin’s in Ayr, just across the water from Pladda.

Being on a lighthouse resembled nothing so much as being in a spaceship. We had comfy armchairs, Tetley tea and coal fires, but we also had the night sky, the aurora borealis, and the luxury of leaning on the rail at three in the morning, a hundred feet above the sea swell, watching satellites track across the Milky Way. It was the summer of 1973 and the Watergate hearings were beamed live by satellite (possibly one of the ones we watched circling overhead) to our island outcrop, yet we lived in many ways an early 19th-century life with our paraffin beacon and steam-driven fog signal. We made our own entertainment. Often we received a week’s newspapers at once, thanks to the generosity of the skipper of a fishing boat. (In return, we gave him the giant conger eels that got caught in our lobster creels which he would then sell to a Chinese restaurant on the mainland.) Supplied with our stack of newspapers we were able to bet among ourselves on Saturday’s horses at Newmarket or Ayr, having painstakingly studied the form and the weather conditions, then immediately check our results in Sunday’s papers.

There are three types of lighthouse. Rock lighthouses come straight out of the sea and, as a keeper, you spend all your time in the tower. Coastal stations skirt the British Isles and are on the mainland, allowing keepers to live with their families. Island lights are situated on uninhabited islands and I worked on three of them. A trainee lighthouse keeper entering the job for life (or until automation) would spend 18 months serving short periods of time on many different lights around Scotland, and would undergo strict psychological tests before gaining employment – something I body-swerved. Thereafter he (there were never any shes) would be posted to a variety of lights for three years at a time. In the space of less than a decade a keeper might find himself on a rock west of the Hebrides, then on mainland Orkney and after that in an inner-city coastal station.

Thus begins a marvelous essay by Peter Hill, in the London Review of Books.

READ THE REST of this entertaining and enlightening yarn, including the bloodcurdling story of the invasion by birds. 

Monday, August 29, 2016

The meaning of "Bully"

A quick scan through the Mighty Oxford reveals some answers to the question people keep on asking me.

WHAT DOES THE WORD 'BULLY' MEAN?

1. A term of endearment and familiarity originally applied to either sex e.g. sweetheart. Later to men only, implying friendly admiration: good friend, fine fellow. Often prefixed as a sort of title to the name of the person addressed as in Shakespeare - bully Bottom. Now obsolete.

2. Brother, companion.

3. A blustery 'gallant' or 'swash-buckler', now esp. a tyrannical coward who makes himself a terror to the weak.

4. The protector of a prostitute, one who lives by protecting prostitutes.

With thanks to Elizabeth Caffin

Sunday, August 28, 2016

EMAIL FROM THE UNDERWORLD

Brian Easton the Illustrious Economist provided a hilarious introduction for the launch of The Notorious Captain Hayes at the wonderful Ekor Bookshop and Cafe.

Straightfaced, he claimed he was simply reading out an email from the Underworld.


THE NOTORIOUS CAPTAIN HAYES by Joan Druett


For launch at Ekor Bookshop and Café, Wellington; 25 August 2016.

I have just received the following email. It is from William Henry Hayes. The email address is ‘underworld’. I tried to reply but the lines are clogged by politicians getting advice. It reads

Another buccaneer by the name of Voltaire – I havn’t been able to find him, he seems to live in a different part of the resort – said ‘to the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.’ What he did not say was, how could you respect the truth when all that is left are lies? No one ever gave me a chance to defend myself; they all pretend they are honest and I am not.

Consider the tailor suing me for $US15,000 (in today’s prices) for my clothing, and $US1200 for each member of my crew. Me, spend that amount on my scurvy crew? Don’t be ridiculous. The silly old fraud is grossly exaggerating; no wonder I refused to pay. The chandlers and other suppliers were always overcharging; why should one pay for poor quality over-priced goods?

The courts of the Pacific were all crooked so I avoided them. As for claims I often sailed early to avoid courts and debts; had to – winds and tides wait for no man. I was a good sailor – nobody says I wasn’t – and I could be courageous as some reliable reports tell. Yet one of the stories about me says I learned my seafaring skills in Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up; for heaven’s sake, it is 400 miles from the sea.

So how can your respect the truth, when all that it left is lies? Joan Druett’s done a good job. She has had to report the falsehoods, but she does so judiciously, and gives the alternate accounts – far fewer but, if I say so myself, truer.

I am not surprised. She is a noted marine historian but I have to add she is quite attracted to me – been chasing me for 15 years. Not bad for a 180 year old, but a gentleman like me attracts the ladies. The stories my critics tell about my liaisons are not fair on the women either.

Take my nickname. ‘Bully’. Nobody ever said it to my face; they wouldn’t dare. It came from an old term for ‘a fine chap’ – as in ‘bully for you’. Not that my detractors would admit that.

The truth was that I was an entrepreneur in the Wild West of the Pacific. Some entrepreneurs have luck, I had less. The lucky get knighthoods, and then defame the unlucky as notorious to hide the fact that they got up to the same shady activities.

In truth I was much the same as other trader-captains of that time and ocean. I’ve been made the scapegoat for their sins. The stories in the book aren’t about me; they are about the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century. Taken that way the book makes a jolly good read.

So thankyou , Joan, for doing your best to rescue my reputation. You wouldn’t like to visit me in my cabin, would you – as many ladies have done in the past? I’m afraid it is a bit hotter than usual.

And for the rest of you, entrepreneurs move on. I have some stunning high-return bonds in very secure enterprises for sale. If anyone has the cash to invest, just contact me through my email.

Oh, and vote for Donald Trump.

Thursday, August 25, 2016

BLACKBIRDING AND THE BULLY




BLACKBIRDING AND THE BULLY

First, the historical fact should be observed that whenever two cultures have clashed on an economic basis, ethics go out the window. England’s maritime supremacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was owed to great Elizabethan sea captains whose acts would be considered arrant piracy today, and shocking social conditions contributed in no small way to the success of the Industrial Revolution. And the cruel practice of slavery, where African men, women and children who were prisoners of tribal raids and wars were treated as cattle, to be transported to foreign lands to work without pay for conscienceless plantation overseers, was due to economic pressures of the time, as well.

And so it was with the so-called ‘black-birding’ trade of the nineteenth century Pacific.  
‘Blackbirding’ is a pejorative term for the practice of recruiting Pacific Islanders - particularly from the New Hebrides (modern Vanuatu) and the Gilbert and Marshall Islands (modern Kiribati) - and transporting them to Queensland, Samoa and Fiji, where the captains who had carried them earned 'head money' from sugar plantation owners in need of cheap labour.  However, the trade, now considered extremely cruel, had a surprisingly benign origin, and its roots lay in cotton, not sugar.

Blame the American Civil War. With no supplies of cotton from the Southern States, the cotton mills of Bradford, England, were grinding to a stop. In 1863 the hunt was on for replacement plantations, and Queensland, Fiji and Samoa were considered ideal. The problem was that cotton is a labour-intensive crop, and to get the enterprise going, plenty of cheap willing labour was necessary.  And this is where a man by the name of Robert Towns stepped in.

Originally an English sea captain who carried speculative cargoes to Australia, Towns was a hugely successful entrepreneur.  One of his most profitable ventures was in sea slugs — bêche-de-mer — which sold well in the Orient as the main ingredient in a virility-boosting soup.  This had been harvested in Vanuatu, so he knew those islands well.  So, he bought land upriver from Brisbane , and sent out his schooner Don Juan to the islands to recruit natives to weed and harvest the fields.

The vessel arrived back in Brisbane on 15 August 1863.  According to the Queensland Guardian, ‘seventy-three South Sea Islanders for Captain Towns’ cotton plantation’ were on board.  This was not slave-trading, because the natives were on board of their own free will.  Not only did they know Towns from his record in the sea slug lagoons, but often they were keen for adventure and fun, away from the social strictures imposed by the missionaries.  And, what’s more, money was involved, as they had signed a contract: they were to receive ten shillings a month (in an era when a cook on a plantation earned five pounds a year), with abundant food, clothing and shelter provided.  As well as this — and most importantly — Towns had promised to return them to their homes within a year, a commitment he did not fail to meet.

Unfortunately, many men were not as honest as Towns, and it was a system that begged to be abused.  Other plantation owners had no scruples about hiring wicked men to kidnap Islanders with false promises and fake contracts, and in the lawless ocean of the time, there were plenty of conscienceless captains.  One of the worst, ironically, had started off in Towns’ employ, a recruiter by the name of Ross Lewin.

Lewin was deservedly notorious.  He used to pose as a missionary — Bishop John Patteson being a favourite — and abduct the men and women who had come to his ship in search of a sermon or a prayer. He also captured natives out of their canoes by dropping large stones into their craft, and sinking them.  However, the blame for all this was shifted to another man — Bully Hayes, while Lewin was lost to history.  Much later on, in a story published on 14 May 1899, the New York Tribune named Hayes as the man who posed as a bishop and sank canoes with heavy stones, triggering a myth that was retold many times, in particular by the solo circumnavigator Joshua Slocum, who loved to tell a racy yarn about this particular bête noir.

So, did William ‘Bully’ Hayes feature at all in the brutal labour-recruiting trade?   

Not often, it seems, and not very successfully. As so often happened, his own misdeeds caught up with him, with highly unexpected results. 

In December 1868, the British Consul on Tahiti reported to London that ‘about 150 natives of Savage Island’ had been carried into port by Hayes on the brig Rona.  None of them had complained about bad treatment.  And the same kind of report was published in the Westport Times (New Zealand) on 31 August 1869.  But the following year a much more sensational report appeared, first in the Sydney Morning Herald, and then in other papers as the story evolved.  Hayes was under arrest in Samoa for kidnapping a cargo of Islanders — and the brave fellow who had arrested him was a Samoan chief!

When Hayes had been hired by a man named Frederick Sievewright to recruit labourers for Fiji, the job looked straightforward, as he was on good terms with the people of Manihiki, having carried them to neighbouring islands on his vessels before.  His device for getting them on board was characteristically devious, involving fake contracts and false promises.  By the same he called for fresh water at the Samoan island of Tutuila, the natives were suspicious enough to make a complaint to Mauga, the local high chief.  With Mauga’s connivance, the natives made their escape, and Hayes, when he pursued them in a towering rage, was apprehended by Mauga’s mighty warriors.  And so Hayes was carried under arrest to Apia, the main settlement of Samoa, where he was confined at large, there being no prison to keep him.

Naturally, he escaped. And that is the end of reported kidnappings.  After that, Hayes turned to blatant robbery, seizing the property of lonely copra and coconut oil traders.  The time for transporting natives was over.  At the islands where he set down his own traders, he mistreated the locals, forcing them to work for his men, but once he had sailed away their lives returned to something like normal, as within months Bully’s traders needed rescuing by the captains of the British and American ironclads, who found them destitute of goods and on the verge of starvation.

So, why were those navy captains hot on his trail?  Because Hayes was charged with blackbirding?  Not necessarily.  When Commander Richard Meade of the US ironclad Narragansett arrested him in Apia in February 1872, it was not for kidnapping natives and transporting them to plantations for head money.  Instead, it was on a charge of violating the Navigation Laws — or so Meade told the British Consul — for Hayes flogged his crew, carried enough arms and men to equip a privateer, had marooned one of his chief mates on a waterless atoll, and was running a protection racket in the islands.

And none of it was proven.  As usual, Bully Hayes talked and charmed his way off the ironclad, and strutted ashore.  Then he sailed off with celebratory bunting flying from his topmast rigging, to carry on with his multi-crime career -- which was of all the above, with the probable exception of blackbirding.

Sources:
The history of blackbirding in the South Seas is a grim and engrossing one, about which much has been written. Useful were: a paper read by E.V. Stevens to the Historical Society of Queensland, 23 March 1950, called ‘Blackbirding, A Brief History of the South Sea Islands Labour Traffic, and the Vessels Engaged in it’, and Doug Hunt, ‘Hunting the Blackbirder: Ross Lewin and the Royal Navy’, in Journal of Pacific History, vol. 42, No. 1, June 2007, 37–53. The letter from Consul Miller at Tahiti to Lord Stanley, 16 December 1868, was quoted in Lubbock's, Bully Hayes, Buccaneer, 147–148. A biography of Robert Towns can be read in the online Australian Dictionary of Biography.

The journal kept by John Chauner Williams, British Consul in Apia, Samoa, was studied at the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, as part of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau series (micro-ms-coll-08-0037). The complete collection of handwritten testimonials is held at the New Zealand National Archives, Wellington (as item R19684924, also available as micro S3623). The despatches presented to both Houses of Parliament regarding accusations of kidnapping and slave-trading against Captain W.H. Hayes of the Atlantic were published in the Queensland Government Gazette, 28 August 1875. While the case of Hayes is not mentioned, a very good background discussion is given by Reid Mortensen, as ‘Slaving in Australian Courts: Blackbirding Cases, 1869-1871’, Journal of South Pacific Law, article 7, volume 4, 2000.

Spinoff, activists, and amendment

It has been a strange week.

On Monday, the online magazine Spinoff published a piece that I wrote and that was edited by the inimitable Spinoff books editor, Steve Braunias, and headed THE MONDAY PIRATE.

Within hours, it had been pulled.  Because of something we wrote?  No.  Because of something we did NOT write.  

We had neglected to call William 'Bully' Hayes a slaver.

According to the Oxford dictionary, it is a person who deals in slaves, and a slave is a 'person who is the legal property of another or others and is bound to absolute obedience; a human chattel.'

Bully Hayes was, for a short time in his nefarious career, a 'blackbirder.'  But was a blackbirder the same as a slaver?

Much more on this to come.  Meanwhile, here is the amended version.

The pirate who came in from the cold

On Monday we ran a piece about 19th century sea captain William Hayes by his biographer, Wellington historian Joan Druett. Some readers were appalled it made no reference to his involvement with slavery, or “blackbirding”. The story was pulled.

We have reposted a slightly amended version today – and await a review of Druett’s book by journalist Michael Field, who was among those angered by the original post’s glossing of the more unsavoury elements of his past. 

Captain William “Bully” Hayes was a cheat, a bigamist, a conman and a “blackbirder” – that is, a captain who enticed Pacific Islanders on board his ship, and then carried them off as cheap labour for the plantations of Fiji, Queensland and Samoa. A notorious celebrity in his own lifetime, after his death he became an enduring mythical anti-hero, the so-called “Pirate of the Pacific”.
But was he any kind of pirate? Or was he a man virtually invented as a pirate?

True, he cheated merchants, and once disappeared over the horizon with an unpaid cargo in his holds. Yet these crimes were common enough. They were the acts of a simple crook, not a pirate. Hayes 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 hard liquor. Yet somehow the newspaper writers turned him into a legendary corsair.

But how, and why? It was mystery that fascinated me, and inspired my biography The Notorious Captain Hayes: The Remarkable True Story of The Pirate of The Pacific.

I discovered that the first to create the myth was a newspaper proprietor in Honolulu. Henry Martyn Whitney was a true American entrepreneur, full of ideas and ambitions and energy. As the publisher of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser his aim in life was to publish breaking news. On September 24, 1859 he published the story that was to trigger the Hayes legend. The headline: THE HISTORY OF A CONSUMMATE SCOUNDREL.

For the first time breathtaking swindles were exposed, along with details of a dissolute life. It was stirring stuff, compulsive reading, reprinted by newspapermen all about the Pacific, without any questions being asked.

In the years that followed there were occasional updates on his exploits – in 1868, the Wanganui Herald mused that Hayes “had a great deal of the pirate in his disposition”, and a Sydney newspaper in 1873 exaggerated him as “the notorious Captain Hayes, freebooter, swindler, pirate and murderer”.
It took until 1876 for the legend to firmly take root, and once again it was courtesy of Henry Martyn Whitney. As the owner and editor of the Hawaiian Gazette, he published an article headlined SKETCH OF THE NOTORIOUS CAPTAIN HAYES.

Hayes met a violent death the following year. Good career move: it turned him into an even more compelling figure. The metamorphosis was spearheaded by the San Francisco paper, Daily Alta California, which summarised his story under the title, The last of the pirates. In May 1899 the New York Tribune published a racy, even more imaginative version.  Not to be bested, the editor of the New York Sun produced his own lurid yarn – BULLY HAYES, PIRATE OF THE PACIFIC, THE THRILLING STORY OF A DOUBLE LIFE.

Writers of trash fiction jumped on the band wagon. Albert Dorrington published Bully Hayes’ yarns in London magazines, depicting him as “half pirate, half hero”. Down at the bottom of the world, colonial readers loved this kind of sensational stuff. In 1903 the editor of the Christchurch Press asked for letters from anyone who remembered meeting Hayes. They were duly rewarded with colourful descriptions. “He was of a courteous and gentlemanly demeanour, a big man and well-proportioned,’ wrote WR Turner. Another reader, Alfred Gee, write that he would never forget meeting Hayes — “a man of splendid physique, fully six feet in height, and proportionately well built”.

Naturally, many books followed this kind of outpouring, some serious, and others not so, with titles like Bully Hayes, South Sea Pirate. The strange result is that Captain William Henry Hayes – a common conman, blessed with a certain charisma – has become enshrined as a flamboyant buccaneer of the Pacific.

The Notorious Captain Hayes: The Remarkable True Story of The Pirate of The Pacific (HarperCollins, $18.99) by Joan Druett features in the latest best-seller chart at Unity Books.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Kiwi Dads not interested in Father's Day?

Perhaps not....






Great review from Linda Collison


The American-born seafarer William “Bully” Hayes was a notorious celebrity in his own lifetime and in the century after his death became the antihero of numerous accounts, novels, secondhand memoirs — and a Hollywood movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and Michael O’Keefe.  At least two Pacific watering holes have called themselves Bully Hayes — one in Hawaii and one in New Zealand.

Much has been written about this 19th century adventurer, accused of countless cons, crimes, swindles and brutalities — some true, some embellished, some pure fiction. Overshadowing his misdeeds, or perhaps driving them, is the portrayal of Captain Hayes as a charismatic and dauntless character —  an enduring, mythical,  antihero.  This image was created largely by the popular media of his time, says maritime historian Joan Druett. Her latest book, The Notorious Captain Hayes; The Remarkable True Story of William ‘Bully’ Hayes, Pirate of the Pacific, is the most definitive biography written about the man, the myth, the legend. The author has spent years reading everything in print about Hayes, studying contemporary newspaper articles, letters, diaries, ship logs and shipping lists in an effort to separate fact from fiction.

The result? An objective but very engaging popular history of a sea captain, trader, showman and blackguard known for his many dupes and crimes — some mere swindles — others abhorrent (rape, coercion, and blackbirding — the transport of poor refugees as cheap labor). Joan likens the mythical Captain Hayes to Hollywood’s Captain Jack Sparrow. The bad guy we love, an enduring archetype.

 From Linda Collison.com

Read more, for the interview

Linda is a seafarer and a very fine writer, author of the haunting Water Ghosts.

Monday, August 22, 2016

Bully Hayes on Spinoff

The Monday pirate: The true story of a swashbuckling Pugwash



Joan Druett goes in search of one of the great pirate legends of the Pacific.

In 1903 the editor of the Christchurch Press asked for letters from anyone who remembered meeting Captain William Henry “Bully” Hayes – a man virtually invented as a pirate.

True, he cheated merchants, and once disappeared over the horizon with an unpaid cargo in his holds. Yet these crimes were common enough. They were the acts of a simple crook, not a pirate. Hayes 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 hard liquor. Yet somehow the newspaper writers turned him into a legendary corsair.

But how, and why? It was mystery that fascinated me, and inspired my new biography The Notorious Captain Hayes: The Remarkable True Story of The Pirate of The Pacific.

I discovered that the first to create the myth was a newspaper proprietor in Honolulu. Henry Martyn Whitney was a true American entrepreneur, full of ideas and ambitions and energy. As the publisher of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser his aim in life was to publish breaking news. On September 24, 1859 he published the story that was to trigger the Hayes legend. The headline: THE HISTORY OF A CONSUMMATE SCOUNDREL.

For the first time breathtaking swindles were exposed, along with details of a dissolute life. It was stirring stuff, compulsive reading, reprinted by newspapermen all about the Pacific, without any questions being asked.

In the years that followed there were occasional updates on his exploits – in 1868, the Wanganui Herald mused that Hayes “had a great deal of the pirate in his disposition”, and a Sydney newspaper in 1873 exaggerated him as “the notorious Captain Hayes, freebooter, swindler, pirate and murderer”.
It took until 1876 for the legend to firmly take root, and once again it was courtesy of Henry Martyn Whitney. As the owner and editor of the Hawaiian Gazette, he published an article headlined SKETCH OF THE NOTORIOUS CAPTAIN HAYES.

Hayes met a violent death the following year. Good career move: it turned him into an even more compelling figure. The metamorphosis was spearheaded by the San Francisco paper, Daily Alta California, which summarised his story under the title, The last of the pirates. In May 1899 the New York Tribune published a racy, even more imaginative version.  Not to be bested, the editor of the New York Sun produced his own lurid yarn – BULLY HAYES, PIRATE OF THE PACIFIC, THE THRILLING STORY OF A DOUBLE LIFE.

Writers of trash fiction jumped on the band wagon. Albert Dorrington published Bully Hayes’ yarns in London magazines, depicting him as “half pirate, half hero”. Down at the bottom of the world, colonial readers loved this kind of sensational stuff. When the Press invited readers to post their reminiscences, in 1903, they were rewarded with colourful descriptions. “He was of a courteous and gentlemanly demeanour, a big man and well-proportioned,’ wrote WR Turner. Another reader, Alfred Gee, write that he would never forget meeting Hayes — “a man of splendid physique, fully six feet in height, and proportionately well built”.

Naturally, many books followed this kind of outpouring, some serious, and others not so, with titles like Bully Hayes, South Sea Pirate.

The strange result of all this breathless, exciting literature, more fiction than non-fiction, is that Captain William Henry Hayes – a common conman, blessed with a certain charisma – has become enshrined as a flamboyant buccaneer of the Pacific.

The Notorious Captain Hayes: The Remarkable True Story of The Pirate of The Pacific (HarperCollins, $18.99) by Joan Druett recently made the best-seller chart at Unity Books.
Illustration from Captain Pugwash: A Pirate Story (1957) by John Ryan.

Friday, August 19, 2016

whale skeleton on display again

From stuff.co.nz

  
Canterbury Museum's blue whale on display again

It's been in hiding for 22 years, but the longest blue whale skeleton in any collection in the world is ready for its big moment.

The 26.5 metre long blue whale skeleton has been in the Canterbury Museum collection since it arrived in Christchurch on a horse and cart in 1908, but the bones slipped from public view in 1994.
There is no space in the museum large enough to display the bones, but they will be the star of a planned future upgrade for the complex of historic buildings.

The Blue Whale was 26.5 metres long when it washed ashore in 1908.
CANTERBURY MUSEUM/SUPPLIED

The Blue Whale was 26.5 metres long when it washed ashore in 1908.
Almost 200 bones have been in storage since the Garden Court – where they were displayed from 1976 – was covered over when the museum expanded in 1994. The bones were carefully restored over four or five years from 2003.
 
The whale bones arrive at the Canterbury Museum on a horse and cart in 1908.
CANTERBURY MUSEUM/SUPPLIED
The whale bones arrive at the Canterbury Museum on a horse and cart in 1908.

The whale has been dead for more than a hundred years and was born two hundred years ago, but the bones still exude oil and retain a distinctive smell. The whale's lower mandible bone is the largest single natural history object in the world, weighing 418 kilograms.

****
This is not the only whale skeleton the museum owns.  Back in the day, on 25 May 1874, the American whaleship Eliza Adams killed a humpback whale just outside of Akaroa Harbour.  Wrote the third mate, Abram Briggs:

"[took it] with our boats & the volunteered assistence of the Steamer that came down to see the whale we towed him to the Ship at 3 PM quite a number of visitors come on board to see the whale, next day took the whale on the beach at high water & at low water went & took the blubber off of him & gave the carcass to parties on shore for the Christchurch museum."

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Book launch: the Notorious Captain Hayes

Hosted by the very new Ekor Bookstore, College Street (opposite Moore Wilson), Wellington

A talk by Joan Druett about the The Notorious Captain Hayes.

  •  
Join us for a wonderful evening talk by leading maritime historian and award-winning author, Joan Druett as she focuses her telescope on a new subject:

THE NOTORIOUS CAPTAIN HAYES
The remarkable true story of William ‘Bully’ Hayes, 
Pirate of the Pacific

Starts at 6pm with drinks & nibbles on Thursday 25 August at
Ekor Bookshop & Cafe Ltd 
17B College Street, Te Aro, Wellington.

‘Talk in the South Seas is all upon one pattern; it is a wide ocean, indeed, but a narrow world: you shall never talk long and not hear the name of Bully Hayes.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, The Wrecker

  

Friday, August 12, 2016

Tsunami and Tupaia





Tupaia, the great Tahitian high priest and navigator, testified to Captain Cook that Polynesians had sailed great distances from Tahiti, and history tells us that one of those great distances involved the 3,000-kilometer voyage from the cradle of Polynesia to New Zealand.  In the meantime, however, the lore had been lost -- when Tupaia arrived in New Zealand in 1769, no one from Tahiti had been there for the past three or four hundred years.

Something had happened.  But what?

According to geological theory, the east coast of New Zealand had been struck by a huge tsunami sometime in the fifteen century. An immense wall of water, probably 12 meters high, had struck the coast and roared inland, leaving devastation in its wake.  Gardens, plantations, house, and fishing beds were destroyed -- along with the massive voyaging canoes.

Great men had died -- the craftsmen, the shipwrights, the priests, and the star navigators. Voyages back to Hawaiki -- Raiatea -- became impossible, because not only the craft, but the lore had been lost.

Or so the theory went.  Now, it has been demonstrated that the theory is right.  The tsunami really happened.  An article in the Dominion Post today describes it.

 A new study shows the East Coast was struck by three or four large tsunamis as high as twelve metres over the past 1200 years.



The GNS Science study which involved the digging of a 90metre long, two-metre-deep, trench at Puatai beach, 30km north of Gisborne, revealed shells and wood that could be radiocarbon dated to establish the dates of numerous earthquakes and tsunamis.

The tsunamis produced waves between nine and twelve metres high and would have travelled up to hundreds of metres inland. The last tsunami occurred about 300 years ago.

"The study provides the first really concrete evidence of what we have long thought likely, and it shows that hazard preparation in the east coast area is on the right track," said lead author Nicola Litchfield.

"The tsunamis would have affected the entire East Coast of the North Island. It is hard to estimate from just this one study how big a particular tsunami would have been at various places along the coast. However, we know from past fieldwork and from modelling that 5metre-plus tsunamis can strike anywhere along the East Coast," Litchfield said.

It has been known for a long time that the area is seismically active and that there is a high risk of tsunamis, but hard evidence about tsunamis has been rare. The study provides solid evidence that the tsunamis occurred.

The investigation showed there were three large earthquakes in the region around 1800, 1200 and 400 years ago. Each quake was around magnitude 7.2 and uplifted coastal land by about 3.5metres.




Sunday, August 7, 2016

Bully Hayes - the radio interview

The real Bully Hayes

The flamboyant Captain William Henry 'Bully' Hayes was a  'thief, pirate, plunderer and kidnapper' according to newspaper headlines of the time and in subsequent books and movies. But what's the true story of this Pacific maritime legend? In her new book The notorious Captain Hayes, nautical historian and writer Joan Druett has investigated the fact and fiction surrounding Bully Hayes.  As Lynn Freeman finds out, he was accused of everything from bigamy and slavery to theft and murder.

Interview with Lynn Freeman

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

the philosophy that has given us Donald Trump





From The Guardian


Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it.

Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

 Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

***

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.
Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

 And then Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan arrived.  Read the rest ....

And what does the American Enterprise Institute believe? They are preparing themselves for a Trump-dominated world economy.  Google "American Enterprise Institute and Donald Trump" and see what I mean.

Review of The Notorious Captain Hayes


CAPTAIN WILLIAM “BULLY” Hayes became a legend across the Pacific, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Newspapers celebrated his wicked ways from Honolulu to Singapore, Hong Kong to Manila, and Saigon to Sydney.

The more outrageous Hayes’ behavior became, the better editors and the reading public
liked it. Separating fact from fiction about the master mariner never got in the way of a good yarn.

To research The Notorious Captain Hayes, New Zealand maritime historian and novelist Joan Druett spent fifteen years poring through the recorded flotsam and jetsam left in the wake of Hayes’ remarkable life to get at the truth about the character many called the “consummate scoundrel.”

Hayes was believed to have been born in Cleveland, Ohio, about 1828 or 1829. As a young man, he initially learned seamanship sailing the Great Lakes during the schooner era. Arriving in the Pacific in the 1850s, he left his mark in seemingly every port he visited.

“Wherever he went,” writes Druett, “a tsunami of headlines seethed in his wake . . . ‘THE HISTORY OF A CONSUMMATE SCOUNDREL’ blared a Honolulu paper in September 1859, just months after he had arrived in Hawaii . . .”

Among the dastardly deeds attributed to Hayes was murder, serial debt-dodging, piracy, bigamy (he loved women), swindling, plain thievery, and engaging in the infamous “coolie trade” and slavery. Journalists were inescapably drawn to these crimes, often imaginatively embellishing reality, which romanticized the rogue and further aroused interest in him from one end of the Pacific to the other.

Despite his black-hearted ways, Hayes was considered to be a competent shipmaster and a strict authoritarian aboard the vessels he commanded. An Englishman named Hines, sailing as an ordinary seaman in the barque C. W. Bradley, recalled: “Every man aboard was afraid of him, and his discipline was almost as strict as a man-o’-warsman.”

By the time Hayes met his maker in 1877 at the hands of an enraged Norwegian sailor, stories from his life had been documented in newspaper archives and books. The Bully Hayes saga was alive well into the twentieth century.

Joan Druett’s lively and salty chronicle, which is as fresh as a sea breeze, brings to life a bygone maritime era that was reigned over by a generation of stalwart men and women – for better or worse.

GEORGE JEPSON, editor, QUARTERDECK

Constitution #2 on Amazon

The furor over Mr. Trump's attack on Gold Star parents has had an unexpected effect.

Bereaved father Mr. Khan waved a pocket copy of the Constitution to demonstrate an eloquent point during the Democratic Convention. The challenge he issued has resonated not with his intended target -- who simply retaliated as only he knows how -- but by the American reading public.

The pocket edition is now #2 on the Amazon bestseller list.

Caveat -- this edition has religious footnotes and commentary inserted by the  The National Center for Constitutional Studies, a conservative, religious-themed constitutionalist organization, founded by Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) political writer W. Cleon Skousen, a former professor at Brigham Young University

It might be a good idea to buy a more regular edition.