Emma Christopher - Kidnapping in ‘New’ Guinea: Messiah’s Defiance and the Kula Traders
In the early 1880s, ships from Australia and Fiji (both parts of the British Empire), and German vessels from Sāmoa, competed in a deadly but lucrative trade kidnapping men, women, and children from the islands off New Guinea to work on sugar, cotton, and copra plantations.
It was half a century since Britain had abolished legal slavery in most of its empire, and eventually the cook on one of these ‘blackbirding’ ships, a Black man from the Caribbean Island of Antigua named Messiah, raised the alarm. Despite being threatened, demeaned, betrayed, and almost lynched, Messiah set in motion an enquiry which saw hundreds of kidnapped men in the Australian colony of Queensland testify to what had happened to them. The outrage of a man born to formerly enslaved parents in Antigua propelled the names, origins, and accounts of many of the kidnapped New Guinean men into the colonial archive. They are the basis of the Pacific People Trading Database.
Yet this specific part of the world demands that other, overlapping voyages be tracked too. Forty years after the murders and kidnappings, many of the locations from which the victims originated were identified by Bronisław Malinowski in his landmark writings on Kula trading. In other words, many of those taken by ships sailing from Queensland, Fiji, and Samoa came from elaborate trading networks and were used to crossing the seas by canoe. What might we learn, therefore, if we plot both sets of voyages together?
Emma Christopher is a associate professor at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. Her latest book is called Freedom in White and Black and is the story of the only two men shipped to Australia as convicts for the crime of slave trading, and the enslaved men, women and children rescued from them. She previously published Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes and A Merciless Place. Emma is also a documentary filmmaker and is the director, producer and researcher of They Are We which was chosen as the United Nations’ Remembrance of Slavery film 2015. It has screened in more than 70 countries around the world. She is an anti-slavery campaigner and previously worked at Anti-Slavery Australia at UTS. She has held both four and five year ARC fellowships as well as two other Discovery Grants. She is currently an Australian Human Rights Institute Associate.
