More than 160 years ago, slave ships arrived at Tonga’s ‘Ata Island.
Bishop Silouan Silala Vea’s ancestors were invited aboard for a meal in a gesture the villagers thought was “great hospitality” by the ship’s captain.
“But sadly, while they were enjoying the meal, the ship took off, and we never heard from those 140 people again,” he told Culture Compass.
“There’s no one left on ‘Ata Island now.
“It was a tragic day for the people of ‘Ata Island as they were taken into slavery.”
Horrified by what took place, then-king Tupou I transferred the remaining ‘Ata islanders to his palace grounds before permanently resettling them on ‘Eua Island where they remain today.
“It’s been over 161 years and we don’t know where they are,” Bishop Silouan Silala Vea said.
“People need to know what happened to our people.”
The people of ‘Ata Island were just a fraction of more than 3,600 captured by slave ships bound for Peru in a process known as “blackbirding”.
Masked as paid labour, Pacific people were tricked by colonial powers and forcibly taken from their homeland by boats.
While much of blackbirding history is tied to Australian sugar farms, the horrors extend deeper into the Pacific.
It has been widely documented that in 1863, a Tasmanian whaler Thomas McGrath arrived on ‘Ata and tricked around half of the island’s 350 residents into boarding his ship and took them to sell them into the slave trade in Peru.
But there are areas across the Pacific that people don’t often know about, explained Dr Line-Noue Kruse, from the University of Hawai’i.
“Niue, Tuvalu … Kiribati …. We were all labourers to them. The only reason why they didn’t come further east is it cost more fuel. It was an economic consideration,” she said.
“But they came all the way to Hawai’i and Rapa Nui.”
Dr Kruse said it was important to understand how many countries across the world, like Australia, had exploited Pacific people and benefited from slave labour.
She said most history books record the era of blackbirding from 1863 to 1904 — a period of 31 years.
“They normally will say about 62,000 to 64,000 South Sea Islanders were transported in the blackbirding schemes in the Moana,” she said.
“A great deal of Indigenous scholars have re-looked and tried to recalibrate those numbers … I think it could go up to 37 years … it represents a great deal of family lines that were lost in the blackbirding system.”
Dr Kruse said the exploitation happened across the Pacific.
“We [Pacific people] were a source of cheap labour for empire-building nations … Blackbirding continued because of its profitability,” she said.
“Blackbirding is an important history to understand, because, oftentimes history books, if you read them there are zero words to [reference] blackbirding, or maybe a footnote.”
This article was originally published by ABC Pacific and has been republished with permission.
