Bully Hayes : South Sea Pirate

BOATS MARITIME
Australiana
322p. [17] leaves of plates : ill., map (on lining papers) 26cm #031023
Includes references to Arrowtown gold diggings and a shipping accident at Croixelles.
1991 reprint of original 1931 edition. (Light edge wear to jacket.)
Hayes, William Henry, 1829-1877
Ship captains — Oceania — Biography
Buccaneers — Oceania
Pirates — Oceania
Islands of the Pacific — Description and travel
The story of the man sometimes known as the last of the Pacific pirates, Bully Hayes.
Hayes was born in 1829 in Cleveland, Ohio, on Lake Erie. He began his sailing career on the great lakes, working for his father until he was eighteen. He developed into “a powerfully built man, six feet tall, weighing over two hundred pounds in his prime, with piercing blue eyes, reddish-brown hair and beard, a pleasant baritone singing voice, and charming gentlemanly manners. And he could fight like a threshing machine!” He learnt his sea craft in down-easters, voyaging round Cape Horn to California. Whatever else is said about Hayes, he was certainly an expert sailor.

Hayes may, or may not, deserve being described as a pirate but he was certainly a swindler. He generally had no difficulty obtaining a ship when he had lost his previous vessel, either wrecked or reclaimed by creditors. His usual method was to persuade somebody to go into partnership with him, signing over a mortgage on the ship in return for his partner paying the bulk of the purchase price. He would then sail off and his partner would see neither ship, nor money again. He would usually get his new ship refitted and stocked with provisions and often loaded with cargo and then neglect to pay his bills before disappearing over the horizon. He left a string of bad debts from San Francisco to Shanghai, to New Zealand and Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Hayes also had wives in various ports, including Adelaide widow, Amelia Littleton who Hayes settled in San Francisco. He acquired another wife, Rosa Buckingham, while running a hotel in Dunstan on the New Zealand goldfields. Rosa and their infant daughter Adalaida were drowned when a yacht that Hayes had borrowed was capsized in a sudden squall. Hayes then married Emily Butler in Christchurch who he took to live at Apia in Samoa where he made his Pacific base. In between visits to his wives Bully Hayes was seldom without female companionship in his travels, either charming young native girls to sail with him or pressuring island chiefs to provide him with girls as well as coconuts. There are also reports, possibly vindictive, that Hayes was guilty of the rape of girls as young as ten but it seems that for the most part his companions were willing enough.

Bully Hayes was certainly engaged from time to time in ‘Blackbirding’, or trading in native laborers taken aboard by trickery or force, and delivered to work on plantations in Fiji.