Blackbirder
The Blackbirders (of English blackbird , in French black Merle) are adventurers who explored the Pacifique at the 19th century with an aim of recruiting, for the Forced labor indigenous S in order to make them work mainly in the Plantation S of Canne to sugar, generally in the Queensland in Australia. They contributed to depopulate islands and archipelagoes. Their action was stopped by protectorate, increasingly wide, of the Western nations still that the States often supported the blackbirders by subduing the revolts which they caused.
The blackbirding consisted with to kidnap or attract the islanders on the boats then to make them sign work contracts with the ridiculous counterparts which made it possible to circumvent the legislation abolitionist that the British navy made apply. The wages were not often even paid and promised repatriation failed.
The term of blackbirding shooting indicated before a barbarian leisure of Australian carrying out for the pleasure of the manhunts. It seems that the blackbirders confused at the beginning the two activities.
The blackbirding paradoxically developed with the abolition of the slavery with the the United States which involved the collapse of the American plantations and consequently the rise out of arrow of the price of cotton.
The moved people were Kanak S (term indicating today the autochtones Melanésiens in New Caledonia) and came from the southern Pacific Islands: of Mélanésie, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, with a small number of Polynesia and islands of Micronesia like Samoa, Kiribati and the Province of the islands Honesty.
The number of moved is discussed, the historian Keith Windschuttle revises them with the fall. One generally estimates this number at 62 000 people.
In 1872, at the the United Kingdom, the Kidnapping Act puts the blackbirders outlaw.
In 1903, in Australia, the Pacific Islands Laborer Act puts a term at the activity. From 1908 to 1908, many Kanaks were repatriated after this act .
References
- Jean-Marie Gustave Clézio, Approach of the invisible continent (Romance)
| Random links: | Mano negra | October 3rd | Intense The Music | Compiègnois Baseball Club | Acotango | Nistos (river) | Banlieue_noire_du_nord_de_Londonderry,_Pennsylvanie |