It was a good thing, however, that the I-Kiribati gained practice and confidence in assaulting ships. By the 1840s, the blackbirders had arrived. These were slavers contracted to obtain labor for the plantations in Fiji, Hawaii, New Caledonia, and Peru. The slavers used both force and deceit to fill their holds. On the friendlier islands, they invited villagers aboard, where they were promptly given rum until the entire village lay passed out on the deck, at which point the crew would quietly sail off with them. At other times, blackbirders raided a village, hunting in particular for women. Said one blackbirder: “They fetch in the Fiji Islands twenty pounds a head, and are much more profitable to the slavers than the men.” According to one account of a raid on Arorae, “thirty-eight young women were all made fast by the hair of their head and led into the boat.” Most never saw their home islands again.
By the 1850s, however, resistance from the I-Kiribati and changing European attitudes toward slavery convinced the plantation owners that they had a bit of a marketing problem. From here on they would no longer engage in slavery but in the “Pacific labor trade.” Instead of armed slavers, there were now recruiters visiting the islands. Instead of being sold as slaves, the I-Kiribati were contracted as laborers. Possibly, contracted laborers might even return home one day. It says much about the hardship of life on an equatorial atoll that over the following seventy years, thousands of I-Kiribati left their islands to work the sugar, cotton, and coconut plantations of Fiji, Tahiti, Samoa, Peru, Central America, and nearly everywhere else where Europeans needed labor. One often reads of the masses of Indian and Chinese indentured laborers in the nineteenth century, but when one looks at the labor trade as a percentage of a country’s population there is probably no nation that exported more of its people than the I-Kiribati. Between 1840 and 1900, nearly a third of all I-Kiribati were laboring abroad. Half never made it back. Still, during this era most of the I-Kiribati recruited to work abroad went willingly. Drought and starvation were the most compelling reasons. No place on Earth is more unforgiving than an atoll during a drought. For generations, starvation and infanticide kept populations in check, but the labor trade offered another way. The laborer’s life was a harsh life, but it was life.
Curiously, upon returning to their islands the laborers were quickly reabsorbed into the village community, where they followed the same beliefs and traditions as those who had never left the islands. It was as if the intervening years abroad counted for little more than a source of colorful anecdotes to be shared in the
Consider the situation of an illiterate, low-class English seaman in the mid-nineteenth century. The pay was low, floggings common, death at sea highly likely, possibilities for advancement negligible, and when he returned to England he would be cast adrift into a country that was well on its way to becoming the industrial hell vividly described by Charles Dickens. Life on a tropical island where polygamy was the norm might not seem like such a bad option. Some jumped ship and hoped search parties would decline to search very hard. Atolls are very small and hiding places few, particularly when the I-Kiribati were offered a tobacco bounty for the seaman’s return. Occasionally, escaped convicts from Australia were deposited by obliging whalers. Most often though, it was a seaman who had made such a nuisance of himself aboard the ship that the captain felt either compelled to maroon him or accede to his wish to be marooned.
The first beachcomber known to have set ashore in the Gilbert Islands was one Robert Wood, who arrived on Butaritari in 1835, where he quickly taught the locals how to brew sour toddy, an ill-tasting alcoholic concoction for which a certain
Early trade in Kiribati consisted of beche-de-mer and turtle shells, which were exchanged primarily for tobacco. Randall was thinking bigger. Coconut oil was used in the manufacture of soap and candles and its trade had long been a sideline for the whalers. Randall muscled in and within a decade he was by far the most important player in the coconut oil trade in the Gilbert Islands. Producing coconut oil did not alter the I-Kiribati lifestyle. They used it themselves, primarily as a skin lotion. The coconut oil trade, however, did lead to change. According to one local historian writing of Randall: “For [coconut oil] he traded such things as rifles and ammunition, food, cannons, whiskey, gin and rum. There was, thereafter, much drunkenness and fighting and many people were killed. The cannons, some of which were quite big, were used for making a noise and frightening people.”
Clearly, in the latter half of the nineteenth century there was a lot of sinning going on in the Gilbert Islands. And if there’s sinning, there will be missionaries. The first appearance of missionaries in the Gilbert Islands occurred in 1852 when the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent three missionary families to the Marshall Islands. The missionaries called on Butaritari and, I must confess, I really wish I had been there. With Richard Randall acting as the interpreter, the missionaries offered Bibles and a letter of introduction from King Kamehameha IV of Hawaii to the high chief of Butaritari. The high chief of Butaritari, Na Kaiea, was fourteen years old. Like most fourteen-year-old boys, Na Kaiea was a little preoccupied and so he had but one question for the missionaries. Does Christianity permit polygamy? When he heard that Christianity forbids polygamy, Na Kaiea decided to hold out for the Mormons. One can imagine Richard Randall escorting the missionaries back to their ship. “Well, it’s been fun. What’s that? Do you mean those four naked women? No, no, we’re just friends. Off you go now. Bye-bye.”
It would take a lot of doing before Christianity supplanted traditional I-Kiribati beliefs. Indeed, it wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that most islanders proclaimed themselves Christian. It is a wonder that it did not take longer. Think of the I-Kiribati male of the nineteenth century—he’s smoking, he’s drinking sour toddy, he’s naked, he’s dancing, and he’s got options, fornication-wise. These are significant lifestyle issues for the missionaries to overcome. The first to try was Hiram Bingham, a frail Yale-educated American, who arrived on Abaiang in 1857 accompanied by his wife, as mandated by the Missionary Board, lest he be tempted by a dusky savage. Bingham immediately saw that he had a lot of work to do.
To do so Bingham set about learning “the heathen jargon which noisy savages were shouting about my ears.” Bingham was successful in mastering the heathen jargon. He essentially created the written I-Kiribati language, though one senses he failed to offer every letter of the alphabet out of spite. By 1890, he had translated the Bible into I-Kiribati. There his success as a missionary more or less ends. His services were poorly attended, and Bingham found that those who did attend were “very slow to learn propriety in the house of God. Many of them, caring little if anything for the truth, habitually sprawl themselves out to sleep; not a few often laugh, talk, move about.” His first two converts soon reconverted to heathenism, while Abaiang was beset by a long period of drunkenness and clan warfare.
Bingham’s work was largely carried on by Hawaiian missionaries, who were increasingly sent to the Gilbert Islands because the Missionary Board deemed the islands too savage for the white man. By the 1870s there were Hawaiian missionaries on seven islands and they had managed to convert 112 I-Kiribati, though only seventy-eight were church members in “good standing.” A number of missionaries were a little lackadaisical in their work, preferring instead to concentrate on trading opportunities, but here and there Hawaiian missionaries conducted their work with the zealotry of the newly converted. This was particularly true on Tabiteuea, which had the
