Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

BLACKBIRDING
44
occasion, local kings or lords anticipated the Inquisition by taking the task on themselves
to suppress heresy and condemned heretics prior to the Inquisition’s arrival. The relationship
between the Inquisition, the civil authorities, and capital punishment was an
intimate one, leading to the growth in imperial Spain of a belief that the Inquisition was
responsible for all judicial and extrajudicial killings carried out in the name of the state.
This was referred to as the “Black Legend,” from the robes worn by the monks of the
Inquisition. The Black Legend spread beyond Spain, giving rise to a reputation painting
the Church as barbaric sadists whose clerics delighted in committing sexual crimes against
women and young boys and whose bloodthirsty ways led directly to the deaths of thousands.
The Black Legend was incorporated into accounts of Spanish ecclesiastical and lay
cruelty in the New World and was even employed as an explanation for the mass extermination
of the native populations there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The
Black Legend stirred up considerable debate over the centuries since then, particularly
within the Catholic Church: supporters say it is wildly exaggerated, but critics of the
Church consider it to be an accurate portrayal of the Church’s brutality as it responded to
major challenges to its authority during the period of the Reformation.
Blackbirding. Term applied in nineteenth-century Australia to describe the practice of
kidnapping Melanesians to work in the sugarcane fields of Queensland as slave labor. It was
generally reckoned that the work was too hard and the heat too debilitating for Europeans
to undertake cane harvesting, so ships set forth to the islands north of Australia ostensibly
to “recruit” workers who would be indentured for a specific period of time—after
which they would be returned to the islands from which they originated. In reality, the
situation was far from this labor relations ideal. Ships plied the waters around the New
Hebrides, Solomon Islands, and Fiji searching for local men (and, less frequently, women)
to whom they would sometimes offer contracts that were for the most part meaningless
documents to those the whites referred to derisively as “Kanakas” (from the Polynesian
word for “man”). In the last four decades of the nineteenth century, it has been calculated,
more than eight hundred ships searched the South Pacific for Kanaka labor. Over 62,000
contracts were “arranged” with Melanesians, but, in many cases, young islanders were simply
kidnapped, thrown into the holds of the ships, and transported by means reminiscent
of the Middle Passage taking slaves from west Africa to the Americas. Whole islands were
depopulated, either outright or piecemeal, so that the survivors were deprived of a male
population from which to breed. Once in northern Australia, the Kanakas were put to
work in slavelike conditions. Foremen watched over them from on horseback, often forcing
them to work harder by means of whips. Harsh corporal punishment was common, but
the Melanesians had no recourse to the law; by the terms of the contracts into which they
had supposedly entered voluntarily, such punishments were permitted. Of course, the
white farm owners and those directing the blackbirding trade were engaging in actions
that were little different from outright slavery, but, given the fact that slavery had been
abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833, the contract system had been devised as
a legal cloak for their actions. By the late 1890s, the system had outlived its usefulness, as
had the Kanakas their presence in Queensland. As the movement for a white Australia
gathered momentum, a push came for the remnants of the Kanakas to be repatriated to
the islands of the South Pacific. This opened up another element of white brutality, as
people were often simply dumped on the first island ships’ captains saw—all too frequently,
not the place from which the workers had originated. Many more perished in