There was once a pirate named Bully Hayes. The Monster of the Pacific they called him.
And he was one of the most famous men to ever sail this ocean.
Although he wasn't really all that special.
And what's more, the stories they tell about him really aren’t all that true. Including the one that I'm going to tell you today.
And yet, he gets to be immortalized. Remembered for generations to come.
So today’s story is about legends. And really, what it takes to get played by Tommy Lee Jones?
They say that Bully Hayes is one of the worst men to ever sail this ocean.
The last of the buccaneers, they call him. The monster of the Pacific.
Which is quite the feat, really, because European expansion into this ocean, in fact now that I think of it,
all imperial expansion into this ocean, has been downright brutal.
Yet even with those many memories of horror, Bully still kinda stands alone. He’s the one we remember.
Although the reasons why are perhaps a bit more human than they are factual.
Born in Ohio, he ran away from his grog-selling drunk of a father to cut his teeth as a sailor on the Great Lakes.
But searching for more adventure, he boarded a ship out of New York on the way to Singapore.
And somewhere along that way, he overpowered the captain and took control of the ship.
Nobody knows how, really, just that he’d done it.
And so when he arrived in Asia, he sold it as his own, and began a life of fraud and malice that would follow him right up until his murder.
As a young man, Bully made a name for himself in the gold rush of New Zealand,
as well as illegally shipping convicts into Australia.
They say he married multiple women, but they kept mysteriously drowning.
After marrying his third wife, at least of the ones we know about, he joined her brother’s roaming troupe of New Zealand minstrels,
which is a very polite way to describe a show based entirely on mocking the natives in blackface.
But that fell through when she, as you might have guessed, drowned. Plus, the people didn’t really like him.
In Otago, they even made a play denouncing him.
Although they also named a lake after him, but I don't think that was exactly out of respect.
It is kind of weird that it’s still named after him to this day, but I suppose that’s up to the good people of New Zealand.
After being somewhat unceremoniously ejected from Otago, he went off to live a life of essentially pure fraud.
His most common method was to partner with some rube who’d let him leave with their ship,
and then forge papers to sell it as his own in some foreign land.
And in the meantime, he’d use it to transport whatever he could to make money.
Usually that meant shipping copra and coconut oil, but sometimes it was guns, alcohol, and perhaps just as often, people.
And of course I don’t mean passengers.
These were slaves, although in the Pacific for whatever reason we rarely call them that.
We don’t really use the term slaver here. We say blackbirder. Perhaps because there’s a bit of nuance there.
A blackbirder’s job was to help fill plantations just like their Atlantic cousins,
but since slavery had been made illegal in virtually every Western country by this point, they had to be a bit more crafty about it.
Not that that mattered all too much in practice, at least when the authorities weren’t around and there really weren't that many authorities,
but at least on paper, it took a little fraud to get away with it.
Blackbirders like Hayes devised a method of skirting the law that meant regardless of the work’s brutality or complete lack of pay when they arrived,
those plantations would never go hungry for labour.
Hayes’ system was that he would arrive on some Pacific shore, charm the local people into thinking they’d be transported to a nearby island as regular passengers.
Or barring that, he’d promise that they’d be paid huge salaries on whatever plantation they ended up on.
And then regardless of how they made it on his ship, once trapped he’d set sail for somewhere they could never return from
and sell them off to whoever paid him the most.
Any girls he wanted would be kept below deck for the rest of their lives. Or at least his interest.
Entire islands were cleared out this way. Entire societies forever lost to the belly of ships of men like Bully Hayes.
But in 1874, his life was coming to a close. He didn’t know it yet, but that’s kind of how it goes with life.
On the island of Kosrae where his name would eventually become infamous, he lost the ship he’d named for his daughter in a storm.
Although that’s not what killed him.
On Kosrae he proceeded to terrorize the local people in a way that a hundred and fifty years later they still have not forgotten.
Here, he’s remembered as the worst monster to ever step foot on these shores.
Here, he would commit untold rapes, mostly of children under 12,
and extort the local population into giving him thousands of pounds of valuable copra just to keep his violence at bay.
But even with all the locals remembering him, even a lake named after him, even with all the fraud and malice that he’d committed,
that’s not what made him famous.
The Pacific was a nasty place, and Bully Hayes was just one tiny piece of it.
There were a thousand men like him. Really, none of them are worthy of our breath.
The reason we remember him is because he fit an image of what back then we considered cool.
He was a pirate. An outlaw. He did exactly what we believe pirates should do.
The reason that we still remember him is because someone wrote a book and said he left a pirate treasure.
The legacy of Bully Hayes has virtually nothing to do with his real-life actions and everything to do with how they fit into our fantasies about the world.
About how we view ourselves.
The readers wanted to dream themselves as outlaws. As men of danger on the open sea.
So we remember Bully Hayes because in the late 1800’s, just after he died, his exploits got recorded as an adventure story.
An adventure that for the most part simply wasn’t true.
If it weren’t for a 19-year old Australian sailor named Louis Becke, we would likely never remember Bully's name.
Becke would go on to write four different novels about this supposedly infamous pirate of the South Seas.
Novels that claimed to have firsthand knowledge but likely weren’t actually all that true. Tall tales from tall ships.
But like the stories of the wild west, stories of the mob, stories of men outside the law
taking justice into their own hands and profiting off the misery of others,
they were extremely popular among people who enjoyed playing fantasy.
In turn, they made him so famous that eventually great novelists like James Michener and A.T. Saunders would push his legacy that much further.
And so eventually those stories would meet the modern day of film. In time, he’d become a legend of the silver screen as well.
To date, he’s had at least two movies made about him. One in the 50’s, one in the 80’s.
Yet neither really paint him as the villain. Not as he was, anyway.
In fact, Tommy Lee Jones kinda plays him as a hero. A man outside the law who uses his unique form of justice to stop the real bad guys.
Like a Dirty Harry of the Pacific, I guess. They called that movie The Savage Islands.
I watched it, and I couldn’t help but notice that Tommy left out a lot of the child rape.
Wouldn’t have been as fun of a film I suppose. But then who knows, we might have had to actually think about what we did here.
We might have to think about who was really savage on these islands.
But the fact is that nobody really wants a mob movie where they hate the mobster.
Nobody really wants a piracy film that shows actual piracy. What we want is a dirty harry. An anti-hero.
A person who never existed who can make us feel that we could be tough too.
Plus, all those treasure chests had to go somewhere. He left a pirate treasure, at least according to the legends.
But that's also a pretty standard trope so it's likely that it's not even true.
Today, in Kosrae, his shipwreck still remains off the southern shore, so heavily covered in mud that much of it probably hasn’t aged a day.
We’re told by the locals that divers who head in at the right level of tide are still able to pull up dishes and bits of the deck as if it sank yesterday.
As if that treasure could still be there. But the truth is we’ll probably never know.
Kosrae looks nothing like it did back then, erosion is taking almost a metre a year of this shoreline.
Do the math and he’d have had to put that treasure pretty far inland for it to still exist.
And the reality is that even if we did dig it up, if we found that it existed, it would probably just be full of rotten copra. Or maybe some turtle shells.
Because that’s what treasure was back then. Maybe, at most, some banknotes long ruined by the salt. But even that’s probably not true.
The truth about Bully Hayes is that he was a nobody monster, and as ironic as it is for me to say that making this video,
he deserves to go back to being unknown.
Bully Hayes died because he raped a child so badly she couldn’t walk for months. A 9-year old.
And when the authorities came to arrest him, he stole a ship and fled.
He spent some time in jail, broke free, and then attempted to return to Kosrae where a cook would murder him.
A chef who simply couldn’t take his shit anymore.
That chef would be hailed as a hero in his time. But only his time.
He isn’t the name that remember today. He’ll likely never be played by Tommy Lee Jones.
He doesn’t get to be a legend, because that’s an honour that we tend to reserve for the bullies.
This is Rare Earth.