Donald Mcleod

New Hebrides History

Defended On

"Piracy" Charge

By H. E. L. Friday

IT is distressing to find, in a bool published since the war, til. greatest of New Hebrideai traders, Captain Donald McLeod labelled a man of unprincipled brutality and violence.

People who knew him recognise* in this Nova Scotian from Nortl Auckland, New Zealand, a man o: character, command, all-round fair ness, and business acumen thai lifted him to the forefront amonj the European Islanders of his time There are scores of instances a his practical acts of kindness ta

wards natives, half-castes, a m Europeans—but natives in particulas Unarmed and unescorted, M comld land on more beaches thas any other man in the Group, an his influence was unrivalled.

In the present century, Messn Graham and Hugh Kerr (one noc 80 and the other 76), two grand o< Hebrideans, would be warmly greete. by natives they had never seen b«< fore because they were nephev of the great “Maklaut” who, on Ir death, had been mourned as tf; grand chieftain of the isles.

Nobody in his day had a bettd knowledge of the Pacific than Loui Becke; yet among all the trader when he was hard up in Sydney 1892, it was to McLeod that Bed; turned for a storekeeping job.

IT was men of the McLeod stanc whom long-voyaging Captae Slocum, honoured when wrote: “The people of this coa;j hardy, robust, and strong, are ditJ posed to compete in the worlcJ commerce, and it is nothing agaim

Captain Donald McLeod.

i the master mariner if the birth i place mentioned on his certificate I be Nova Scotia.”

When, in 1883, Julian Thomas I visited the New Hebrides for the 1 Argus, Melbourne was the centre of I mission attacks on the trading com munity. More mud was slung at McLeod than at anybody else, be cause he was the traders’ natural

leader.

Thus Thomas found McLeod: “A I tall, powerful, quiet-spoken man of I some 45 years of age . . . above I everything, level-headed; not one Ito be led away by impulse. For 16 years he has been trading on t his own account and he was so r well-known and had acquired such interests and influence that the first proceeding of the New Hebrides Company was to buy him out for a t very handsome sum and retain his services as resident manager.” i It is a pity Mr. Neil Robinson, f author of Lion of Scotland, and, I [ believe, an Auckland journalist, t apparently did not come across Thomas’ invaluable book. He would ihave known that it was out of to picture McLeod as a rman likely to sail through the [Gr»up with a native hanging from rthe rigging, or as one ever ready :to indulge in promiscuous slaughter.

McLEOD, says Thomas (and his history proves it) “had always I borne a character for •humanity; it was said that he

would take the part of the natives against the whites in any case of ill-usage.”

McLeod, too, was antagonistic to unlicensed and indiscriminate sale of gin and muskets. He was critical of an Auckland firm which sent the Aida C. Owen twice and May Anderson once to trade such things to the natives, even though he supposed “they made a good thing out of it.”

“It is the regular traders of the

islands,” McLeod maintained, “men who, like myself, have lived here for years, who bring the natives into peaceful ways. It is our busi ness to be friendly and to make them friendly.”

To him the trader was as big a civilising factor as the missionary.

In fact, the plantation “boy” being taught to work (and McLeod paid him a fair wage for the period), he considered a better human type

than the mission native.

He had a kind word for the missionaries for trying to do good, but he deplored depopulation, and thought doctors would do even more good. He would certainly have approved the mission doctor of to day.

Lion of Scotland repeats a sneer which tabbed McLeod a pioneer “French” settler. Such he never was.

For years he urged Australia or the Colonial Office to take over; he was bitterly disappointed when annexation was negatived and de plored missionary hostility as driv ing traders (there were none but British-Australian at first) into the French camp.

THE founder of the French com pany, Higginson (who was not Irish), and director John Morgan, son of Sir William, a South Australian Premier, both be came French nationals, but not “Maklaut.”

Thomas tells us that it was still for the British trader, not the com pany’s representative, that the natives waited on the beaches with their copra.

Then McLeod went back to busi ness on his own account. The new store he built at Vila helped to make that port the centre of the Croup. The Havannah Harbour natives deserted his old store, now

in French hands, to do business with him.

As the only British copra buyer in the Group he gained a fair share of the business going, although a French shipping subsidy made things difficult for him. He was often in Sydney, where a fellow New Zealander, Mr. Gillies, who had been British Vice-Consul at Noumea became his agent.

He was also in partnership for a while with Mr. Johnston, the British Consul, who succeeded Layard, and father of the present British Consul, Mr. W. Johnston.

Eventually the NSW Government to the joy of all British planters,’ listened to McLeod’s plea for a subsidy for Sydney’s island ship ping.

MR. ROBINSON alleges that McLeod had lost an eye. In correct. He had bullet scars on his body and had lost a finger in a tomahawk attack at Tanna, from which island he withdrew after get ting tired of being potted at when he tried to work his plantation.

His chief enemy, G. J. Paton, had also withdrawn from Tanna. This missionary-politician acted as in terpreter, and the master of the mission ship Dayspring as pilot, when HMS Curacao shelled villages in Tanna and Erromango. The bombardment is said to have done good.

4 A backer of the mission wrote: I cannot help fancying that a broadside or two occasionally would help to convince the natives that white man’s lives are not to be sacrificed with impunity.”

Yet when McLeod and his em ployees defended themselves in a tough spot, the same camp labelled it bloody, unprincipled murder.

Mr. Robinson has apparently con fused McLeod’s era with an earlier sandalwood period. He depicts a Sydney of “low standards” still under a convict regime still McLeod, on arrival at the quayside might encounter a dozen convicts hung out to dry.”

(Continued on page 90)

THERE is a personal aspect to the McLeod chapter which would have amused its subject.

This trader of sterling courage, upright and outspoken, is depicted as rowing ashore off Whangarei Heads in the secrecy of night to escape being recognised by the local community who regarded him as an unrepentant criminal. After calling on his relatives he stole away, still in guilty secrecy, to his ship “and was seen no more.”

“What they talked about I do not know,” says naive Mr. Robinson, “but it is hard to see how they could have given him a very great welcome.”

The fact that the eldest brother of the numerous Kerr family, now long since dead, joined McLeod in the Hebrides some time before his (McLeod’s) death in 1894, disposes of this bit of smug Waipu gossip.

Mr. Robinson writes: “His kinfolk and their friends who came to New 7 Zealand from Nova Scotia were not proud of him. News of the more spectacular events of his career came back to his people, but they were rarely discussed. And when he died, some of them refused to in herit money that had been acquired in such dubious way.”

In the light of the known facts, this does not seem credible.

Lion of Scotland, like a book called The Gael Goes Forth before it, deals with the migration of stout-hearted Highland folk, first

to Nova Scotia, then to Australia, and finally to New Zealand.

McLeod was worthy of a chapter to himself, though not for the reasons Mr. Robinson indicates.

The headstone on McLeod’s grave describes him as master mariner and trader of Vila —“born at Cape Breton, Nova Scotia; died at Noumea 14th May, 1894, in his 50th year.”

If Mr. P. B. Laxton, District Officer, Ellice Islands, is on vacation in New, Zealand. if Mr. M. L. Bernacchi, CMG, OBE.

Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony and Mrs. Bernacchi, left the Colony for New Zealand early in August, en route to the United Kingdom on furlough. Mr. F. N. M. Pusinelli.

MC, is Acting Resident Com missioner.