Any reader of “Mauki” shudders at London's description of the trader Max Bunster, who has beaten two native wives into early graves, relentlessly torments his workers, and takes a particular delight in donning a mitten made of a ray's rasp-like skin to scrape the hide off Mauki's back. The story was written in October 1908 while London was cruising the Solomon Islands while on his South Seas adventure aboard the Snark. In it, London depicts an indentured laborer's violent response to a culmination of abuses from a sadistic overseer that culminates in a flaying of the overseer before the taking of his head. As Jeanne Campbell Reesman observes about “Mauki,” “Though he dwells more upon the savagery of the Melanesians, London also describes the moral degradation of the whites, with their laxity, alcoholism, and racist stupidity.”1 Charmian London notes that the story stemmed from Jack's fascination with the tale about his past experiences told by a cook on the atoll Ontong Java, formerly known as Lord Howe Island. She describes Mauki as “a mild-faced Solomon Island cook, who, despite his deceptive weak prettiness, is deservedly serving an aggregation of sentences that cover eight years, for murders, escapes in hand-cuffs, thefts of whaleboats—a history of bloodcurdling crimes and reprisals too long to go in here, but which so tickles Jack's fancy that he intends making a short story of it, to be called ‘Mauki,’ and including it in his collection South Sea Tales.”2 Scholars typically note the source of the story in this anecdote but otherwise have been content to let the anecdote rest.As it turns out, Mauki's mistreatment did occur, and the character of Bunster was based on an actual person, Charles Peter Munster, who was the trader for Levers’ Pacific Plantations Company stationed on Ontong Java from 1905 to 1908. The compositional background of “Mauki” is of considerable interest for what it reveals about colonial labor practices during a time of transition—when British colonial powers were attempting to alter formerly abusive labor policies as part of a larger project of managing colonial economic interests. The goal, as we shall see, was not to enable indigenous islanders to achieve some measure of self-governance but rather to increase the economic profit, and thereby the stability, of the British empire in the Pacific.When the Londons met Charles M. Woodford on 25 August 1908 at Tulagi, the seat of administration for the Protectorate,3 the Resident Commissioner for the Solomon Islands Protectorate no doubt talked to them about his efforts to transform the islands into a productive member of the Empire. The Protectorate had been formed in 1893 after it became apparent that the rapaciousness of labor recruiters for Australian and Fijian plantations, abuses by traders and planters within the Solomons, and the illegal trade of guns were creating turmoil that the Crown could no longer overlook. In creating the Protectorate, British officials also decided that it would need to be entirely self-supporting: the Crown would provide no funds for administration beyond salaries for Woodford and his subordinates. When Woodford was appointed commissioner in 1897, he believed that “This end could be attained, not by relying on the initial sources of local revenue (taxes on stations and on trading and recruiting vessels), but only by attracting a big company prepared to invest large sums in opening copra plantations.”4 (See figure 1.)A major impediment to establishing these plantations was the indigenous practice of headhunting, a chief object of interclan raids that defined indigenous life. Since he had taken charge, Woodford had acted to end headhunting by destroying tomoku, the large war canoes so central to the predatory raids, and by shelling villages in reprisals for raids. Woodford's brutal tactics worked: by 1902 headhunting had ceased. As David Russell Lawrence observes, Destruction of canoes disrupted intergroup communication, as well as warfare, and broke the alliance, kinship and affinal linkages that facilitated many social and economic ties. Local leadership was discredited by defeat at the hands of the police and into that power vacuum came the Christian churches. Inter-island connections unravelled and relations between islanders and Europeans became dominated by trade based around copra making.5To develop these plantations, laborers were needed, and although labor recruiting to Queensland had ended in 1906, workers could now be directed inter-island.London arrived in the Solomon Islands in late June 1908, at a time when islanders, planters, and traders were adapting to the new administration. As we shall see, islanders both embraced and resisted opportunities presented by labor recruiting, and planters and traders regaled the London party with tales of past abuses, filtered through a racist haze in which islanders were regarded as cannibalistic savages doomed to extinction and needing the control of a superior race. As Woodford opined in a December 1909 letter to Everard im Thurn, the High Commissioner for the Western Pacific and Governor of Fiji, “nothing in the way of the most paternal legislation or fostering care, carried out at any expense whatever, can prevent the eventual extinction of the Melanesian race in the Pacific. This I look upon as a fundamental fact and as certain as the rising and setting of the sun.”6 These attitudes affected the perception of islanders and more importantly the accounts of the Snark voyage and especially the story “Mauki.”Since London did not write about the Ontong Java experience in the articles he compiled into The Cruise of the Snark (1911), we have only the two competing travelogues by Charmian London (The Log of the Snark, 1915) and Martin Johnson (Through the South Seas with Jack London, 1913) for evidence of the “facts” underlying the story of “Mauki.” What we know about the composition of the story comes largely from the former with a minor echo in the latter account.When the London party arrived on the island on 18 September 1908, Munster had recently been replaced by the trader Harold Markham, with whom the Londons developed a warm friendship and whose exploits later became the inspiration for his David Grief stories. In the story, London describes Max Bunster as the one white man on Lord Howe, trading in the pay of the ubiquitous Moongleam Soap Company. And the Company billeted him on Lord Howe, because, next to getting rid of him, it was the most out-of-the-way place to be found. That the Company did not get rid of him was due to the difficulty of finding another man to take his place. He was a strapping big German, with something wrong in his brain. Semi-madness would be a charitable statement of his condition. He was a bully and a coward, and a thrice-bigger savage than any savage on the island.7London's narrator then describes a series of previous incidents of Bunster's brutality at trading stations prior to his posting on Ontong Java.London has the facts substantially correct about Bunster's character and brutality, though he probably invented the specific acts of cruelty levied to Mauki. What follows is based on the Munster file, a forty-three page collection of documents housed in the papers of the Western Pacific High Commission at the University of Auckland Library in New Zealand. The occasion for establishing this file was a deportation proceeding against Munster in January 1909. Munster had been a seaman in the German navy and, as Woodford noted in a letter to Charles Major, the Chief Judicial Commissioner for the Western Pacific, he “had suffered a term of imprisonment for striking an officer. Afterwards, meeting the officer ashore in Sydney in a certain house of ill fame, he further assaulted him, stripped him nearly naked and turned him in that condition out into the street. He then deserted and found his way here.”8 Munster apparently found the relative lawlessness of the Solomons attractive and he became a British subject in 1904 and found employment as a trader for Oscar Svensen's Marau Company, which had been busily establishing coconut plantations before selling many of their interests to the Lever Company between 1905 and 1907. Munster was stationed on the plantations on Marau Sound, on eastern Guadalcanal, and sometime after 1903, when Svenson established trading agents at Ontong Java,9 he was transferred to that island.In 1906 reports reached the Lever management that trouble was afoot on Ontong Java. A missionary reported that Munster was “troublesome.” That missionary was probably the Tongan Methodist missionary Semisi Nau, who had been posted to Ontong Java in 1906 and who appears by name in “Mauki” as “Samisee, the native Tongan missionary” (1541). The nature of the trouble? As Joseph Meek, Chairman of Lever Brothers Australia and Managing Director of Levers’ Pacific Plantations, explained in a letter to Robert Crewe-Milnes, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Munster had what he euphemistically described as “trouble about women” and he had been “rather rough on some of the natives.” Meek explained that “We investigated the matter and the missionary himself at the time was satisfied that the story about Munster was not correct. Mr [Frederick] Barnett, the Assistant Resident Commissioner in the Solomons, also went round to make inquiry on the subject, and he told us here in Sydney afterwards, that he was satisfied that Munster was perfectly clear of any blame in the matter. Thus you see,” Meek concluded, “the Government had no complaint to make regarding Munster after three years of residence.”10Here Meek is obviously doing some butt-covering, for he took pains in this seven-page typed letter to spell out the particulars of Levers’ investigation, though it's clear from the letter that the Lever management took the accusation more seriously than officially reported. After Barnett's investigation, Munster went to Sydney on holiday and there “we talked to him seriously,” Meek explained, “and told him we could not allow any man in our employment to deal other than considerately with the natives with whom he came in contact. Having heard Munster's explanations we told him we would not let him go back again to Lord Howe, and we told him we would put him on Ugi Station, and we must not hear any complaints about him, or he would go.”11 Why transfer Munster to Ugi—now known as Uki Ni Masi Island? Ugi is a small island just north of San Cristobal (now known as Makira), which was a coaling station and trading post on a regular streamer run to the Lever headquarters at Gavutu Island, just north of Guadalcanal, a distance of about 115 nautical miles. So it would be easier for officials to keep watch over Munster, for Ontong Java was among the most isolated of the islands administered by the Protectorate.What prompted Meek's explanation is that Woodford had written to express his alarm that Munster was still in the employ of Levers: “I hear that you have placed him on Ugi, at which place two white men have already in the past lost their lives owing to troubles with native women, and where there is always the likelihood of the recurrence of a similar tragedy.”12 For the generally young white men stationed at these posts, consorting with native women was common and frequently led to conflicts; some, like Harold Markham, married and thus were in a better position to negotiate with the local islanders. Indeed, the trader Joseph Dickinson reflected about this incident with Munster: “It's men like him who have caused well-meaning white men to be killed in these islands. He has been meddling with Makera bushwomen.”13 In reply, Meek expressed a concern for due process and took refuge in the exoneration provided by George Fulton, the assistant general manager of Levers’ Pacific Plantations: Regarding the man you mentioned from the Lord Howe Group:—Mr Fulton asked you if you had heard any complaints about him, and you said no. This man came up to Sydney on a holiday: we did intend not to let him go back to Lord Howe because a report had reached us that he had been rather rough on some of the natives. After listening to his story, and taking everything into consideration, we felt that the report was exaggerated: but we gave him a special warning that we can allow none of our employees to be anything but considerate with the natives. The real reason Mr Fulton asked if you had ever heard any complaint about him was simply to corroborate a complaint that had reached us, and afterwards we felt it was not fair to the man to discharge him merely on suspicion, and you had no complaint.14That Meek was not really sensitive to complaints of this sort is illustrated by appointing Fulton as investigator. In August 1908 on Rendova Plantation, Fulton had asked for a photograph of an island woman, whom an overseer had asked to undress in front of a group of Malaita men. In the ensuing confrontation, the overseer shot and killed one of the Malaitans.15 In the inquiry that resulted, “Fulton attempted to suppress the evidence concerning the photograph”—and thus his own role in the death.16There the matter rested: Munster had been exiled from Ontong Java sometime in 1908 and relocated to Ugi, where the Lever management could keep a closer eye on him. The fact that Levers chose to retain Munster might be explained by a concern for due process, as Meek claimed, but it is also probable that, without more convincing proof, Levers was reluctant to let Munster go because it was difficult to find agents willing to be posted to the remote Solomon Islands, with few creature comforts and the manifest dangers present.As best I can determine, Munster was nominally the agent in charge at Ugi when the London party visited from 2–4 July 1908. Charmian reports that the London party met three people while at Ugi: “Frederick A. Drew, missionary of the Melanesian Society, Church of England” and “one trader, Larry Keefe, [who] are the only white men,” and who had come over from the nearby and larger island of San Cristobal while they were anchored “at Eté Eté, the native village” which is “off to the right of the well-kept, white painted trading station on stilts.”17 That trading station was Langakaula, operated by Levers. Charmian also reports meeting one Mansel Hammond, an Australian trader newly stationed at Ugi, with whom they engaged in some target shooting to intimidate the native population. There were two traders stationed at Ugi, for the Meek letter refers to Munster as “one of our Traders stationed at Ugi.” In his account, Martin Johnson reports that Hammond “had been here one month. The last man got frightened and left, for the natives of Malaita, a very savage island, had come down in canoes and killed nearly every trader that ever set up business here; and he got word from one of his boys that they were coming again.”18 So Munster was not present at this time; Charmian reports that Jack had hoped to meet the trader Jack Larkin at Ugi, whom he had heard about from the trader Tom Butler while at the island of Santa Ana. But Jack Larkin was absent, and it's likely that Munster had accompanied him, whether because of fear or for some other reason.19Nonetheless, sometime that summer Munster had returned, and then commenced the activities that would lead to his deportation, activities that confirm his brutal and lawless character established by “Mauki.” On January 16, 1909, the Levers’ vessel Malekula arrived, under the command of Charles Butchart, to take on copra and deliver supplies. Munster, the worse for drink, was, in Butchart's words, “chasing a Malaita native round the deck, saying he would take his life.” Munster fought with members of the crew, bit one person's thumb, threatened to shoot some natives, and actually fired upon them. Matters escalated, with Munster swearing at the crew and “threatening to shoot everyone in the ship.” Eventually he made his way to shore, where the fighting continued to such an extent that passenger Joseph Dickinson disabled Munster by shooting him in the foot. Thereafter Munster fled to the bush and the ship departed to file a complaint and record depositions in Tulagi.20When Woodford arrived at Ugi to arrest Munster on January 21 on a “charge of firing at natives, assault, and threatening to shoot,” he found “an extraordinary state of affairs,” as he explained in a letter to Charles Major, the Acting High Commissioner.Although Munster protested that he was not aware of the illegal nature of his recruiting, he was “receiving a premium of seven shillings and sixpence per head from Messrs. Lever for each native so recruited. So that this illegal recruiting was certainly sanctioned by the Firm.”21And therein lies the reason for Meek's protestations concerning their employment of Munster. At the time, the Lever company, busily establishing coconut plantations to harvest the oil for their various businesses, had been caught violating four provisions of Protectorate law, among them a prohibition against arming natives and recruiting without a license—and also condoning brutality toward the island population that was so necessary for that business. As Judith Bennett notes in her extensive study of the Solomons, labor conditions on the plantations “were sordid in the extreme,” and “Physical violence was the order of the day on most plantations.” Moreover, “Levers’ European employees were notorious for it” and she proceeds to document a number of revolting instances. The Lever management relied primarily upon young Australian men, “abundant in hopes but deficient in experience,” who “often became unbalanced because of loneliness and took their frustrations out on their laborers.” As a result of labor abuses like those of Munster, in December 1908 Woodford sent Arthur Mahaffy, his assistant, to investigate labor conditions on the plantations, and in his report Mahaffy warned Woodford that Levers’ Australian managers were abusing laborers “in some cases by actual cruelty. It is not to be denied that floggings take place upon some estates, and to put power into the hands of ignorant and prejudiced persons constitutes a real danger.”22The “danger” Mahaffy refers to is that the labor supply was in decline23—indeed, Woodford had lobbied the government to restrict labor recruiting to plantations within the Solomons and to rely on indentured labor from India for the Fiji plantations—and mistreatment of workers acted as a strong disincentive for future recruits. Since Woodford relied upon the plantation economy to generate the funds to administer the Protectorate, he had little patience with companies, like Levers, whose actions undermined his efforts, which explains the testy exchange with Levers’ chairman Meek. When abuses came to light, the typical procedure was deportation, as in the Munster case, rather than prosecution, for legal action required further financial commitment. As a result of Mahaffy's report, in 1910 Woodford established new labor regulations to provide for better, more humane treatment of the labor pool.The trader in “Mauki” was thus based on a man who in many ways epitomized the typical Levers’ employee, and the conditions he describes are historically accurate. London sailed into the Solomons at a pivotal time in its colonial history, a time that, while headhunting had ceased, labor exploitation had yet to be brought under control. The backstory of “Mauki” is of considerable interest for it reveals that, when Woodford was aware of specific instances of labor abuses, he took steps to remedy those abuses.24What happened to Munster? In an effort to rationalize Munster's actions, Meek explained, “We are rather inclined to think that Munster may have been subject to temporary outrageous fits owing to his isolation: he seems to have acted in an insane manner”25—which certainly accords with London's description of Bunster in “Mauki” as “a strapping big German with something wrong in his brain. Semi-madness would be a charitable statement of his condition” (1539). And in his testimony during deportation proceedings, Munster attempted that excuse: “He did not know what he had been thinking. The Captain (Butchart) said in his evidence that he had only one drink in the morning before he left the ship. He had several. He took them when no one was looking. After that he knew nothing. He had had nothing to eat that morning and thinks that that was the reason why it took so much effect upon him.”26 Munster's attempt to excuse his behavior did not work. For his actions on Ugi, Munster was fined five pounds and required to deposit two hundred pounds “as security for his future good behavior”; when he was unable to pay, he was then deported and ordered to pay the expenses of his deportation.27In their accounts of their time on Ontong Java, both Martin Johnson and Charmian London were drawn to the presence of a Melanesian on this island of Polynesians. Johnson describes him as “a Solomon Islander working around the place,”28 while she describes him as a “cook,” and after this single mention in both books “Mauki” disappears. Curiously, here the accounts diverge. She devotes much of the segment devoted to Ontong Java describing their developing friendship with Harold Markham, who had recently arrived to take his post as a trader for Levers. But Johnson never mentions Markham; instead, he identifies the trader as “the Dutchman”: Markham was Australian, so he is not the “Dutchman” of Johnson's account. Neither acknowledges the presence of a second trader. But the manuscript of the story has “Two traders” stricken before the sentence “Not even a white missionary has landed on its shore.”29 When the London party arrived, they met two traders, not one, and Johnson's “Dutchman” was one Schwartz, a German, or a “Deutschman”; Schwartz had been in the employ of the German firm of E. E. Forsayth before Ontong Java was acquired by the British Solomon Islands Protectorate in 1899, and when Markham was hired by the Levers’ company to serve as the island's resident trader in 1908, Schwartz remained as Markham's partner—thereafter he fades from the historical record. Why Johnson nowhere mentions Markham, and why Charmian London similarly does not mention Schwartz, remains a mystery.30So who was this Solomon Island laborer that so struck Jack London's fancy? Or more to the point, who told the London party about his experiences, and how accurate are those experiences? The Londons almost certainly did not learn the details from the person they would call “Mauki.” Charmian London's summary sentence suggests she learned of his story from another, and few Solomon Islanders spoke English (which is why Jack devotes so much time to Beche de Mer English in The Cruise of the Snark). The source was probably “Bob,” an Ontong Javan who paddled out to guide the Snark when it arrived and who figures largely in Charmian's narrative and whom she describes as “a benevolent middle-aged fellow with a tuft of curly hair over each ear and a straggling beard touched with grey [and who] seemed to be a personage.”31Bob was Bobu or Apopu, the Londons’ interpreter, who also served as an interpreter two years later for the German ethnologists Ernst Sarfert and Hans Damm.32 Two photographs from the trip identify Bob as “Mauki,” further sowing confusion, for the two images do not appear to be of the same man. In the photos taken by the Londons, Bob does not have a beard (one is reproduced as figure 2), but in the photo taken by Sarfert, he does (figure 3).As for Mauki's experiences, what readers remember from the story, in addition to Mauki's ill-treatment at the hands of Bunster, is the cook's determination to return to his native Malaita, during which he escapes nine times, and each time after he is caught, he is fined, with the fines coming as time added to his labor contract, so that his initial three-year contract is extended to eight and a half years. Since Charmian London's description of Mauki's so-called crimes repeats the details of the story “Mauki,” it's possible that she is drawing upon the story for this part of her book, as Osa Johnson did later in Bride in the Solomons (1944), her account of her travels in 1917. (In the book, Osa Johnson treats the details of Jack London's story as fact and curiously does not mention that Martin Johnson had traveled to Ontong Java with the Londons and had met Markham previously.)Jack London scholars typically accept his portrayal of Melanesian labor conditions as factual and his descriptions have formed the basis of nearly all discussions of blackbirding and plantation conditions, with some scholars describing Melanesian indentured labor as “slavery.”33 But Melanesian indentured labor was not the same as slavery and to persist in perceiving labor practices as slavery both minimizes the very real differences and impedes understanding of colonial labor practices. Unlike chattel slavery, in which a person owns another who has no consent to location, duration, or manner of labor, indentured labor in the Solomons was largely voluntary and was subject to terms and conditions. We tend to forget that London wrote fiction, and like all fiction writers, he exaggerated and otherwise distorted the facts in pursuit of his fictional agenda—in this story, to magnify the brutality of the colonial overseer and to portray the inner nobility of the laborer. While it is true that a major reason for recruiting laborers from one island to work on another is to prevent laborers from running away—which is a common form of response to ill-treatment—it was not typical, at the time of the Londons’ visit, to fine or mistreat laborers or to extend their labor contracts. First, such actions would serve as a massive disincentive for recruitment since returning laborers naturally reported labor conditions to their fellow islanders. Who would sign up if mistreatment and involuntary extensions were routine? And when abuses came to light, authorities acted expeditiously to address them.While he was in the Solomons, London met the Australian Jack McLaren, who began as a labor recruiter before he became a successful novelist.34 McLaren describes his labor recruiting at Malaita in his memoir My Odyssey (1923). While McLaren notes that some overseers were as brutal as London described them, he also describes the difficulties of persuading islanders to leave their native island: But when their village was lost to sight they regretted having come. They became village-sick. They spent their time wailing that never again would they see their village and their people. They were fools to think of going so far away from home, they said. They begged me to put the schooner about and return.On my refusing, they sulked, and I could see there was likelihood of trouble when they came before the Deputy. If they refused to sign on, I had no power to compel them; the natives were at all times perfectly free to choose whether they would indenture or no. Indeed, I would have to take them back at my own expense, and would probably be rebuked by the Deputy for taking natives away from their villages against their will.35True, McLaren describes an attempted mutiny, but he notes that he was able to quell the mutiny when he explained they would be arrested and jailed and then deported to their island of origin—the usual result of breaking colonial law.By the time of London's adventures in the Solomons in 1908, colonial labor practices had changed and most of the abuses that marked the earlier years of the labor trade—like kidnapping and forms of coercion—had for the most part ended. In 1901 Queensland voted to enact a new law to provide for the “Regulation, Restriction and Prohibition of the Introduction of Labourers from the Pacific Islands”—basically an act to expel nonwhite residents of Queensland as part of a movement to maintain white hegemony. One of the provisions stipulated that, by 1906, all Melanesian laborers were to be deported back to their island of origin.36 These returnees increasingly played an important role in Melanesian society. As Lawrence explains, The trade box, and its contents purchased in the sugar towns, became essential markers of a young man's success overseas. The goods distributed within the traditional systems of reciprocity enabled young men, in a culture dominated by old men, to gain status and prestige. Other social and cultural issues explain why young men signed up for indentured labour. These young men were at an intermediate age when they were often excluded from important religious and ceremonial roles. When bride-price was expensive and controlled by the older men, young men found that the status goods added to their chance to gain a wife. Some men were escaping from punishment for offences committed in their communities and others, especially later in the trade, were keen to learn about Christianity or seek medical care in plantation communities.37While labor recruitment to Queensland had ended, there was still a pronounced need for laborers on Solomon Island plantations, and that need outstripped supply. Laborers who agreed to work on the Queensland plantations were typically attracted by the promise of European goods, the novelty of travel, escape from conflict at home, treatment for illness, and/or increased status. As Peter Corris remarks, “Only the actions of those men who were kidnapped in the early 1870s, and the very young men who went at the urging of their relatives in the closing years of the [Queensland] trade, cannot be explained in these ways.” Corris concludes, “By the 1890s labor recruiting itself had become an initiation of a sort, an experience which a young man needed to go through in order to be considered a sophisticate.”38At the time of the Londons’ visit to the Solomons, the return of approximately four thousand Melanesians had been completed,39 and the islands w