blackbirdern.

1876 A. M. Cameron New S. Wales i. 13 The men..by whom these places are chiefly visited, viz. the traders in island produce, captains of labour ships, and (in former years) the ‘black-birders’.

1880 Bulletin (Sydney) 17 Apr. 4/3 Three well-known ‘blackbirders’, alias Government labour agents.

1883 All Year Round 22 Sept. 355 Blackbirders, the kidnappers for labour purposes on the islands of the Pacific.

1890 Fortn. Rev. Jan. 52 The Solomans,..the favoured resort of the ‘black-birders’, the purveyors of contract labour, slave-catchers in all but name.

1907 Hansard's Parl. Deb. 4th Ser. 169 215/1 Recruiting agents under licence were no more blackbirders than captains in the British Mercantile Marine were beachcombers.

1926 Glasgow Herald 4 Mar. 8 The man was captured by ‘black-birders’ and sold into slavery on a Virginian cotton plantation.

1978 Amer. Speech 53 177 Assorted blackbirders..recruited them as indentured laborers.

2000 E. Hunt et al. South Pacific 747/1 The villagers..didn't hesitate to attack the whalers,..missionaries and blackbirders who landed on their shores.

1880 H. S. Cooper Coral Lands II. xvii. 249 A ‘blackbirder’ called the Anna..came to Onoatoa,..and a great number of the simple-minded natives went aboard.

1888 W. B. Churchward ‘Blackbirding’ in S. Pacific 163 That chap whose throat I cut on board the blackbirder.

1920 F. Coffee Forty Years Pacific 30 The most renowned ‘black-birder’ in the Pacific, the Sydney Bell.

1927 Blackwood's Mag. Apr. 518/1 Recruited by a Government brig and not by an illegal blackbirder.

2003 E. Thomas John Paul Jones (2004) i. 22 A slaver, the King George, out of Whitehaven, a ‘black birder’ in the cruel jargon of the time.