
thumb|300px|In 1869, seized the blackbirding schooner and freed its passengers, who were bound for Queensland, Australia.
thumb|300px|In 1869, seized the blackbirding schooner and freed its passengers, who were bound for Queensland, Australia.
Blackbirding was the trade in indentured labourers from the Pacific in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is often described as a form of slavery, despite the Slave Trade Act 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire, including Australia. The trade frequently relied on coercion, deception, and kidnapping to transport tens of thousands of indigenous people from islands in the Pacific Ocean to Australia and other European colonies, often to work on plantations in conditions similar to the Atlantic slave trade. These blackbirded people, known as Kanakas or South Sea Islanders, were taken from places such as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, Easter Island, the Gilbert Islands, Tuvalu and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, amongst others.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).