The Collaborative International Dictionary
Blackbirding \Black"bird*ing\, n.
The kidnaping of negroes or Polynesians to be sold as slaves.
The act or practice of collecting natives of the islands near Queensland for service on the Queensland sugar plantations. [Australia]
Wiktionary
n. (context UK Australia English) The practice of kidnapping Pacific Islanders, or kanakas, for sale as cheap labour.
Wikipedia
Blackbirding is the coercion of people through trickery and kidnapping to work as labourers. From the 1860s, blackbirding ships in the Pacific sought workers to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands in Peru. In the 1870s, the blackbirding trade focused on supplying labourers to plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland and Fiji. The first documented practice of a major blackbirding industry for sugar cane labourers occurred between 1842 and 1904. Those "blackbirded" were recruited from the indigenous populations of nearby Pacific islands or northern Queensland. In the early days of the pearling industry in Western Australia at Nickol Bay and Broome, local Aborigines were blackbirded from the surrounding areas.
Blackbirding has continued to the present day in developing countries. One example is the kidnapping and coercion at gunpoint of indigenous people in Central America to work as plantation labourers in the region, where they are exposed to heavy pesticide loads and do backbreaking work for very little pay.
Usage examples of "blackbirding".
Pressing ahead with his blackbirding under the very nose of a Survey Service ship… He's always prided himself on being able to keep just on the right side of the law.
I sailed in the teak-built ketch, the Minota, on a blackbirding cruise to Malaita, and I took my wife along.
Originally a teakbuilt, gentleman's yacht, brass-fitted, copper-fastened, angleironed, sheathed in man-of-war copper and with a fin-keel of bronze, she had been sold into the Solomon Islands' trade for the purpose of blackbirding or nigger-running.
My story would be that I had recently forsaken African blackbirding in favour of river dealing -- I had all the expert knowledge for that, at any rate.
There is wild talk of cannon aboard, and of strange raids and expeditions she may make, ranging from opium smuggling into the States and arms smuggling into China, to blackbirding and open piracy.
I had had some experience in blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus.