John Williams of Ohio

John Williams led a wandering, lonely life. A Black American born in Ohio in 1860, he arrived in New Zealand as a young man, probably as crew on a sailing ship. (His occupation was listed as ‘sailor’). He first came to the attention of police in 1882 when he stole several items from a bag on Dunedin’s Rattray Street Wharf: three blankets, some boots and shoes, two pairs of serge pants, ‘an oilskin coat, sou’wester hat, monkey jacket and three Crimean shirts’.

A Crimean shirt and a monkey jacket.

Williams received a sentence of two months’ labour for his troubles, and was set to work helping to building a road near Portobello. He and thirty-three other prisoners slept overnight in a prison hulk, the remains of the topsail schooner Sarah and Esther that lay at anchor in various places in Otago Harbour. One morning a prisoner named Luckhurst reported Williams to the warder:

I found the accused in my bunk under the bed clothes, he had my shirt pulled up & my drawers down nearly to my knees when I awoke. I know it was the accused, because I spoke to him. I said ‘what are you doing there?’ He said ‘hold your tongue I’d like to go for you, I will give you half a stick of tobacco tomorrow’. It was then I knew it was accused by his voice. I said ‘get out you dirty black brute’.

Williams was charged with ‘attempting feloniously, wickedly and against the order of nature to carnally know one George Luckhurst’. He suggested he had been set up by the other prisoners who conducted a whispering campaign against him. The jury at the Dunedin Supreme Court agreed, and he was acquitted.

A number of prison hulks in Otago Harbour, though none is Sarah and Esther.

But that was not the end of it. Williams embarked on a life of larceny, and was often caught. By 1887, when he was charged with theft in Dunedin, he was said to have racked up twelve convictions. This time a judge sent him down for two years with hard labour. Once released, he wandered slowly up the South Island, and we can track his movements by his subsequent arrests. In May 1889 a five year prison term was imposed for housebreaking in Oamaru. Williams was released early, and in 1893 he broke into another Oamaru house. He received a further five years in jail. He was out by 1895, stole in Christchurch, and was locked up for six months. Another break-in, this one in Timaru in 1897, earned him a four year sentence. And he got six months for theft in Waimate in 1905.

Timaru in about 1900.

Williams collected aliases: at various times he claimed to be John Allen, John Brown and John Green. It seems incredible, given the number of times he was arrested and jailed, that he never had a photograph published in the Police Gazette, but there were notes on his appearance. He was 5 foot 4 inches in height and had black eyes, black complexion, a ‘flat’ nose, large mouth, large chin, and black hair. As time went on, his curly locks turned grey. The Gazette described Williams as ‘a negro’. There were few African Americans in New Zealand at the time; the 1916 census enumerated only 95 in the whole country.

Williams personified the social atomisation that Miles Fairburn writes about in his book The Ideal Society and its Enemies. Many nineteenth-century settlers were scattered across the countryside, and many a fellow was ‘a “man alone” in the sense that his associations tended to be few and fleeting’. Often there were no kinship ties to rely on; all of Williams’ family members remained in America. Some men with homosexual interests found their way into loose social networks, even during the nineteenth century, but Williams was not one of these men. He had neither the requisite cultural nor social capital and, given Luckhurst’s comments in the prison hulk, we can speculate on the wider impact of racism on Williams’ experience. Like many of the other male immigrants Fairburn writes about, he wandered from place to place looking for work and company.

'His mark': those who could not write were able to sign official documents with a cross. This is at the end of Williams' transcribed statement in the 1883 Dunedin trial for sodomy.

Williams eventually found the latter, but it cost him his freedom once again. In 1905 he was sentenced to life for ‘committing an unnatural offence with a European named Frederick Jordan, at Claremont’. Williams and eighteen-year-old Jordan got to know one another while tramping around the Timaru district ‘in search of work’. It is not clear how their sexual relationship came to the attention of the authorities, but two farm workers appeared in court as witnesses. The judge, unimpressed, said Williams ‘appeared to be a man who had determined to live in defiance of law and of society, and having been now convicted of one of the most degraded and disgraceful of crimes known to the law, and apparently from his conversation this was not the first time he had polluted the lives of young men with detestable practices, he deserved the maximum penalty, imprisonment for life’. Williams was sent to Paparua, at that time a prison farm, near Christchurch.

He was let out on license in 1918, stole again in 1919, and was recalled. This time he would be locked up at New Plymouth Prison with several dozen other prisoners convicted of having sex with other males [see here]. Williams worked in the quarry, but by the early 1930s his health was failing: he had dropsy and a deformity of the left hand. The medical officer kept an eye on him, and the jailer noted that Williams ‘had not been allowed to work for the last 18 months though always willing to do so’. John Williams died of heart failure on 8 April 1933; another prisoner sat with him during his final hours. His life had been tough, but he was afforded a modicum of care right at the end.

Sources:

Brickell, C. (2010) ‘Sex, Space and Scripts’, Social and Cultural Geography, 11(6), 597-613.

Brickell, C. (2012) ‘Man Alone or Men Entwined’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, NS 13, 11-33.

Davidson, J. (2023) Blood and Dirt, 52-53.

‘Don Juan: Life’s Journey O’er’, https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC80321 

Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies, 161.

John Williams, Trial File, DAAC D256 281 22, 1883, Archives NZ.

John Williams, Coroner’s inquest, 1933, R23858583, Archives NZ.

Police Gazette, 23 August 1883, 133; 4 October 1882, 156; 8 August 1883, 140; 2 January 1889, 5; 13 February 1889, 31; 22 May 1889, 98; 3 May 1893, 78; 24 June 1896, 110, 20 December 1905, 452; 18 May 1918, 300.

Southland Times, 5 November 1917, 4; Taranaki Daily News, 10 April 1933, 6; Timaru Herald, 15 September 1905, 4.

Carl Walrond, ‘Africans in New Zealand’, https://teara.govt.nz/en/africans/page-1