| Notes |
- The Man Who Was Reputed to be King: David Dean O'Keefe
Francis X. Hezel, SJ MicSem Articles | Historical
David Dean O'Keefe, a tall, burly Irishman with a temper to match his flaming hair, was a successful 19th century copra merchant based in Yap with a trade circle that encompassed western Micronesia. In the eyes of many Westerners, however, he was much more: he was reputed to be a king. Even before his death in 1901, after thirty years of commercial dominance in the area, the man had begun to assume mythic proportions. Georg Hoff, a Norwegian fortune-seeker whom O'Keefe hired just before his death at sea, wrote with awe of his employer that he 'has gradually taken possession of one island after the other, so by now they are his property and no can take them from him. He has unlimited favour down there and is called "The King of the Cannibal Islands"'.1
The fictionalised biography by Klingman and Green a half century later, His Majesty O'Keefe, echoes these tales while coloring the popular understanding of the man ever since.2 True to its title, this book presents O'Keefe as ruler of the Micronesian islands in which he traded - 'King of Yap, Monarch of Mapia, Sovereign of Sonsorol'.3 An article in a New York newspaper two years after his death assured its readers that 'O'Keefe was the ruler of thousands of people. They were untutored and savage, but they revered him, and his law was theirs'.4 If monarchs require thrones, O'Keefe had one 'and enjoyed all the privileges and pleasures that properly appertain to royalty', not to mention a 'standing army of twelve naked savages'.5 His wealth may have been due in great measure to his success as a merchant, but it was steadily increasing 'through the gifts of his half-savage subjects'.6 With press notices like these, small wonder that O'Keefe's descendants were visiting Yap to claim his fortune for fifty years after his death.7
The island of Yap, the headquarters of his trading emporium, was in the last quarter of the 19th century a confluence of Western and Asian commercial interests and political aspirations. According to Klingman and Green, O'Keefe dominated these interests as easily as he did his 'half-savage subjects'.
The Dutch were dumbfounded by him; the Spaniards feared him; the Germans hated him; the British mistrusted him; the Japanese blackguarded him. His own country, the United States, ignored him until after his death; had it not, the history of the late Pacific war might have been vastly different.8
O'Keefe was in his own day well known in Pacific trading circles, but he gained legendary status following his death.9 The myth has eclipsed the man. Because many details of his life remain obscure, I was obliged to refer to Klingman and Green's half-fictional account twenty-five years ago as I was writing my history of precolonial Micronesia.10 This article, then, is an attempt to rescue O'Keefe from the tangle of legends and half-truths that grew up around him, often the result of his own artifices, and to recover the man who played such a central role in the early Micronesian copra trade.
David Dean O'Keefe was born in southern Ireland in 1824, according to the US immigration document.11 Like many of his compatriots who struggled through the potato famine, he looked across the Atlantic for the opportunities that were denied him in his own country. Soon after his arrival in New York in March 1848 aboard the Sir Robert Peel, he moved to southern Georgia where he took a job laying railroad ties. Soon tiring of this, he turned to the sea as his livelihood, working his way up from an apprentice seaman aboard windjammers to a captain's berth on a Savannah coastal steamer. Rumour had it that he was engaged in blockade running during the Civil War when Union ships cordoned off Southern ports.12 Was it to mislead the victorious forces and obscure his shady past that in 1867, just two years after the war, he claimed in an affidavit that he was only 24 years old - supposedly too young to have held command of a hostile vessel?13 Whatever the reason, this was just the first of many self-serving fabrications.
O'Keefe continued to skipper cargo ships out of Savannah - as master of the trading schooner Anna Sims in early 1866, and a year later as skipper of a British schooner engaged in three-way trade with Nassau and Matanzas, a province of Cuba.14 His cargo was rum and sugar in a trade cycle that would in an earlier day, have included slaves from West Africa. O'Keefe's shipping run would have brought him to semi-tropical islands covered with coconut palms, a harbinger of and perhaps an enticement to the life that he would soon be living.
A few years later, in April 1869, O'Keefe married Catherine Masters, a slight woman nearly twenty years younger than him, but possessed of a fiery temper, as she is remembered in Savannah. If these recollections are accurate, family life must have been tempestuous for O'Keefe, who was hotheaded and explosive himself. The couple soon produced a daughter whom they named Louisa Veronica. Lulu, as she was called, wore a patch over her right eye because of a childhood accident and reportedly inherited her parents' choleric disposition. Years later she married a semi-professional baseball player named Frank Butler, who eventually deserted her.15
Even before his marriage, in February 1866, a disaster occurred that would change the course of O'Keefe's life: the killing of a crew member aboard his ship, Anna Sims. As the Savannah papers record the incident (quite differently from the way it is represented by Klingman and Green), an argument broke out after O'Keefe accused the sailor, William Geary, of some minor infraction and angrily struck him. According to the newspaper accounts, Geary then gave his captain 'a severe thrashing'. O'Keefe picked himself off the deck, rushed to his cabin for his pistol, and as he emerged tried to fire at the offender. Twice the pistol failed to discharge: Geary rushed at O'Keefe before he fired again, but was stopped by a bullet to the forehead.16 O'Keefe was imprisoned in the county jail, where he remained for eight months before he was acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defence. The incident made O'Keefe none too popular around the wharves of Savannah, and there was speculation that he was marked as a target of revenge by the family of the sailor he had killed.17
O'Keefe may have had difficulty getting work after his release. From short notices in the papers, it would appear that he was reduced to ferrying well-to-do townspeople to vacation spots on day-excursions.18 His finances must have been none too good, for he had lost a considerable sum in a failed investment.19 He was wary of American law courts, perhaps even disenchanted with the American justice system, as his identification of himself as a British national in his affidavit of 1867 suggests. Overall, life was bleak for O'Keefe in late 1866. He struggled on for a few more years before, in 1871, he decided to leave Savannah and seek his fortune elsewhere.20
With little fanfare, O'Keefe shipped aboard the Belvidere, bound for New York and Liverpool, as first mate. He stayed with the ship when it sailed for Manila and might have continued to serve if he had not had differences of opinion with the captain. In Manila he caught a ship bound for Hong Kong, arriving in September 1871. From Hong Kong he informed his wife that he planned to return to Savannah very soon and sent her a gold draft for $167, while mysteriously urging her not to inform people that he had left the Belvidere.21
According to the story that had gained currency in Savannah, O'Keefe had drifted to Yap, washing up half-dead after the Belvidere was wrecked in a storm.22 The truth is less dramatic, but more revealing. O'Keefe sailed from Hong Kong on a trading voyage in early October 1871, but was had to return because of a storm and the death of its captain.23 O'Keefe told his wife that he was planning another short voyage and had to 'repair some before I start again on our home'.24 In what should have been a hint as to the direction of his thinking, he asked Catherine to send his master's license. Clearly less homesick than three weeks earlier, he was weighing commercial possibilities in Asia with an eye to making the money there that he could not earn in Savannah.
In June 1872, O'Keefe, employed by an individual named Field, with his headquarters in Hong Kong, wrote to Catherine again, informing her that he was preparing to make a trade run with a cargo of teas and silks on which he stood to make a profit of five or six thousand dollars. He had been given a ship by his employer, the first he had ever owned. If his trading venture was successful, he added, he expected to be home by Christmas.25 In fact, he was home by Christmas, or shortly afterwards - not in Savannah, but in the small island of Yap that would be his residence for the next thirty years. By late 1872 or very early 1873, he had arrived there on a Chinese junk named after his wife, to begin trading.26
O'Keefe was not the first white trader on Yap. During the previous decade Andrew Cheyne and Alfred Tetens, trade captains in the China market, frequently visited the island group to gather b
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1824 - 1901 (77 years)
