Featured prominently in our collection of Settle petitions, Judge Roger Greene heard a devastating account of abduction, abuse, and confinement from Fannie Fowle on November 21, 1885. Fowle swore that British Captain George Finlayson had taken her hostage from her home in New South Wales, Australia, that she tried to escape his ship in Hong Kong and repeatedly thereafter even though he beat her and called her his slave.
Fowle’s horrifying condition only became known after Finlayson’s crew sued him in Seattle’s admiralty court for breach of contract and abusive treatment. Their habeas petition is also in our database. When officials inspected Finlayson’s clipper ship, they reportedly found Fannie in his cabin, although none of the seamen mentioned her in more than 100 pages of documents chronicling the ill-treatment they endured while working for Finlayson from Hong Kong to Victoria to Seattle. The local paper described Fowle’s ordeal as “an exceptional case,” and revealed what her habeas corpus petition obscured. Fannie Fowle was Aborigine, likely from the Dharawal region of New South Wales, near where George Finlayson had married into an elite family with convict origins in Australia. Finding herself trafficked throughout the nineteenth-century Pacific Imperial trade that connected British colonial projects in Australia, China, and Canada to American colonial projects in the Pacific Northwest, Fannie Fowle suffered abuses that modern-day Indigenous women who have survived human and sex trafficking in the US-Canadian borderlands describe in American and Canadian courts and crisis centers today.
Our research has yet to yield more information about the outcome of Fannie Fowle’s ordeal since the legal records fail to document her whereabouts after she escaped Finlayson’s captivity. For his part, Captain Finlayson survived the charges with his reputation and routine intact, and he left Seattle in his clipper ship with high regards. A few weeks later, local press reported that his ship had nearly wrecked outside of San Francisco, but that their friend and his cargo had held up remarkably well. Finlayson would continue to practice his trade until 1889, when his boat did wreck on the shores of Hong Kong, all of his cargo lost to beach combers.
We can only imagine Fannie Fowle’s fate, wondering about the choices she might have made in 1880s Seattle. Perhaps she traveled north to British Columbia, by then a commonwealth partner to the British crown that had also claimed her people in Australia. Or did she find other options among the transnational laborers she had known on Finlayson’s boat, themselves from China, Spain, Ireland, and the United States? Like many of the extraordinary women in this database, she disappears from the record too soon.
