Captain Bully Hayes was, in real-life, a ship Captain called William Henry ("Bully") Hayes, who sailed in the South Pacific Seas during the mid nineteenth century, until he was murdered in 1877.
The term "blackbirders", used in the movie, is a nineteenth century alternate expression for a form of slave-trading, where people were recruited for laboring through trickery and kidnapping, the practice was common in the South Seas, where this movie was set, and filmed. The movie's production notes define blackbirders as ''slavers''.
Sets constructed for this movie included an entire Fijian native village, a full Samoan business port of the late 1800s, the transformation of a fishing vessel into a sinister steam-powered German gunboat, rope bridges across dangerous ravines, as well as vicious and lethal sacrificial set-ups.
In the 1970 biography "Captain Bully Hayes: blackbirder and bigamist", Frank Clune stated that the real William Henry Hayes was often described as a "rogue, villain, cheat, swindler, barrator, buccaneer, bilker, bigamist, freebooter, polygamist, seducer, murderer, pirate, slave trader, robber, rapist, hooligan, and bully", but was "never convicted in any civil court of law for any serious criminal offense."
In real-life, Captain William Henry Hayes (a.k.a. "Bully" Hayes) was born around 1827-1829, and lived until 1877 when he was aged around forty-eight to fifty. Hayes has inaccurately been described by some writers as "the last of the Buccaneers".