Nate and Hayes

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.

Whilst it is true that this film was not a box office success, it may be unfair to blame the public completely for it. Paramount studios had agreed to bankroll this medium budget project, which was being filmed thousands of miles away in New Zealand. When the studio were presented with the final cut of it in the summer of 1983 they were concerned at some of the stylistic similarities with Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (which had proven to be a huge hit for Paramount two years previously). During the summer of 1983 Steven Spielberg was already in pre-production with the Raiders sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) with a view to it being Paramount's tent-pole release for the summer of 1984. Not wanting to have two old fashioned swashbuckling adventure films released within a year of each other for fear of effecting the advertising, publicity and box office potential of the Spielberg film (and remember Harrison Ford was a hugely popular star by this point whereas Tommy Lee Jones was practically unknown), Paramount Pictures decided to cut their losses and give this film only a small, relatively publicity free release, to meet contractual obligations. It was released in the fall of 1983 where it would go unnoticed, sandwiched between the likes of James Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983) and the Clint Eastwood thriller Sudden Impact (1983). The Indiana Jones film was subsequently released just over half a year later where it was, unsurprisingly, a huge hit, earning back more than ten times its budget.

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."

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.