Burns Philp and Co was a shipping company established in the 1870s to facilitate trade around the coast of Australia. In the early 1880s they secured the mail contract to service New Guinea to the north. The Scottish owners quickly acquired a fierce reputation as hard businessmen and the company was soon widely known as "Bloody Pirates". In 1884 the canny Scotsmen advertised the first tourist cruise from Sydney to Port Moresby. The round trip was promoted as a sideline to their trading activities. It was such a success that within two years they had published the first tourist guide to the region and had included Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides into their cruise itineraries. This paper details how the South Pacific cruise experience was developed in the late nineteenth century by Messrs Burns and Philp and describes their influence on the region's tourism development and tourism imagery.