TWO

Missionary Martyrs of Melanesia

If the South Seas cannibal epitomized human savagery for many Victorians, the murders of missionaries on remote Pacific islands served to ennoble Britain’s most potent export. This is not to say that British Protestantism found receptive audiences throughout the Pacific. Nor is it the case that missionary sacrifices abroad silenced domestic ridicule of this work. At the start of the nineteenth century, the Reverend Sydney Smith’s dismissal of Baptist missionaries in Bengal as “little detachments of maniacs”1 echoed a broader skepticism about the allocation of spiritual resources. Due to their labors among the “cannibal isles,” South Seas missionaries drew more than their fair share of such gibes. It was again the irreverent Reverend Smith who in 1841 advised George Selwyn, missionary bishop of New Zealand, to placate man-eaters with this gustatory disclaimer: “I deeply regret, sirs, to have nothing on my own table suited to your tastes, but you will find plenty of cold curate and roasted clergyman on the side-board.”² Toward the end of the century, the equally acerbic Oscar Wilde assured his dinner guests that “missionaries are the divinely provided food for destitute and underfed cannibals.”³ The missionary in the cannibal pot, as we have seen, was likely a comic assault on evangelical earnestness.

Beneath these caricatures of the missionary enterprise, however, lie serious questions about nineteenth-century religious organization, its role in extending Britain’s imperial reach, and the reception of Christianity in Pacific island communities. Prior to the 1990s, the tendency within mainstream British imperial history was to marginalize missionary activity—and indeed the place of religion—in the grand narrative of Western expansion.⁴ Intriguingly, Bernard Porter, whose widely read text The Lion’s Share treats religion as an analytical afterthought, has more recently insisted that “imperial ideas, values, assumptions [and] prejudices” left few marks on metropolitan culture, and “scarcely touched” its working-class majority.5 Porter’s claim is a monument to selective research. For it conveniently ignores the essential parts that chapels, churches, and missionary societies played in linking the preoccupations of core and periphery.⁶

Where missionaries have been taken seriously, they tend to be seen either as the first wave of colonial exploiters or as blessed toilers in the vineyards of the lord. Both views are reductionist. When John Comaroff called nineteenth-century British missionaries in South Africa “the vanguards of empire and its most active ideological agents,” he wisely recognized temperamental differences among these agents.⁷ A “proto-Marxian” variation on this theme holds that missionaries introduced indigenous peoples to Western notions of work-discipline by dangling material goods in front of them: to buy these goods, natives would need money, and money could be earned only through regular (“civilized”) labor.⁸ The inescapable fact, however, is that many British missionaries did not fit the description of “colonizers.” Missionary motives often differed from those of colonial administrators, soldiers, and explorers. Missionaries sometimes harbored theological doubts about colonial authority. And even when spiritual belief meshed with colonial aims, the saving of souls demanded close contact with indigenous peoples. Missionary and “native” worked side by side in the same schools, chapels, gardens, and villages—or, so often throughout Oceania, sat crammed together in the same battered whaleboats. As Susan Thorne has observed, “This degree of intimacy was a clear violation of the segregationist proclivities of those within the colonial community, for whom racial difference reconciled Britain’s liberal pretensions and imperial interests.”⁹ The empire of Britain and the empire of Christ often diverged.

Britain’s missionary thrust outwards to, and beyond, the edges of empire has also been framed as a chapter in the triumph of global Christianity. This interpretive pole likewise reduces cultural complexity and distorts lived experience. Victorian tales of missionary “heroes,” a staple of popular publishing, typically blended hagiography with exotic particulars of savage lands. As reliable historical sources they are dubious, erasing signs of ambition and exalting acts of self-sacrifice. Indeed, so pervasive was the evangelical preoccupation with atonement for personal sin that these missionary paeans often seem nearly interchangeable.¹⁰ They flatten personalities and homogenize courage. Yet they should not be dismissed as mere propaganda, although religious (and often imperial) propaganda they surely were.¹¹ What ought to give historians pause is the reality that some British missionaries, crowned “heroes” in the nineteenth century, are still revered in non-Western Christian communities. Twenty-first-century Indians accept the Baptist William Carey as a driving force behind the Bengali cultural renaissance; Jamaicans continue to honor William Knibb and other Baptist missionaries who denounced slavery at great personal risk.12

When personal risk led to death, missionary “heroes” often became “martyrs.” At least in the western Pacific, these paragons of Christian commitment often command great respect today. This writer was struck by the affection with which worshipers in Fiji’s largest Anglican church regard J.C. Patteson, the first missionary bishop of Melanesia, butchered at the hands of revenge-minded Islanders in 1871. On 17 September 2006, the clergy of Suva’s Holy Trinity Cathedral led their congregation in an opening prayer:

God of the southern isles and seas, we remember with thanksgiving your servant John Patteson, whose life was taken by those for whom he would freely have given it.¹³

The killings of three British missionaries who sought to evangelize the “southern isles and seas” were widely noted in their own day. For white audiences, their murders confirmed the benighted state of Melanesian peoples. The missionary societies that had sponsored these men capitalized on their deaths to plead for greater public support. Some evangelically disposed individuals, black and brown as well as white, were inspired by such self-sacrifice to enter the mission field themselves. But most noteworthy, the violent fates of John Williams, Thomas Baker, and J.C. Patteson encouraged even some of the unchurched to reflect on the frontier conditions that had, to a considerable extent, ordained their deaths.

HERO, MARTYR, FANATIC

The label “martyr” was applied almost as loosely in nineteenth-century British society as it is in the jihad-stained present. Etymological precision, for example, never stopped the Victorian foes of “medical despotism” from lauding their “martyrs of conscience”—namely, all those parents who endured repeated fines or jail for refusing to let their young be vaccinated against smallpox.¹⁴ Similarly, when street gangs rewarded Salvation Army speakers with insults, kicks, and black eyes, the latter often welcomed such abuse as tests of their faith.15 Christ, the original martyr, had been “faithful unto death.”¹⁶ And Christ’s own words appeared to consecrate suffering: “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad: for great shall be your reward in heaven” (Matthew 5:11–12).

Meanings migrate, of course, and charting their migrations can be revealing. Although the Encyclopaedia Britannica cannot be taken to represent the full range of literate opinion, its understanding of “martyr” is suggestive all the same. We read in the seventh edition (1842) that a martyr is “one who lays down his life . . . for the sake of his religion.” The root word, we learn, is Greek and “properly signifies a witness.” So in its early Victorian sense, “martyr” denotes one who “suffered in witness of the truth of the gospel,” and connotes a “singular constancy and fortitude under the most cruel torments.”¹⁷ For the comfortable classes of mid-Victorian Britain, more economically secure but probably also more skeptical of mass enthusiasm in any form, martyrdom possessed a darker side: “From this high estimation of the martyrs, [early] Christians were sometimes led to deliver themselves up voluntarily to the public authorities—thus justifying the charge of fanaticism brought against them by the heathen.”¹⁸ Self-sacrifice was not suicide, a distinction that Christ himself made: “When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next” (Matthew 10:23). In the eleventh edition of the Britannica (1910–1911), the cautionary note sounds more clearly still: “While the honour paid to martyrdom was a great support to early champions of the faith, it was attended by serious evils. . . . Fanatics sought death by insulting the magistrates or by breaking idols, and in their enthusiasm for martyrdom became self-centered and forgetful of their normal duty.”¹⁹ Then locked in a naval arms race with Germany and therefore acutely aware of the damage that rash action could cause, Edwardian Britain would have found such qualification only prudent.

Never stable, the political and cultural values bound up with the notion of martyrdom nonetheless constituted a core feature of British, and especially English, national identity. A.G. Dickens once pronounced the “Smithfield Fires”—the burning of Protestant heretics during the brief reign of Mary I (1553–1558)—as “the least English episode in our history.”²⁰ Whether those martyrs who went to the stake were, in fact, “earnest and good and rather stupid fanatics” may be debated.²¹ But no doubt surrounds two features of the Marian burnings: first, that the sufferings of the condemned were recounted in gruesome detail; and second, that this record of spiritual integrity would become a defining element of English Protestantism for the next 350 years. When John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, popularly known as the Book of Martyrs, appeared in 1563, its stories of Protestant constancy in the face of Catholic torture served to support the fragile religious settlement of a young Queen Elizabeth. Constant himself, the Reverend Foxe guided three more editions (1570, 1576, and 1583) through to publication, each more imposing than the last. Foxe’s death scenes would soon be seared into the English Protestant mind.22 They emphasized sublime courage, not miraculous intervention; in the images that accompany some editions of the Acts and Monuments, Foxe’s human candles stare out at the reader rather than toward heaven. Climate compounded the horror. For any reader (or listener) born under English skies would have understood that the odds of being burned with damp kindling were excellent.

The moral of these stories—that Providence had smiled on England because her people had remained steadfastly Protestant—did not elude nineteenth-century audiences. Foxe’s threnody was reissued four times between 1837 and 1877.²³ Victorian evangelicals thus possessed not only Christ’s example of steadfastness but also that of their Tudor forebears. As late as 1868, a magazine for young evangelicals warned its readers about the modern designs of a Catholicism that had, three centuries earlier, burned, chopped, hanged, and buried alive faithful Protestants.²⁴

The gradual secularization of self-sacrifice was reflected in a tendency to conflate heroism and martyrdom. Samuel Smiles, described by his editor as “the authorized chronicler of the men who founded the industrial greatness of England,”²⁵ encouraged this conflation. “Real heroism,” according to Smiles, involved suffering, “patiently and enduringly borne.” Delayed gratification, in both the material and the spiritual realms, was thus the sweetest success. “Courage,” Smiles maintained, should be a badge reserved for sustained grace under pressure. Finally, a “martyr” designated a special sort of courageous person, one whose influence is “magnetic,” one who “creates an epidemic of nobleness.” In the medieval past, William Wallace had been a martyr for Scottish freedom, Jeanne d’Arc for the preservation of France.²⁶

In the Victorian present, the towering hero-martyr was the missionary-turned-explorer David Livingstone. Livingstone’s life epitomized Smilesian virtue. From his humble childhood working in a cotton mill, Livingstone (1813–1873) made his way, care of the London Missionary Society, to Africa, where for thirty years he won lasting fame as Britain’s greatest “missionary pioneer.” Livingstone was both less and more than he appeared: certainly less humble about his exploratory feats than an adoring public wished to believe; probably more concerned about promoting lawful commerce in East Africa to undercut the Arab slave trade.27 The good doctor did not die a true martyr’s death in the sense of suffering fatal violence for the sake of his faith. He was discovered in his tent kneeling by the side of the bed, head buried in his hands: Livingstone “died in prayer,” or so his acolytes would declare.²⁸ But if the death was peaceful, the life had been heroically hard. The first European to cross Africa from coast to coast, Livingstone nearly lost an arm in a lion’s jaws, suffered repeated attacks of dysentery, and, most disturbing for a man of tender conscience, endured the spectacle of Africans being dragged off to the slave markets of Zanzibar. Livingstone knew the qualities that a “missionary leader” must possess. “He ought to have physical and moral courage of the highest order, and a considerable amount of cultivation and energy, balanced by patient determination; and above all there [is] necessary a calm Christian zeal.”²⁹ In the idiom of Samuel Smiles, “calm Christian zeal” became, simply, “uprightness.” Since “rational progress” was deemed to be the sum of individual uprightness,³⁰ it followed that David Livingstone was a martyr of British commerce as well as British Christianity.

Perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds connected the otherwise very different paths of Livingstone and the Victorian Pacific’s missionary heroes. Unlike the Livingstone legend, the narratives emanating from the South Seas featured spectacular physical violence.³¹ Charges of cannibal desecration in two of the three cases studied here added a whiff of the grotesque to Oceanic martyrdom that no other mission field could match, although agents of the Lord were murdered around the globe. (Actually, the most lethal posting for British missionaries was Patagonia, where a large proportion of the few agents sent there succumbed to violence.³²) The superior piety attributed to missionary martyrs could be linked to a fatalism that seemed to teeter between selflessness and monomania. In St. John Rivers, Charlotte Brontë gave literary voice to the doubts about such a calling. The Reverend Rivers is “[z]ealous in his ministerial labours, blameless in his life and habits . . . yet did not appear to enjoy that mental serenity, that inward content, which should be the reward of every sincere Christian and practical philanthropist.” When the brooding Rivers fixes on a missionary future in India, his moral unease dissolves into calm certainty. As Jane Eyre realizes, this is an unnatural calm, “inexorable as death,” since the young clergyman seemed to know that his name was “already written in the Lamb’s book of life.”33 So the death wish imputed to some missionaries tainted their sacrifice.

But the South Sea martyrs of Victorian times were more often praised than faulted for the risks they took. Their collective story was a “romance,” an account redolent of “the adventurous and chivalrous.”³⁴ This missionary romance masked three underlying truths, however. First and most significant, the typical Pacific “martyr for Christ” died without ever having glimpsed Britain. Indigenous preachers, recruited mainly from the Polynesian islands, were the everyday evangelists throughout Melanesia. Methodist Tongans carried the gospel to Fiji; Samoans, “themselves just rescued from the darkness of idolatry,” formed an advance guard in the turbulent New Hebrides; and Raratongans led the way for the London Missionary Society in New Guinea.³⁵ These brown mediators between the white missionaries and the black heathens of the western isles occupied an intermediate status within the Pacific’s hierarchy of otherness.³⁶ And “native teachers” in the Pacific (the title “missionary” being reserved for Europeans) endured terrible hardships for their faith. An English explorer sniffed in 1885 that the LMS’s Raratongan teachers stationed at South Cape on the Gulf of Papua seemed to move as “little kings” among the people they had come to convert.³⁷ The price of authority was nonetheless high. Of the 250 LMS teachers deposited along the fever coast of southeastern New Guinea during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, at least 130 died, some violently. The mortality of their kin will never be known. Arguably the most poignant example of Polynesian devotion to the missionary cause in New Guinea was that of Ruatoka, a Cook Islander. Shortly after Reverend James Chalmers was murdered in 1901, this elder wrote to his white supervisor begging to be reassigned: “In that place where they kill men, Jesus Christ’s Name and His Word would I teach.”³⁸

Two further facts qualify the Pacific missionary romance: not all martyrs were male, and some were not even Protestant. Melanesia could boast no equivalent of Mary Slessor (1848–1915), the Scottish shoemaker’s daughter who, inspired by Livingstone’s example, spent the last four decades of her life as an iron-willed Presbyterian agent (the “Queen of Okoyong”) in upcountry Nigeria. The Society for Promoting Female Education in China, India and the East dared not send its single women into the Pacific.³⁹ But the wife of a Presbyterian pastor on Erromango Island in the New Hebrides, Mrs. Gordon, suffered the same “fiendish” mutilation by tomahawks as her husband.40 More commonly, missionary wives in Melanesia faced the prospect of pathetically short lives, both for themselves and their children. Margaret Cargill was comparatively fortunate. Becoming “a new creature in Christ” at age twenty, she went out with her Methodist husband to Fiji and was dead at thirty, four of six children surviving to mourn her. Mary Williams outlived her murdered husband John, although not before enduring six failed pregnancies and contracting feefee, a parasitic precursor to elephantiasis.⁴¹ If the evangelization of Melanesia was built upon the graves of Polynesian pioneers, missionary wives sustained it.⁴²

Although Catholic efforts to save souls in the western Pacific started later and remained far more geographically limited than the Protestant competition, they produced their own corps of martyrs. Had these Catholic campaigns been British, they would have generated anxiety enough. But much worse, they were French. In Britain, therefore, scant sympathy greeted the news that a Marist priest, Father Peter Chanel, had been axed to death on Futuna, an isolated speck of land located northeast of Fiji, in 1841.⁴³ Four years later, Bishop John-Baptist Epalle, the grandly designated Vicar Apostolic of Micronesia and Melanesia, dealt unwisely with the denizens of Santa Ysabel, in the Solomon Islands group. Leaving aboard ship the green tassels on his hat “so as not to excite the greed of the natives,” but failing to stop them from cleverly dousing his muskets with seawater, Bishop Epalle also earned an axe to the head.⁴⁴ Halting though they were, these Catholic steps into the western isles struck some British Protestants as a grave challenge. The Methodists, for example, held that only aggressive proselytizing on unvisited islands could halt this “Romanist” advance.

Easily the most aggressive of the Pacific’s Methodist agents—and a useful reminder that some British missionaries refused to water Melanesia with their own blood—was George Brown (1835–1917). Like Charles Frederick Mackenzie, the Anglican missionary bishop of Central Africa, Rev. Brown did not hesitate to kill those who threatened his converts. However, unlike Bishop Mackenzie, who could at least justify his guns as the only practical defense against “slave-hunters,”⁴⁵ George Brown’s most controversial act reeked of revenge. Based for fourteen years in Samoa, Brown dreamt of extending the Wesleyan creed to the remote island of New Britain, just east of New Guinea. The dream became a reality in 1877 when, accompanied by Fijian teachers, Brown and his wife settled on New Britain’s Gazelle Peninsula. Unfortunately, a local big-man resented this new presence. Concerned about his monopoly over the supply of European trade goods to the island’s interior, “Taleli” ordered four of the Fijian teachers to be dispatched and consumed in what one Wesleyan journal called “horrible cannibal repasts.”46 Rather than wait for a man-of-war to shell the offending district, Rev. Brown led a raid that torched Taleli’s hamlets, wrecked his food stores, and shot “several” (perhaps as many as eighty) of his subjects. This was, to say the least, a “novel pastime for a missionary entrusted with the dissemination of Christian religion.”⁴⁷ Exeter Hall, epicenter of British evangelical philanthropy, denounced the raid. Australian Methodists, who had funded the push into New Britain, wrung their hands. But Brown stood unrepentant. Insisting at his subsequent trial for manslaughter that he had done no more than was “absolutely necessary” to protect his flock, he escaped punishment.⁴⁸

It would be foolish to suggest that the sins of maverick missionaries such as George Brown, or for that matter the exemplary acts of evangelizing “martyrs,” impressed British citizens at home as deeply as they did indigenous peoples abroad. Yet it would be no less foolish to dismiss the possibility that dramatic accounts from the mission field did much to familiarize ordinary Britons with colonial issues.⁴⁹ Granted, to show that large expenditures were made on behalf of a cause is not necessarily to show society-wide support for that cause. The radical writer Harriet Martineau, no friend of Exeter Hall, noted that in 1855 alone, foreign and colonial missions had consumed nearly half a million pounds, not including the cost of translating the scriptures.⁵⁰ Perhaps this enormous sum signaled no more than the religious commitment of a middle-class minority? It may also be true that during much of the nineteenth century Britain’s churches demonstrated “heroic insensitivity” toward both subject peoples far off and the poor under their noses. Many among the British working classes were, in fact, geographically illiterate and downright hostile to the pieties of religious visitors.⁵¹ Did praise for missionary martyrs therefore fall on deaf ears?

The answer depends on where one looks for evidence of evangelical influence. Religious literature was unavoidable in nineteenth-century Britain. Tracts were flung from carriage windows, passed out at railway stations, delivered to jails and hospitals, dispensed in army barracks. Henry Mayhew’s “wandering tribes”—the costermongers, navvies, and sailors—no doubt turned few of these pages.⁵² But many among the self-described “respectable” working classes probably did.53 Their children, moreover, often attended Sunday schools and joined juvenile missionary societies. The parent organizations had early on recognized the effectiveness of poor children as fundraisers. Tellingly, when in 1824 the London Missionary Society moved its popular Missionary Museum to Austin Friars in the City of London, it aimed to impress boys and girls with the degraded state of heathen lands: chief among the “singularly interesting objects” on display were the “horrible IDOLS” that South Sea islanders had relinquished (Figure 2.1). The Museum literally brought home the exotica of empire, helping to instantiate Pacific savagery for a metropolitan audience.⁵⁴ Two generations later, a London boy’s most vivid childhood memory was that of a missionary collection box “with a picture of a nicely dressed missionary standing under a coconut palm surrounded by a crowd of very respectable brown people.”⁵⁵ These collection boxes were ubiquitous. The small sums they attracted individually yielded tens of thousands of pounds for evangelical causes. The young thereby gained a proprietary interest in the conversion of “savages,” a process made all the more compelling when children were told, for example, that the first native preacher from Raratonga had at one time baked his enemies.56 Methodists in Bradford understood that the salvation of heathendom meant a long war; new troops would need to be constantly recruited. Hence the “main feature” of their Juvenile Missionary Society involved “training the young, almost from their very birth, to a love of Missions, Missionaries, and Missionary efforts.”⁵⁷ Central to this indoctrination was the spellbinding tale of the missionary martyr.

Figure 2.1   Museum of the London Missionary Society, circa 1859. Its collection of “horrible idols” from the South Pacific proved especially popular with evangelical patrons. Source: Illustrated London News (25 June 1859).

SOURCE: Courtesy, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

JOHN WILLIAMS: AN ENTERPRISING DEATH

The London Missionary Society, first among Britain’s evangelizing groups to reach the Pacific, needed a hero whose exploits could restore public confidence in its work. John Williams (1796–1839), a second-generation LMS agent, became that hero. By 1816, the year that Williams and his wife left London for the South Seas, his sponsor had already suffered several embarrassing failures there. Like the Baptists before them (1792) and the Anglicans after them (1799), the Congregationalists who dominated the officially nondenominational LMS (1795) were products of the great eighteenth-century evangelical revival. British evangelicals, whether “dissenting” Protestants—Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians—or members of the “established” (Anglican) Church of England, shared common spiritual values: an insistence on the fact of personal sin; a belief in the individual’s capacity to be born again through divine grace; and a recognition of the need for continuous self-examination lest the soul be waylaid on its path to salvation. For most evangelicals, the “good news” that salvation could be attained despite innate human corruption imposed a sense of joyful obligation, a powerful impulse to spread that news. Theological differences, as for example over the proximity of the millennium, did exist.58 But such differences paled in importance beside the overwhelming enthusiasm with which nearly all evangelicals tackled the job of conversion.

Unfortunately, in their haste to save the “perishing heathen” of the South Seas, agents of the London Missionary Society left Britain thoroughly unprepared for the conditions that awaited them half a world away. These agents, mostly pious working-class men who were expected to “civilize” the benighted Islanders as well as evangelize them, had been taught to expect success. On 24 September 1795, Rev. Thomas Haweis, one of the founders of the LMS, had addressed three hundred ministers and “an immense concourse of people” in Surrey Chapel, clothing “marvelous facts in the dazzling embellishments of an impassioned eloquence.” His marvelous facts demanded action. After all, South Pacific skies were “always serene.” Heathen governments would be easy to deal with since they “seldom” resorted to violence. Because “religious prejudices” were weak in Oceania, and because “[e]very guilty creature feels the necessity of atonement, in some shape or form,” conversion would be swift. The languages of the South Seas were, moreover, “simple” to learn.59 Apparently neither Rev. Haweis nor any other LMS worthy pondered the possibility that some of their agents might be slaughtered while proclaiming God’s word. Thus, the thirty missionaries and their families who cast off down the Thames on 10 August 1796 sailed with confidence. They had a godly captain in James Wilson, a sturdy ship in the Duff, and a shared sense that their mission would be an evangelical version of Cook’s triumph.⁶⁰

Six and a half months after leaving London, the Duff sighted Tahiti. Providential promise soon vanished in a public relations nightmare. Captain Wilson landed seventeen of the missionaries, including all the married couples, on Tahiti. The “natives” clung to their idols. The missionaries, although sheltered by the robustly heathen king, Pomare I, could not feed themselves. Temporarily abandoned in 1808, the first Tahitian mission failed to save a single soul.

Meanwhile, the Duff had sailed on to Tonga and the Marquesas, depositing agents in both island groups. These missions proved still more ineffectual, collapsing in 1800 and 1799, respectively. Adding scandal to incompetence, the Tongan episode featured two LMS men who settled down with indigenous women and three more who were murdered after rashly choosing sides in a local civil war. Such fecklessness was not the stuff of martyrs.⁶¹ When the Duff set out on her second voyage in late 1798, she was captured by a French privateer. Her evangelists were packed off to France, only to be recaptured, this time by the Portuguese, upon their release. It may have been the case, as one advocate insisted, that such disheartening accounts “tended doubtless to increase the interest” of Dissenters in the missionary cause.⁶² But it is certainly true that the tone of LMS propaganda changed perceptibly over the course of its first twenty years. By the time that John Williams ventured into the Pacific in 1816, the assertive confidence of Reverend Haweis had given way to reminders that “patience and perseverance” marked the successful missionary.63

For several years after John Williams settled on Raiatea, his sponsor continued to draw sharp criticism. The LMS could take comfort from its organizational growth over the first quarter of the nineteenth century, growth nourished by numerous “auxiliary societies” that sprang up throughout England, especially in the industrial North. Then too, after a new Tahitian king, Pomare II, spurned his idols in 1816, the LMS could at last point to tangible progress in its assault on Oceanic unbelief.⁶⁴ But such headway was slow, expensive, and, according to some reports, threatened to transform a once-joyous people into righteous prigs. Captain Otto von Kotzebue, leading a Russian voyage of discovery, spent eleven days near the LMS settlement at Matavai Bay during the early spring of 1824. Kotzebue repaid the missionaries’ hospitality with what they saw as malicious lies. In A New Voyage Round the World (1830), the Russian explorer blasted the faith he encountered on Tahiti: “A religion which consists in the eternal repetition of prescribed prayers, which forbids every innocent pleasure, and cramps or annihilates every mental power, is a libel on the Divine Founder of Christianity.”⁶⁵ First, Europeans had brought disease and alcohol to paradise; now, under LMS direction, they were banning the flute, native dance, long hair, and tattooing. Rephrasing Kotzebue, a modern indictment declares, “Smash went everything that stood in the way of Jehovah and English customs as the missionaries waged a war against Satan that knew no quarter.”⁶⁶

To the dismay of British evangelicals, Satan, in the form of French Catholicism, eventually crowded the LMS out of Tahiti. Yet the Society’s defenders clung to the belief that missionaries were meant to wield “a power over the [indigenous] people.”⁶⁷ Charles Darwin, by no means a religious zealot, extolled the civilizing force of the LMS. Impressed with the “merry, happy faces” of the Tahitians surrounding him at Papiete, Darwin lashed out in late 1835 at those critics who “expect the Missionaries to effect what the very Apostles failed to do.” The shipwrecked sailor “on some unknown coast,” Darwin famously observed, “will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the Missionary may have extended thus far.”⁶⁸ Actually, the shores of such island groups as Tonga and Samoa had by then been cleared of those who might once have dined on the shipwrecked. This had been the work of English Methodists and self-directed Islander evangelists—not, as the LMS wished to claim, through its own exertions.69 Still, the Society’s best-known agent had personally visited Samoa in 1830, and the growing fame of Rev. John Williams did not encourage measured praise.

The story of Williams’s modest roots—the London ironmonger’s apprentice whose “blind eyes” opened to “God’s law” at seventeen⁷⁰—fascinated his contemporaries and has continued to intrigue modern scholars. The latter have generally emphasized Williams’s liminal social status. He was, supposedly, one of those marginal men in their own cultures who achieved social distinction back home by breaking idols abroad. In the most ideologically charged reading of this story, Williams belonged to a “dominated fraction” of the “dominant class,” ever eager to elevate himself.⁷¹ Certainly John Williams was both personally ambitious and hyperactive. But his roots were petit bourgeois, not proletarian. Through his apprenticeship he learned the commercial side of the hardware business, “exempt[ing] him from the manual labour of the forge and the furnace.” What impressed his contemporaries is that Williams’s “mechanical instinct” (as Samuel Smiles phrased it) was the product of curiosity, not necessity. He loved to handle tools: Williams so enjoyed the “practical arts” that he often volunteered for labor “such as could neither be asked nor expected of him.” This eagerness to “don [the] workman’s apron” was the evidence of a superior mind. Allied with a spiritual compulsion to convert the pagans, it would soon make Williams an evangelical legend.⁷²

The legend began to build on Raiatea. Located 120 miles northwest of Tahiti, Raiatea was a mountainous, reef-encrusted riot of green. When Williams and his wife crossed its beach in September 1818, the island was home to roughly 1,500 souls. According to the LMS instructions that Williams would have read, the defining feature of most Polynesians was sloth. With fish in the lagoon, fruit overhead, and root crops thriving in rich volcanic soil, the Raiateans supposedly knew not the stimulus of want; they were, as the poet William Cowper imagined, “inert through plenty,” the “victims of luxurious ease.”⁷³ Williams therefore viewed it as his duty to demand changes of habit as well as of heart. Hence by building his family a comfortable home, the missionary aimed to rouse the “imitative faculties” in his flock. The resulting object-lesson was a fine, seven-room house overlooking the harbor that boasted solid wood framing, walls plastered with coral lime, shady verandahs, a spacious flower garden, and a full complement of handcrafted furniture. It was literally an awe-inspiring example. And it served its purpose. For gradually, the Raiateans abandoned their “sordid huts” in the interior and built European-style homes near the shore.74

Although still in his early twenties, John Williams yearned to tread a wider stage. His declaration to LMS headquarters in 1823—“[F]or my own part I cannot content myself within the narrow limits of a Single reef”⁷⁵—could be interpreted as the ravings of a megalomaniac or, alternatively, as a cry of frustration with the cheeseparing caution of LMS headquarters. The available evidence suggests that whatever his private fantasies may have been, Williams regarded the question of expansion as a fundamentally practical matter, one whose imperatives were as familiar to the prudent businessman as to the evangelical in a hurry. On 7 June 1820, less than two years after reaching Raiatea, Williams informed the LMS directors that his talents were being squandered: “I know that one soul is infinitely more valuable than my body or a thousand bodies, but how does the merchant act who goes in search of goodly pearls? Supposing he knows where there is one pearl which would pay him for his trouble, and he knows where there are thousands of equal value, to which place would he direct his course?”⁷⁶

Williams’s course, he decided early on, lay to the west, among those island groups where sailors still feared to sail. Any such mission would require a ship, however. The first attempt to secure one ran afoul of Williams’s London masters. In 1822, while on medical leave in Sydney, the enterprising missionary bought a small schooner, the Endeavour, partly with an inheritance from his mother. This vessel would, Williams reasoned, pay for itself by carrying island-grown tobacco and sugar to market in Australia, while still leaving time to explore the pagan western isles. Uneasy with the way Williams had involved the LMS in commerce, headquarters forced him to sell the Endeavour in 1823. Four years later he resumed his nautical quest under very different circumstances. This time Williams found himself temporarily stranded on Raratonga, the largest island in the Cook Group, a “splendid” place that he (mistakenly) claimed to have “discovered” and on which he had landed Raiatean teachers.⁷⁷ Now, in 1827, Williams sought a way back to Raiatea. His solution was to build a ship from the materials at hand. Williams would later claim that he “yielded” to the wishes of his Raratongan hosts and allowed them to help with the unskilled portions of the job. But the construction of the sixty-foot Messenger of Peace in just fifteen weeks was mostly a feat of ingenuity. Wooden pins sufficed for nails; a mixture of coconut husks and dried banana stumps served as caulking; hibiscus bark made first-rate rope; and the fiber mats on which the Islanders slept, much enlarged, became sails.78 A fellow LMS missionary lauded Williams’s “perfect genius for mechanical contrivance.”⁷⁹

The myth of the self-sufficient man resonated powerfully in an ever more interdependent British economy, and Williams fully understood the atavistic charm of his Pacific regime. No man was an island, but some islands could draw out the best in men. As for the missionary and his people on remote isles, “it must be at once obvious, that the simplicity of the means used two or three hundred years ago would better suit both his condition and theirs than the improvements of modern times.”⁸⁰

By the time John Williams returned to London aboard a whaling ship in 1834—the first glimpse of his homeland in nearly eighteen years—much had been accomplished on Raratonga. The “repulsive deformity of rude idolatry” had been banished, as had polygamy. The sincerity of the conversion experience among some Raratongan men was demonstrated by confessions of cannibal pasts.⁸¹ The Tongans and Samoans had joined the Protestant fold, if not always as Congregationalists. Only dangerous Melanesia remained beyond Christian reach.

Before Williams could attack that last bastion of sin, however, there was a reputation to enhance at home. It would be unduly cynical to say that no British missionary worked harder than John Williams to win applause if one did not add that he probably could not distinguish between his personal fame and the health of the Pacific mission field. While his three sons acclimated to city life and his wife recuperated from years of poor health at their lodgings in Bedford Square, London, John emerged as a star on the lecture circuit. Some of the same LMS leaders who had once chided their man for his blinkered devotion now colluded in his celebrity. For the best antidote to critiques of LMS policy in the South Seas was the magnetic appeal of Williams on a public platform. There, his abrupt phrases, “sonorous” voice, and command of the telling detail packed chapels, town halls, and private chambers.⁸² He seldom spoke for less than an hour, often five times per week, reportedly with undiminished “freshness of feeling.” The talk he gave at Birmingham late in 1834 would become his set piece. The text was Psalms 74:30—“The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.” After flattering local benefactors, Williams put flesh on the “pitiable condition of the degraded heathen” by telling of his longtime servant, a woman who before embracing Christ had specialized in strangling unwanted babies while they “writhed in her arms.” At Hull, Williams “awakened the greatest interest” and opened the pockets of local merchants who were then battling a trade depression. At Glasgow, in late 1835, he aroused “unusual excitement” with his scheme to evangelize the New Hebrides. At Bristol, he breakfasted with the future penal reformer Mary Carpenter who, along with several other young ladies, judged him to possess a “gift of tongues.”83 After his widely read Narrative of Missionary Enterprises appeared in April 1837, his demand as a speaker soared. Williams, now the LMS’s most compelling public figure, became a fixture at both branch (“auxiliary”) festivities and the parent body’s carefully choreographed annual general meetings.⁸⁴

The furlough lasted nearly four years (Figure 2.2). During that time he not only spoke incessantly but also published his manuscript of the New Testament in Raratongan; testified before Parliament’s Select Committee on Aborigines (during which appearance Williams maintained that even completely “degraded” savages were “capable of receiving instruction”); and basked in the praise for his new book.85 Missionary Enterprises sold 38,000 copies, in various editions, over five years. Illustrated by the evangelical printmaker George Baxter, it soon became the most popular portrait of the South Seas since Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784).⁸⁶ It appealed to several audiences, armchair scientists and dry-land sailors as well as staunch evangelicals. Both Lyell and Darwin welcomed the missionary’s account of the exceedingly slow formation of coral reefs. The ethnographically inclined applauded Williams’s willingness to let his Islander informants “speak for themselves,” a noteworthy anticipation of modern fieldwork practice however naïve its claim to unmediated reportage.⁸⁷ Williams could not bear to let his book speak for itself. The first edition, a handsome octavo priced at twelve shillings, was dedicated to the King. The LMS directors gave their famous agent fifty copies, all of which, accompanied by personal letters from Williams, were presented to members of the British elite. Princess Victoria received her copy one month before she ascended the throne.⁸⁸

Figure 2.2   The ambitious Reverend John Williams. In 1823, Williams warned LMS headquarters, “I cannot content myself within the narrow limits of a Single reef.”

SOURCE: Ebenezer Prout, Memoirs (1843).

The mighty, as well as the readers of the later cheap editions, learned that Williams had fixed his gaze on the “several millions” of savages who supposedly occupied “Western Polynesia.” Here, in New Guinea, the Solomons, the New Hebrides, and Fiji, where “copper-coloured” peoples gave way to the “negro race,”89 he would labor last and best—provided, of course, that a proper ship could be found. The LMS leadership forbade Williams to petition the central government directly (because “public property” should not finance private ventures), but, in a peculiar suspension of that same logic, allowed him to solicit the Corporation of London. Its resulting grant of £500 proved to be the largest of a great many gifts totaling nearly £4,000. With this sum the LMS bought and fitted out a 200-ton brig, the Camden. This became the Society’s first missionary vessel, although Williams irked some of his coworkers by treating it as his personal ship.⁹⁰ All that remained was to orchestrate a rousing exit.

That send-off surpassed even Williams’s expectations. On 8 October 1837, he delivered a sermon at Surrey Chapel entitled “The Missionary’s Return.” There is something “transcendentally sublime” in the missionary spirit, he reminded the congregation, since it “regards the globe . . . as its parish.” In his own future parish, the persistence of “horrible cannibalism” was “enough to make the missionary weep.” But such painful facts at least made plain the “contrast between your mercies and their miseries.”91 Six months later it was the missionary’s farewell that transfixed evangelical London. “There is in fact no observance on earth more heart-stirring than that of the . . . sending forth of missionaries to the heathen,” Harriet Martineau would concede in 1856.⁹² This certainly proved true for the metropolis in the spring of 1838. Williams’s packed last speech at Moorfields Tabernacle on 4 April gave him the chance to wonder out loud whether he would ever see his birthplace again, whether he would be “entombed in the ocean” or sent to rest “among the graves of my children.”⁹³ The Camden lay moored at the West India export dock, open to viewing by the Christian public. “Immense throngs” inspected her.⁹⁴ By 11 April, departure day, the Camden had been moved downriver to Gravesend. To board her, the missionary party took a steam launch from London Bridge. Reverend Williams waved to the “multitudes” lining the wharfs and eastern walls of the bridge, and was gone. When Robert Moffat, LMS agent among the Bechuana tribes of South Africa, reached London on furlough in early June of 1839, the “missionary heart of England” was still “stirred to its depths” by the figure of John Williams.⁹⁵

What Rev. Moffat could not have known was that his brother missionary had then just over five months left to live. The Camden’s passage to Australia proved uneventful, as did her subsequent visits to LMS settlements on Samoa, Raratonga, Tahiti, and Raiatea.⁹⁶ Several nineteenth-century accounts of Rev. Williams’s last days find dark portents. There was, above all, the final sermon at Upola, Samoa, where Williams, his mind “beclouded with a presentiment of coming danger,” took as a text Acts 20:36–38, Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian Elders.⁹⁷ The disaster that did in fact befall Williams at the New Hebridean island of Erromango on 20 November 1839 is more difficult to understand today than it was during the Victorian era. We know that he exercised caution when approaching reputedly hostile shores, as for example when he reconnoitered “Savage Island” (Cook’s name for Niue) around 1830. Yet his landing at Erromango seems to have been the one time when he approached a strange island without either Polynesian teachers or returning locals to smooth the way.⁹⁸ One reconstruction of events suggests that Williams blundered into a coastal community then preparing to hold a religious feast, thus annoying Islanders who already associated white men with the rapacious sandalwood trade. But this is conjecture, and in any case LMS agents were apt to blame the crews of commercial vessels for much “native” violence.99 We can be reasonably sure that as the whaleboat containing Williams, his fellow missionary James Harris, and seven more men rowed toward the head of Dillon’s Bay, it neared a canoe holding three Islanders. These appeared “wild” and “extremely shy”; their refusal to come closer and accept gifts signaled further cause for concern. Yet Williams would not wait. He is alleged to have told the Camden’s captain, just before wading ashore, “You know, Babel was not built in a day—if we can only make a good impression now, we must be content to do a little and come back another day and leave teachers.”¹⁰⁰

These words, if indeed they were uttered, do not portray John Williams as a man courting death. But die he did, along with James Harris, when club-wielding natives rushed them from the bush that fringed a steep and stony beach. George Baxter’s color print of their slaying vastly exaggerates the number of attackers and strategically poses Williams in the surf to recall images of Cook’s death.¹⁰¹ The senior missionary’s body, riddled with arrows, could not be retrieved. An eyewitness (and near victim) of the attack, William Cunningham, vice consul at Sydney, later lamented that had those in the whaleboat possessed a single musket, Williams could have been saved.¹⁰² But perhaps better that he had died a righteous death, better that, in the hero’s own words, his “happy spirit” had “quit its tenement of clay.” It was very rare, the Evangelical Magazine pointed out, “that any death produces the deep, the general, the thrilling impression which that of Williams did.” Theologically speaking, sorrow for the mere man was “profitless.” Yet his “blessed enterprise” would presumably inspire other workers to still nobler triumphs.¹⁰³

The relics of Victorian Britain’s first missionary martyr largely vanished into rumor. His clothes were stripped from the body and the corpse hauled into the bush as his friends watched helplessly from the whaleboat. At the end of February 1840, a British warship dispatched from Sydney sailed into Dillon’s Bay; its captain was assured that both Williams and Harris had been eaten. All that remained of the former, it appeared, was his skull and a few bone fragments, buried shortly thereafter at Apia, Samoa. The authenticity of even these few bits would be cast into doubt a generation later when descendants of the original killers confessed that their kin had simply handed over random bones scattered across a native burial cave. A club, reputedly the instrument of death, found its way back to the LMS’s Missionary Museum in London—where for a generation it bore mute witness to the corporal fact of Christian sacrifice.¹⁰⁴

Mainly, though, what endured of John Williams was a legend. His wife, Mary, whose grieving retreat to London fascinated the evangelical press, prolonged interest in her husband’s fate.105 His name lived on, gracing LMS ships in the Pacific from 1844 until 1971. Rural districts back home grew accustomed to the “John Williams Missionary Van” spreading the good news at a statelier pace. He would long be compared to both Cook and Livingstone. Williams would serve as the model of male mechanical savvy for R.M. Ballantyne’s juvenile classic The Coral Reef (1858). And, tragically, he would inspire three more white missionaries to be butchered on the same deadly island. “Alas poor Williams,” one prescient LMS agent exclaimed in April 1840: “It appears he was the arch deceiver.”¹⁰⁶ We cannot know what the indigenous people of Erromango thought of Rev. Williams, or of those who followed him to an early grave. We certainly should not assume, as the hagiographers do, that their deaths enhanced the prestige of Europeans in Islander eyes. “[T]hose wild eyes that watch the wave / In roaring round the coral reef” (as Tennyson conceived the Pacific savage) may well have viewed such risk-taking as foolish.¹⁰⁷ There can be little doubt, however, that the apotheosis of John Williams did much to advance the missionary cause at home and abroad.

THOMAS BAKER: ALL BUT HIS BOOTS

No subsequent missionary martyr in the Pacific achieved the fame of John Williams. Indeed, one of them, Thomas Baker, died largely unmourned by his natal land and has only now resurfaced as a Victorian curiosity, a hapless trigger of unintended consequences. Born in England, reared mostly in New South Wales, Baker would meet a gruesome end in the mountainous center of Viti Levu, Fiji’s largest island. His name appears in few biographical dictionaries; his murder excited comment mainly in Methodist periodicals and a few Australian newspapers. But Baker’s death, more than that of any other Victorian messenger of grace, has framed discussion about what “Christian duty” entailed in the British Pacific.

Thomas Baker arrived in Fiji on 25 April 1859, keen to enlarge the Christian foundation that his predecessors had so laboriously built. Two months earlier, upon learning that the Australasian Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society would send him to toil in this notorious den of vice, Baker had been elated. To Fiji, he told his diary, “I have felt my spirit irresistibly drawn, and now I have my hearts desire. My glory rejoiceth.” Then, as if worried that these islands had already been domesticated beyond the point of salvific challenge, Baker added, ominously, “May I not be disappointed.”108 It is useful to keep in mind that by midcentury such evangelical exuberance was hardly typical of the average Australian settler—or, for that matter, of the average citizen back in Britain. Just seven years before Baker set foot on Fijian soil, Charles Dickens had lampooned the “telescopic philanthropy” he saw sustaining much missionary work abroad: Mrs. Jellyby could in good conscience lavish time and money on the Africans of “Borrioboola-Gha” yet ignore the perishing classes all around her.¹⁰⁹ One month after Baker’s mission began, a London newspaper attacked “cannibal-civilizing societies” in general, and the LMS in particular, for wasting “enormous sums” on the conversion of “barbarians.”¹¹⁰ Plainly, the fate of John Williams had not silenced the critics of foreign missions.

But Thomas Baker had become a Methodist, not a Congregationalist, and in Fiji at least his brand of Dissent had made remarkable progress. The early Methodist agents in Fiji understood the value of a lurid tale. Sir Edward Belcher, captain of HMS Sulphur, had predicted in 1840 that the tiny band of Methodist brethren then at work on Lakemba, Viti Levu, and Taveuni “will find these people far beyond their powers.” The Fijians that Belcher had encountered were “at the present moment far too ferocious to submit to any restraint.”¹¹¹ The Methodist pioneers, however, saw this ferocity as their raison d’être. In his 1838 “Appeal to the Sympathy of the Christian Public, on Behalf of the Cannibal Fegeeans,” Reverend James Watkin merely teased. These savages, he lamented, were “enslaved by vices too horrid for minute description.” The Reverend David Cargill was less coy. In a letter to mission headquarters in London dated 2 July 1838 but not published until October of the following year, Cargill sought to shock:

Let your ears be pierced with the dying groans of strangled widows, and the wild shrieks of the victims of a horrid superstition, who are either roasted alive, or otherwise cruelly murdered. Paint to your imaginations the awfully horrifying spectacle of multitudes of human beings fattened and slaughtered to be roasted and eaten! Look at enraged warriors cutting out the tongues of their fallen enemies, and eating them raw! See some of them quaffing the still reeking blood, and proudly retaining the skull of their vanquished foe as a drinking vessel!¹¹²

If a more debased people cried out for conversion, they were not of this world.

It may be generally true, as one historian has argued, that the tenets of the evangelical revival remained at midcentury “but a dim light in the conception of the [South Sea] islanders.”113 In Fiji, Thomas Baker’s first impression—“there seems to be a very great lack of heartfelt religion”—appears to support this generalization.¹¹⁴ But for Baker, as for his predecessors in Fiji, imperfect faith demanded greater resolve. Methodists embraced John Wesley’s “Arminian” form of Protestantism, one that stressed the role of free will in the attainment of grace. This was the motor of both Methodist optimism and Methodist anxiety. For those who could win divine forgiveness through moral self-discipline might also, through spiritual complacency, revert to a state of sin. The fear of backsliding expressed itself in several ways, not least importantly in the expectation that Methodist missionaries would welcome hardship. Jabez Bunting, for eighteen years secretary of the Wesleyan Missionary Society in London (and a stranger to empathy in almost any form), set out four “maxims” for his agents abroad:

1. A missionary ought to be able to live anyhow and die anywhere.

2. The missionary will not be murdered though he may be assassinated.

3. All persons taken into the work for mission stations are to remain abroad for life.

4. So long as a missionary has no wife the heathen people must have no gospel.¹¹⁵

Bunting, it should be added, never entered the foreign field.

Those who did often endured severe trials, especially in Fiji. Ever since their late eighteenth-century emergence as a distinct Protestant community, Methodists had worried that they were making “too great advances towards conformity to the world.” Seeking to avoid moral enervation, their leaders as early as 1792 had decried dancing school instruction for children, “superfluity” of dress for adults, the consumption of alcohol, and all “unprofitable conversation.”¹¹⁶ Exhorted to shun outward forms of vanity while constantly scanning the soul for signs of wavering faith, the pious Methodist missionary could rarely have felt comfortable in his own skin. During much of his ten years in Fiji (1838–1848), John Hunt, perhaps Methodism’s most effective emissary there, was haunted by a sense of his own worthlessness. Another agent, probably the Reverend Thomas Jaggar, wondered in 1844, “I am this day 30 years of age. How many of these have I spent in the service of the wicked one?”117 David Cargill, among the first missionaries in Fiji, broke under the psychic strain. His wife and two children having died, Cargill sought oblivion in brandy and later, fatally, in a bottle of laudanum. Methodism’s pioneers in Fiji earned scorn from some European observers. For example, both the missionaries’ rigid opposition to Islander polygamy and their almost hysterical suspicion of the Catholic presence in Fiji drew fire.¹¹⁸ More often, criticism came from white traders, a scattered community whose commercial hub in the 1850s and ’60s was Levuka, on the island of Ovalau, where mammon appeared to rule. If mainline Methodism grew more receptive to imperial values toward the close of the nineteenth century, its Fijian agents treated “trade” as a dirty word. Such primness infuriated planters, merchants, and Levuka’s small tradesmen.¹¹⁹

Despite their peculiar blend of sanctimony and self-doubt, however, Methodist missionaries transformed the religious face of Fiji. In some of its foreign arenas, such as among Native Americans west of the Mississippi, Methodism’s advance proved slow and uneven.¹²⁰ Among the fabled “Cannibal Isles,” it exceeded all expectations. The intrepid Cargill and Cross had arrived in 1835; a generation later, 106,000 Fijians out of an estimated indigenous population of 120,000 were thought to be regularly attending public worship. In 1867, the year of Thomas Baker’s death, 481 Methodist chapels and 238 “other preaching places” dotted the archipelago. By 1922, a resident magistrate could reasonably declare that “Wesleyanism, to all intents and purposes, occupies the position of the established religion of Fiji.”¹²¹

Here, then, was a Christian triumph to which a godly young man like Thomas Baker might cleave. Whether he was temperamentally suited to the work in Fiji is another matter. Rev. Walter Lawry, General Superintendent of Methodist missions in New Zealand, visited both Fiji and Tonga in 1847. His tour prompted Lawry to reflect on the two “classes” of men who should “never dream of entering upon South Sea Mission work.” The first, he held, were “those who feel a thirst for popularity, and who would like to shine before the people.” The second sort of misfit was he who had been “bred and cooped up all [his] days in artificial society,” a stranger to rugged travel and the carpenter’s plane.¹²² Thomas Baker may have been safe on the second score but not, unfortunately, on the first.

What we know about Baker’s route to the islands derives largely from a diary he began on 25 August 1850, eight months after his conversion at the age of seventeen. Through this evangelical lens only the outline of a poor, emigrant childhood can be glimpsed. Thomas, born on 6 February 1832, was the second of five children in a “humble class” family whose breadwinner was a carpenter. Just short of the boy’s seventh birthday, his father decided to leave their parish of Playden, near the East Sussex town of Rye, and start over in Australia. The rough passage from Gravesend to Sydney seemed to confirm Mrs. Baker’s fears about the move: en route, her eldest child was swept overboard. The bereaved family reached Sydney on 17 March 1839. Illness soon descended on Thomas and his parents, and carried off two new babies. Eventually, though, health returned, the family moved to the “Glebe” (then a southwestern suburb of Sydney), and the parents joined a local Methodist meeting. Alas, just as Mr. and Mrs. Baker were discovering the depths of their depravity, their son rebelled, “being led captive by the Devil.” At the age of fourteen, Thomas abandoned Sunday school and turned to taunting outdoor preachers. “Next came night walking, and from that to smoking and the ale house and gambling, swearing, fighting.” But the life of a young rough left Thomas “miserable beyond degree.” Apprenticed to a shoemaker, he relinquished most of his profligate ways and “found myself in a spider’s web, quite secure.” Mere security could not ease his “sin burdened conscience,” however, so Thomas’s search for spiritual peace continued until midday on 1 December 1849, as he was walking up a hill. Recalling the Hill of Difficulty in Pilgrim’s Progress, the simplicity of true faith suddenly overwhelmed the young man, who was saved there and then in the middle of the Morpeth Road.123

Baker’s New Nature nevertheless remained embattled, since his mind could not ignore the material world. Some prayer sessions proved uplifting, others felt “slack.” Local Methodist fellowship meetings—“lovefeasts”—gave Baker the confidence to try preaching. Yet even this new outlet for his faith failed to banish the “great sluggishness of soul” that paralyzed him from time to time. By the autumn of 1858, Baker had come to “feel very deeply . . . about the Fijians”¹²⁴ at least in part because service in this risky arena promised to erase lingering self-doubt. Enthusiasm alone did not immediately sway his superiors in the Australian Wesleyan Conference. Having no theological training, indeed little more than a fractured elementary education, Baker was not the first choice of a committee that still looked askance at “colonial” recruits. But Thomas did, finally, get his wish. In a letter to his experienced agents in Fiji dated 11 April 1859, Rev. John Eggleston, General Secretary of the Conference, reported that the elders had just sent some freshly ordained missionaries and their partners “to share in your toils and triumphs.”125 Thomas Baker and his new wife formed part of this relief column.

Once in the field, Baker found that everyday chores left little time for the sort of epic labor he had envisioned. “Fiji is before me,” he announced in an early letter to headquarters, “and I resolve to spend and be spent for its salvation.” But his house near Bua on Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second largest island, required constant repair, his halting Fijian demanded improvement, and perverse winds constantly delayed the small vessels used for most travel. Moreover, if Baker savored the idea of saving souls, he often found the attached bodies “dirty,” occasionally “horrible-looking.”¹²⁶ Drama, not pious routine, compelled him. Late in 1862, the missionary and several teachers had to slip past the notoriously violent village of Macuata. The sight of sails being raised in the much faster canoes thus induced a shudder: “I thought[,] Fiji has never stained its shores with a Missionary’s blood yet, and am I to be the first[?]”¹²⁷ Not then and not there, it so happened. But Baker’s transfer from the Bua Circuit of Vanua Levu to the upriver station of Davuilevu in the Rewa Circuit of Viti Levu during June of 1865 brought him closer than any other Methodist preacher to the big island’s craggy center, and to its mountain tribes that had thus far refused to lotu (embrace Christian worship).

Now officially designated “Missionary to the Interior,” Baker continued to find certain local habits unsettling. He resented the traffic in his house at all hours. Nor did he welcome the stares: one day when soaking wet he was forced to change clothes “before a full bure [thatched house] of heathen, who feasted on me with their eyes.”¹²⁸ The missionary nevertheless appeared to relish the long and often uncomfortable journeys that went with his new territory. Baker estimated that between mid-1865 and mid-1866, his remote posting at Davuilevu had necessitated 1,800 miles of boat travel, or roughly thirty-five miles per week.¹²⁹ Geographic isolation alone may not have accounted for all this movement. The last entry in his diary, for 31 July 1866, mentions a “considerable altercation with Bro[ther] Carey” over the distribution of teachers. Methodist agents were expected to maintain among themselves “unity of affection, which will not fail to produce unity of action.”¹³⁰ It appears that theory and practice were increasingly at odds on Viti Levu, however. Baker must have communicated his growing disenchantment to mission headquarters, because in a letter dated 12 July 1867, one of the brethren in Sydney wrote urging him to persevere “for a few more years.”131 Rev. Baker never saw this letter. He was dead before it reached Fiji.

Precisely why he died remains unclear. But a spasm of ambition, possibly a reaction to growing conflict with his colleagues, was the impulse that placed him in harm’s way. Viti Levu’s size—nearly as large as Jamaica—and mysterious interior made it attractive to European explorers. It was not until late 1865 that J.B. Thurston, then a cotton planter and later governor of the colony, led what he called “the first expedition across Fiji,” by which he meant Viti Levu. Its formidably steep inland hills, violent rains, and sometimes “insolent” tribesmen had provided all the challenge Thurston could handle on his south-to-north trek.¹³² How much more impressive, Rev. Baker reasoned, if he could traverse the island by canoeing up the Rewa River and then pushing west, across the staunchly heathen Navosa Plateau, down to the coast at Vuda. The hazards of this plan were such that Baker did not alert his wife when he left. On Friday evening, 19 July, he finally put pen to paper, assuring Mrs. Baker that he had already completed half of the journey and anticipated no trouble ahead, save perhaps at Navosa. And even if the “natives” there “do not lotu, I believe they will not venture to kill me.” The potential glory was worth the risk, he calculated. “If I accomplish this trip,” Baker told his wife, “I shall be the ‘Lion of the Day,’” a boast that would be carefully erased from the official Methodist account of his death.¹³³

He became, instead, a kind of Pacific holy fool whose murder rekindled debate over the conduct of missionaries among “savages.” Earlier, on Wednesday, 17 July, Baker, the Fijian minister Setareki Seileka, two teachers, and six students had reached the Dawarau district where they enjoyed the hospitality of a friendly chief. Their host accepted a tabua, the sperm whale tooth that in Fijian custom obliged the recipient to honor an accompanying request. The request was for guides who could show the way to Navosa. Most of the subsequent accounts of “The Baker Tragedy” agree that although willing to provide guides, the chief implored Baker to avoid the Navosa district. The missionary may well have interpreted this warning as one tribal leader’s reluctance to share a prestigious visitor with rival tribes.¹³⁴ Yet the weight of contemporary, non-Methodist opinion would be less charitable: Baker brought on his own death, and that of seven companions, through “imprudent zeal” or “sheer fanatical obstinacy.”¹³⁵

The party’s last rest came at the village of Nagagadelavatu, perched 3,000 feet above sea level where the headwaters of the Sigatoka River rush south through deep ravines. Their reception was chilly. Nawawabalavu, the village chief, offered no yams to the strangers and expressed contempt for their faith. Accepting a tabua, he agreed to show Baker’s group the path to Vuda next day. But allegedly just before the missionary’s arrival, Nawawabalavu had accepted another tabua from the chief of an eastern village who wished the entire party killed. This melodramatic rendering of events, besides inspiring one of Jack London’s more obscure short stories,136 is at least plausible. For at this time, Thakombau, who had converted in 1854, was trying to consolidate his influence throughout Viti Levu. Resentful mountain tribes, long accustomed to independence, would reasonably have linked Thakombau’s meddling with the Methodist lotu.¹³⁷ An alternative explanation for the missionary’s demise paints Baker as a cultural buffoon. First sketched by Thomson in 1894, embellished by Brewster in 1922, and now widely accepted as accurate, it has Baker either playfully trying to comb Nawawabalavu’s tangled hair or else indignantly snatching his borrowed comb from the chief’s “verminous” locks.¹³⁸ Thomas Baker may have had tunnel vision, but he was not a moron. For a missionary with eight years’ experience in Fiji to touch a chief’s head would have been unthinkable. Furthermore, if the repeated cultural gaffes that Rev. Thomas Williams committed at Somosomo in the early 1840s are any indication, Fijian chiefs may have been quite tolerant of pale men in black coats.¹³⁹

Whatever its motivation, the killing of Thomas Baker and most of his party on Sunday morning, 21 July 1867, was premeditated. After early prayers, the Methodists and several villagers set out single file along a track bordering the Sigatoka gorge. Just outside the village, Nawawabalavu, his axe-bearing guides, and a second group of armed natives suddenly turned on the visitors. Baker was among the first to fall, followed shortly by Setareki, the Fijian minister, who caught his fatal blow while stooping to kiss Baker’s bloody face.¹⁴⁰ The only survivors of this ambush were two students who escaped by burying themselves in the tall grass that bordered the track; they would separately stagger back to the east coast, carrying with them the grim news. Although the two guides who had brought Baker’s party to the Navosa district had been detained in the village, they later saw the corpses piled up, Baker’s on top. The preparation of the bakola took place a short distance away at Cubue. In rumor and in verse, the diners would be demonized:

They slay, they cut, they cook, they eat;

For days the feast is spread;

Nor guilt they feel, nor sin, nor shame;

Nor pity for the dead!141

The legend of Reverend Baker’s exotic demise built quickly. When A.B. Brewster landed at Suva less than three years after the fact, children in Methodist schools there had already composed their own “dirge”:

Oh! Dead is Mr. Baker,

They killed him on the road,

And they ate him, boots and all.¹⁴²

His killers went unpunished. Thakombau’s punitive expedition of April 1868, even with support from John Thurston, failed to dislodge the “mountaineers” from their aeries.¹⁴³ And the Methodist mission in Fiji remained unusually quiet about its slain agent, as if Baker’s bid for personal glory had sullied a church known for its “self-denying and unostentatious labours.”¹⁴⁴

Yet remorse, if not retribution, would haunt the highlands of Viti Levu. Baker’s murder left a widow and three fatherless daughters. It also launched a quest for atonement, a campaign of expiation that lasted 136 years. The afterlife of this missionary death began even before the tribes of the Navosa Plateau were fully “pacified.” Having eaten a white man and defeated Thakombau’s warriors, Nawawabalavu and his highland allies went on an extended rampage, slaughtering hundreds of lowlanders in mid-1870, then killing and cooking two white planters, Spiers and Macintosh, on the Mba River a year later.¹⁴⁵ But by the late 1870s, the former “devil tribes” had been defanged and partially Christianized. Nagagadelavatu, the village where Rev. Baker had earned his “martyr’s crown,” was abandoned. Henceforth the missionary’s murder would be associated with nearby Nabutautau, to which some of the killers moved.¹⁴⁶ Body parts allegedly belonging to Baker—a sliver of arm bone here, three skulls there—remained in short supply compared to the many cannibal forks and war clubs sold as the true tools of dispatch.¹⁴⁷ Baker’s telescope, now part of the Mitchell Library’s collection in Sydney, and his ordination Bible, on display at the Fiji Museum in Suva, may be the only authentic relics to survive.

Then there are the boots. Or rather, there are the leather fragments that remain of footwear “recovered from near where [Baker] was murdered years after the event,” as the display case in Fiji’s national museum explains.148 Just before resident magistrate A.B. Brewster left Fiji in 1910, the people of the Navatusila area, some of whose parents had feasted on the Baker party, held a council at which they issued a formal apology, an isoro, for what their kin had done. But these early twentieth-century apologists “hotly resented the accusation of having eaten the boots.” After all, “they knew quite well” that boots “were adjuncts of the vavalongi [white men] . . . in the same category as their guns, powder, axes, knives, etc.” Never mind that the curled leather soles look very much as if they had been boiled.¹⁴⁹

The interesting point here is not that Brewster’s Fijian informants resented being cast as ignorant—an entirely reasonable sensitivity. Rather, it is their residual guilt. On the basis of more than twenty years’ experience as a colonial judge in the highlands of Viti Levu, Brewster concluded that Protestant Christianity had reinforced, but certainly not created, a cultural belief in the need to compensate for past injuries inflicted. What Brewster called “conscience” could not be salved entirely through the confession of personal sin and perpetual self-examination. A communal expression of regret for a communal wrong needed to supplement prayer. Officials of the Fijian Methodist Church reasoned in 1913 that the monument to Rev. Baker erected by highland villagers near the site of the massacre constituted “the fullest atonement possible.”¹⁵⁰ Apparently this gesture, too, was insufficient, because over the next several decades, people of the Navatusila district continued to endure land disputes, leadership struggles, wretched roads, inferior schools, and rising rates of teen pregnancy, incest, and suicide. The “generational sins of their fathers, particularly the bloodguilt of the murders,” demanded a traditional forgiveness ceremony, a matanigasau.¹⁵¹

Thus it happened, after months of planning and a barrage of newspaper publicity, that 600 people gathered on 13 November 2003 at Nabutautau village to watch what may prove to be the last act in the martyrdom of Thomas Baker. The missionary’s great-grandnephew had flown in from London, as had eight other relatives from Australia. To them, the chief of Navatusila, Ratu Filimoni Nawawabalavu, presented thirty whales’ teeth. Only if publicly forgiven, Ratu Filimoni announced, could the people of his district escape “the bondage and curse” that had oppressed them since 1867.152 The ensuing hugs and tears seemed sincere all around. Forgiveness was granted. A few of the highland villagers told perplexed reporters that the rationale for their elaborate penance was biblical: “[I]f my people who are called by my name humble themselves . . . then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles, 7:14).¹⁵³ This much the headstrong Reverend Baker would have understood. But he probably would not have grasped that the descendants of Nawawabalavu and his warriors had combined pagan and Christian imperatives to acknowledge their cannibal past.

JOHN COLERIDGE PATTESON: PATRICIAN SAINT

If it was the postscript that preserved Reverend Baker’s name, the fame of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson owed more to pedigree than “native” penance. Whereas Baker brought very modest social credentials to the work of conversion, J.C. Patteson emerged from a cocoon of privilege to find death in the western Pacific. Indeed, it was Patteson’s renunciation of status and security that made his martyrdom so poignant. Unlike Thomas Baker and John Williams, Patteson would be neither dismembered nor eaten; a body known to be the bishop’s was retrieved from his killers and buried at sea. However civilized his obsequies, Patteson’s death would nonetheless serve as the single most compelling proof of the need to rein in the Pacific labor trade. Savagery, his murder seemed to show, knew no color.

Patteson’s story struck the comfortable classes as at once “picturesque” and “touching,” as full of “holy charm [as] that of any saint of ecclesiastical legend.”¹⁵⁴ His childhood and youth had been quintessentially genteel. Born in London in 1827, “Coley” was the elder son of Sir John Patteson, for over twenty years one of the most learned judges in the civil law court of King’s (later, Queen’s) Bench. The boy’s mother, Sir John’s second wife, was the sister of a still more famous judge, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, and it was through this side of the family that Coley traced his kinship with the great poet.¹⁵⁵ Both clans thought of rural southwestern England as home, favored a “high church” form of Anglicanism, sent their boys to Eton, their young men to Oxford or Cambridge and, well before “a healthy mind in a healthy body” became Victorian scripture, encouraged athletic pursuits for their males. Coley followed this arc. Although his academic performances at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, were lackluster, he excelled at such “manly” games as cricket and football. More importantly, Patteson’s arrival at Balliol in 1845 coincided with John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism. Although Patteson remained within the Anglican fold, some features of the “Tractarian” movement—especially its emphasis on prayer, prescribed by liturgy and celebrated by the ordained clergy—made a lasting impression on him.156

Intending to take holy orders, Patteson left Oxford with an undistinguished degree but a growing sense that foreign languages would enrich study of the New Testament, and so make him credible as a preacher of God’s word. While touring Western Europe, he quickly acquired German and French, whereas brief forays into Hebrew and Arabic proved more demanding. This Continental interlude convinced him that he had a linguistic gift, a gift that would later be realized as a preternatural facility with Melanesian tongues.¹⁵⁷ But the welcome prospect of serving as a parish priest in Devonshire preceded any yearning for the South Seas. For seventeen months Coley threw himself into showing the people of tiny Alfington that spiritual renewal was as much a concern of Anglicanism as of any Dissenting sect. The reappearance of George Selwyn in Patteson’s life altered the young curate’s vision, however. In 1841, as a fourteen-year-old boy at Eton, Coley had been impressed with the newly appointed bishop of New Zealand. A great oarsman at Cambridge and himself an Old Etonian, George Augustus Selwyn (1809–1878) had sung the praises of self-sacrifice on the eve of his departure for the Antipodes. Thirteen years later, in the summer of 1854, Selwyn was back in England to raise funds for a missionary schooner and plead the cause of Melanesia. Why, Selwyn asked during several sermons, should young gentlemen rush to volunteer for war in the Crimea yet hesitate to enlist for more noble service among the heathen isles? Patteson, for one, would not hesitate. Now intent upon a missionary career, he left England with the bishop in March 1855, arriving at Auckland in July. Nine months later he sailed for the first time to Melanesia as Selwyn’s missionary chaplain.¹⁵⁸

In Bishop Selwyn, Patteson gained the sort of powerful patron that neither John Williams nor Thomas Baker ever knew. Privilege begat privilege. Yet Selwyn’s patronage required agreement with his brand of expansionist Anglicanism. During his first six years as bishop of New Zealand, Selwyn had alienated some white settlers by championing Maori land rights under the Treaty of Waitangi (1840); he had vexed a sponsor, the Church Missionary Society, through his insistence on the rigid separation of church and state; and he had seized on a clerical error in the “Letters Patent” of 1841—Selwyn’s ecclesiastical marching orders—to define the Diocese of New Zealand as including much of Melanesia.159 Even without this technical excuse to do so, the bishop probably would have looked north, toward the equator. Writing to his father from Tonga in early 1848, Selwyn explained, “Lest you should think that I have gone out of the range of my own duty, I must tell you that the Archbishop of Canterbury in his valedictory letter to me, commended to my notice the progress of Christianity ‘throughout the Coast and Islands of the Pacific’; a charge which the troubled state of New Zealand has hitherto prevented me from attempting to fulfil.”¹⁶⁰ The bishop was capable of considerable generosity toward other evangelists. He admired John Williams, for example. But he never ceased to regard Dissenters as theological renegades, and he longed to reclaim Melanesia from the white traders, many of them British, who had transformed these western isles into a “field of mischief.”¹⁶¹ This was the formidable mentor in whose hands Patteson had placed himself.

Selwyn found an able student in Patteson. Fortunately, the acolyte could match the master in physical strength. Selwyn had at first allowed no one to land with him on an unvisited island; the bishop insisted on swimming ashore alone from a whaleboat, presents stowed in a top hat. Shortly after Patteson’s arrival, however, both men swam through a gap in the reef surrounding Bellona, a Polynesian outlier near the Solomon group, somehow hauling two adzes and two hatchets between them.¹⁶² Patteson moreover embraced Selwyn’s plan to use island converts as evangelists. Other missionary societies had of course relied on Polynesian “teachers” to conduct much of the routine work on heathen islands, but Melanesia posed special problems. Its bewildering diversity of languages, malarial climate, and fragmented, egalitarian social structures rendered hopeless any scheme centered on European agents and a top-down conversion strategy. The bishop therefore proposed bringing potential converts to his headquarters at St. John’s College in Auckland. Once they had grasped the core precepts of Christianity, these “boys” (some of whom were mature men) would return to their home islands as Anglican proselytizers. The implementation of Selwyn’s plan began in October 1849, when he returned to Auckland with five young men recruited in the southern New Hebrides. Arriving at St. John’s, Selwyn triumphantly announced to his wife, “I’ve got them.”163 The Melanesian Mission had been launched.

Although the Mission’s growth would prove all too gradual, its supervision rapidly passed from Selwyn to Patteson. By the end of 1859, the latter had established a routine: five months in New Zealand each year interspersed with two long voyages among the New Hebrides and the Solomons.¹⁶⁴ One measure of Patteson’s effectiveness throughout this vast territory came in 1861 when, Selwyn having pulled the right political strings back in Britain, Coley was consecrated “Missionary Bishop of Melanesia.” The duty daunted Patteson, then just thirty-three (Figure 2.3). He asked the worshippers in St. Mary’s Church, Auckland, “[P]ray for me, called too young, so in years so in all else, to an office of which I dare not say that I realize the responsibility.”165

Figure 2.3   John Coleridge Patteson, bishop of Melanesia, circa 1865.

SOURCE: Courtesy, Auckland Institute and Museum.

Taking time and place into account, a more humane appointment could not have been made. The new bishop’s renowned kindness to Islanders within and beyond his ministry flowed from racial egalitarianism. Advocating “deep compassion” for the Pacific Islander and warning against “self-complacent assumption[s] of superiority”166 among his white supporters, Patteson never underestimated the cultural dislocation that religious teaching entailed. He understood, in part, because he could converse with nearly all the “boys” he recruited. Patteson seems to have spoken four Melanesian languages fluently (Mota, Bugotu, Arosi, and Negone) and to have had some skill in at least sixteen others. Armed with a remarkable vocabulary, it was true that he possessed an unmatched “feeling [for] the native ways.”¹⁶⁷ One of these was an aversion to cold. Patteson had realized early on that St. John’s College, built atop an exposed hill outside Auckland, made a poor site for instruction; the change from a constant 84° climate to a springtime 56° at St. John’s shocked Melanesian bodies. Moving the central school in 1859 to Kohimarama, a more sheltered spot on the south shore of Auckland Bay, helped.¹⁶⁸

But Patteson had long dreamt of shifting Mission headquarters to subtropical Norfolk Island, 600 miles closer to Melanesia than Auckland, warm enough for his scholars yet pleasant also for Europeans. In 1855, Norfolk had been abandoned as the empire’s most brutal penal colony. Shortly after the last convicts decamped, most of the surviving “Pitcairners,” descendants of unions between Bounty mutineers and Tahitian women, took their place. Concern in Britain over the fate of the Pitcairn “half-castes”—a romance of preservation through isolation at a time of debate about “dying native races”—had frustrated first Selwyn’s and later Patteson’s plans. But at last, in 1867, the Mission managed to buy about one-ninth of Norfolk Island.¹⁶⁹ This crucial relocation paid one more dividend, the services of Robert Henry Codrington. Like Patteson the fellow of an Oxford college, Codrington (1830–1922) was a learned man who at first regarded his work as head of Mission education on Norfolk as an intellectual exile. He would stay for twenty years, however, running St. Barnabas as a bare-bones public school and winning wide acclaim for his pioneering contributions to Pacific anthropology and linguistics.¹⁷⁰ The benighted isles could now receive the bishop’s undivided attention.

That attention, unusually, was accepting of much indigenous behavior. As Patteson put it to his uncle in March of 1866, “[W]e ought surely to change as little as possible—only what is clearly incompatible with the simplest form of Christian teaching and practice.”171 To be sure, Patteson agreed with his British missionary predecessors that the conversion of a primitive people necessarily involved exposing them to new social and economic values. But unlike, say, John Williams, who gloried in the belief that right religion created new material needs, Patteson insisted that Christianity must accommodate itself to local habits. It is difficult to know precisely what the bishop meant when he referred to the “Oriental tendencies” of Melanesian minds.¹⁷² Those minds were unambiguously Other. Still, a good shepherd ought not order his flock to adopt strict Sunday rituals, or to stop smoking, or even to wear clothes. What was the likely message of a ban on nakedness, Patteson wondered, if not to imply that simply wearing a yard of unbleached calico signaled salvation?¹⁷³ After the bishop’s death, Mission officials, particularly Islander agents possessed of an “evangelizing ferocity,” would grow far more intolerant of nakedness and unmarried couples living together.¹⁷⁴ So long as Patteson remained in command, however, the Anglican imprint on Melanesian culture was comparatively light.

The strain of authority nonetheless told on Patteson. It was gratifying that by the late 1860s a model Christian village had been established on Mota (Sugar Loaf) island. Part of the Banks group, an island cluster situated between the New Hebrides to the south and the Santa Cruz group to the north, Mota had contributed not only the first indigenous deacon, George Sarawia, but also the language of instruction for all Mission schools. To Mota could be transported promising recruits from the turbulent central Solomons, where Christian influence remained nearly invisible.¹⁷⁵ Even so, the long voyages on the Southern Cross, an unrelenting yam-based diet while living ashore, and the loss of close colleagues aged Patteson alarmingly. In August 1864, a surprise arrow attack at Graciosa Bay, Santa Cruz island, wounded two of his trusted assistants. The slow, agonizing deaths from tetanus of Edwin Nobbs and Fisher Young caused the bishop “one of the deepest sorrows I have ever known.”¹⁷⁶ He never married, refused to consider taking an extended leave, and rarely saw Auckland acquaintances once Mission headquarters moved to Norfolk Island. Selwyn’s return to England in 1868 to become bishop of Lichfield caused further regret. By 1870, save for the lively correspondence he maintained with his family and friends, Coley had become remarkably isolated. Yet the obvious antidote for isolation, resuming his work as a parish clergyman at home, held little appeal. “I am not the man,” Patteson assured his mentor, “to stand up and fight against . . . many-headed monsters.”177

Ironically, it was just such an evil, the Pacific labor trade, that most of Patteson’s admirers would identify as the underlying cause of his murder. Some of the Islanders among whom Patteson sought recruits for his schools were “unpredictable.” That is to say, the rare European visitor had no way to gauge the impact of events, recent or remote, on such people. The bishop appreciated that he was often working blind—or, expressed in more Christian terms, from faith. His multiple landings on Santa Cruz island during the summer of 1862 amid “exceedingly friendly” (if heavily armed) men gave no hint of the hail of arrows that would be unleashed on his boat two years later.¹⁷⁸ Moreover, what Patteson first identified in late 1867 as “a semi-legalized slave trading between the South Sea Islands . . . and the white settlers in Fiji” was deepening distrust of strangers arriving in large vessels. He grew incensed about this human traffic. In a five-page memorandum dated 11 January 1871, the bishop warned his Anglican colleagues in New Zealand that neither the government of Queensland nor Her Majesty’s consul at Levuka, Fiji, had done anything to protect people on their home islands. Thus, “we are now obliged to be very cautious” even at islands where the Mission was already on “intimate terms” with the local folk. Native retaliation was inevitable, Patteson wrote. When it occurred, the perpetrators must not be punished unless and until evidence proved that their violence had no connection to “outrages first committed by white men.”¹⁷⁹

He dismissed the rumor that at least one unscrupulous labor recruiter had been landing on islands dressed as a bishop with a Bible in his hand. But the blow that fell soon thereafter at the small coral atoll of Nukapu, near Santa Cruz, was all too real. Around noon on 20 September 1871, the bishop landed in a canoe at low tide, having left his boat and its crew of four outside the exposed reef half a mile from the beach. Nukapu was known territory. Patteson had visited its Polynesian-speaking people on at least three previous occasions and hoped now to enlist an interpreter for help with the vexing language of Santa Cruz. The bishop had been ashore and out of sight for about forty minutes when suddenly the Islanders in the canoes near the whaleboat began shouting and firing yard-long arrows at the visitors. Three of the four men in the boat were wounded yet managed to reach the Southern Cross. Joseph Atkin, a missionary most recently based in the eastern Solomons and one of the wounded, led what he hoped would be the rescue of his leader. As Atkin crossed the fringing reef he could see through his glass one apparently empty canoe being towed toward him by another. Cut adrift, this canoe was found to contain the bishop’s body, naked except for his shoes and socks, wrapped in a mat. The right side of his skull had been shattered. On his chest rested a sago palm frond tied in five knots. “Beside all this ruin,” marveled C.H. Brooke, another agent posted in the Solomons, “the sweet face smiled as of old, with the eyes closed as if in prayer.”180 Patteson’s corpse was consigned to the deep next day.

The bishop shared his fate with two others. Stephen Taroaniara, a new convert from San Cristobal in the eastern Solomons, and Atkin, the son of an Auckland settler, both died in the convulsive grip of tetanus seven and eight days later, respectively. Their deaths were vaguely unsatisfying, as was C.H. Brooke’s account of them. For “no word bearing upon religion,” no expression of “faith and hope” passed their lips.¹⁸¹ That Patteson had left the world equally mute mattered less since a life of self-denial provided grist enough for any martyr’s mill.

The production of a legend began immediately despite ambiguities surrounding both the motive for Patteson’s murder and the efficacy of his work. In Brooke’s report to the Anglican Church of New Zealand, he declared that the killing of the bishop could only have been “an act of revenge” against white kidnappers. Codrington, shortly after the news reached Norfolk Island, agreed that the slave trade was, with “very little doubt,” behind the attacks. Lorimer Fison, like Codrington an ethnographically astute missionary, sketched a similar picture, speculating that “for tribal reasons” the warriors of Nukapu had killed “a great chief” who belonged to their enemies.¹⁸² Speculation congealed into certainty. Five Nukapu islanders had supposedly been snatched to toil on a Fijian plantation, and the reminders of this crime were the five knots tied in the palm frond on Patteson’s chest. The identities of the five kidnapped men were never established, however, a detail that troubled none of the bishop’s hagiographers. Nor did they dwell on the very limited success of their saint’s work. Under Patteson’s regime, the only place in Melanesia to approach complete Christianization was Mota, a dot of land with brackish water located in a minor island chain. After Patteson’s death, R.H. Codrington soldiered on, refusing to succeed him as bishop but persevering with teaching on Norfolk and fundraising among genteel supporters in England.183 The Santa Cruz and Reef islands would long remain the “weakest part of the whole Mission.” As of 1910, after a generation of contact with Anglican agents, perhaps a hundred out of the Santa Cruz group’s estimated 8,000 inhabitants were believed to be living under Christian influence.¹⁸⁴

If anything, the generally “sullen” resistance of these people to Western ways burnished the legend. Santa Cruz became the late-Victorian Erromango.¹⁸⁵ Just as the island of John Williams’s death would later claim three more white victims, so Santa Cruz destroyed another English gentleman, James Graham Goodenough. An “honourable, true, [and] tender-hearted” schoolboy at Westminster, Goodenough had gone on to carve out a distinguished naval-cum-philanthropic career, helping to capture Canton in the Anglo-Chinese conflict of 1856–1858, distributing food to war-ravaged French villagers in 1870, and eventually, as commodore on the Australia Station, seeking to suppress the worst abuses of the Pacific labor trade.¹⁸⁶ During the summer of 1875, Goodenough took HMS Pearl through the New Hebrides and Santa Cruz groups, hoping to “open up friendly intercourse with the natives.” On 12 August at Carlisle Bay, Santa Cruz, Goodenough and five of his crew received a sudden volley of arrows in exchange for the presents they had just distributed. Before succumbing to tetanus a few days later, Goodenough insisted that his men do no more than burn the offending village. In their different ways the commodore and the bishop had each turned the other cheek.¹⁸⁷

The murder of Patteson became “the absorbing topic” throughout New Zealand and the eastern states of Australia.¹⁸⁸ In Britain, the grim details produced anguish among the mighty. Gladstone wrote early on that reports of the tragedy had caused him “extreme grief,” although the prime minister confessed to a devastated Selwyn that more direct government control of the Pacific labor trade aroused “much misgiving.” Three years later, now out of office, Gladstone concluded his review of Charlotte Yonge’s massive Life of her cousin with words that approached rapture: “The three highest titles that can be given to man are those of martyr, hero, saint; and which of the three is there that in substance it would be irrational to attach to the name of John Coleridge Patteson?” In the autumn of 1878, as he was preparing several essays for reprinting, Gladstone dove back into the Yonge biography. As he confided in his diary, “Reperusal of Patteson moves even me to tears.”¹⁸⁹ The same study also stirred Gladstone’s most regal critic, the Queen herself. Victoria recorded in her journal for 30 November 1874: “[Princess Beatrice] read to me after tea, the most sad death of the really saint like Bishop Patteson, whom one might call a martyr, & who was killed by savages. It is so dreadful, for it was due to the wickedness of others who had killed and kidnapped the poor natives, till they thought every white man was their enemy!”190 Max Müller, the eminent philologist and one of Patteson’s regular correspondents, told The Times, “His bones will not work childish miracles, but his spirit will work signs and wonders by revealing even among the lowest of the Melanesian savages the God-like stamp of human nature.” Later, during a lecture delivered in the Nave of Westminster Abbey, Müller resumed his panegyric. “It has been my privilege to have known some of the finest and noblest spirits which England has produced during this century,” he observed, “but there is none to whose memory I look up with greater reverence . . . than [to] that true saint, that true martyr, that truly parental missionary.”¹⁹¹

The outcry over Patteson’s death expressed itself in legal reform as well as eulogy. The Queen’s Speech at the opening of Parliament in 1872 mentioned his murder and called for legislative remedy.¹⁹² The killing of a Christ-like innocent mobilized humanitarian sentiment in the imperial hub and hastened passage of the “Pacific Islanders Protection Bill.” Speaking to the House of Lords, the Earl of Kimberly, Gladstone’s Colonial Secretary (and Patteson’s contemporary at Eton), pointed to the murder as “the crowning atrocity” in a traffic that could go unpunished no longer.¹⁹³ Thus, June of 1872 saw passage of the so-called “Kidnapping Act.” As the next chapter will discuss, the 1872 act would prove woefully inadequate. But in the short term, law appeared to have vindicated an exemplary life.

That life would continue to be celebrated, in the small and the large, for decades. There was awkward poetry:

Floating along from the island,

Look at that silent canoe;

Scarcely a ripple ’tis making

Over the deep shining blue.

What is it bearing so gently,

Gliding along to its rest?

The motionless form of the martyr,

A palm on its lifeless breast!¹⁹⁴

Memorials multiplied. Coley’s silver cross, marked with the initials of his governess, would be fixed into the altar at Selwyn College, Cambridge; his image, rendered in stained glass, would shine down on the boys in chapel at Sedbergh School, Cumbria; the ornate sandstone and Devonshire marble chapel at St. Barnabas School, Norfolk Island, became a shrine.195 Numerous articles and popular biographies compared the fate of the bishop with that of Livingstone, and within the Established Church the murder of this refined Christian did much to enhance the prestige of foreign missions. It is no accident that among Anglican communities in Melanesia today, “Patteson” is a common first name. There is more at work here than the residue of cultural deference, or the remnants of what one anthropologist has called the “infantilization” of evangelical colonialism.¹⁹⁶

.   .   .

Britain’s modern missionary project has not yet fully shed what one historian terms the taint of “postcolonial disgrace.”¹⁹⁷ It is certainly true that the Oceanic murders discussed here tended to reify a discursive realm of savagery named “Melanesia.” It is also true, however, that the men and women who gave their lives for a set of Protestant precepts recognized differences among the cultures specific to individual islands and settlements. These Christian emissaries, then, should not be held hostage to a scattershot critique of racism.¹⁹⁸ Nor should we assume that the Islanders of the western Pacific viewed British missionaries as disembodied numbers in a calculation of otherness. No doubt overgeneralizing himself, an early twentieth-century agent of the Melanesian Mission cautioned new recruits to remember that “Natives never generalize. They seldom have a name for their island, but only names for each tiny headland, and bay, and village.”¹⁹⁹ Given their eagerness to move, by boat and boot, between place-bound tribes, the missionaries discussed in this chapter all became well known throughout their districts. Their murders, with the possible exception of Bishop Patteson’s, occurred precisely where a missionary was not known. Clerical familiarity rarely bred contempt, although neither did it necessarily win converts.

John Williams, Thomas Baker, and John Patteson played deceptively important parts in a vast drama. The year of Queen Victoria’s death, 1901, found roughly 10,000 British missionaries, representing some 154 societies and auxiliaries, toiling overseas. Britain at that time contributed about £2 million annually to support Protestant missionary ventures, a sum equivalent to almost two percent of the central government’s gross yearly expenditure.200 The Pacific Islanders attracted more foreign missionaries, per capita, than any other indigenous population except the North American Indians.²⁰¹ Such a concentration of religious resources was attributable as much to stirring propaganda as to an abundant harvest of souls. This propaganda, in turn, derived a good deal of its emotive force from accounts of missionary lives lost to violence.

But the western Pacific was not simply a place where white missionaries went to die at the hands of black savages. It was, additionally, a quasi-colonial sphere in which the construction of Christian heroes must complicate what we think we know about the impact of evangelization. In Oceania, as for example among the Xhosa peoples of southern Africa, missionaries provided information—“colonial knowledge”—to the imperial state.²⁰² Yet much of this knowledge was not directly useful to those who may have dreamt of a British-dominated Pacific. Williams’s observations on coral reefs; Baker’s accounts of the upper Rewa River; and Patteson’s philology: these contributions fascinated naturalists, explorers, and linguists, although such information possessed little strategic value. Moreover, the sharp contrasts that are so often drawn between the job of the missionary and that of the anthropologist tend to blur where Melanesia is concerned. Daniel Hughes, who served the western Pacific in both capacities, has offered a neat distinction: “The missionary is essentially a teacher and, to some extent at least, an agent of cultural change. The anthropologist is an observer and preserver of culture.”²⁰³ But what of Patteson and James Chalmers, Victorian New Guinea’s own “Great-Heart”? Both men vigorously resisted most efforts to Anglicize their people. And what of those local mythologies that described a hero-stranger? Did the coming of British evangelists affirm or subvert such myths? That is, to what extent was Protestantism indigenized?²⁰⁴ Finally, the butchered missionaries of Erromango, Viti Levu, and Nukapu became revered elders for the denizens of those islands, as well as for a large Christian-activist minority in the British Isles. The sacrifices of these martyrs would provide stories to think with throughout Melanesia.