In the 1790s newly formed British mission societies began sending evangelists to the far corners of the world. Thirty years later a few missions had become firmly established in the Pacific islands and Africa. Reinforcements and the entry of more denominations steadily increased the missionary presence in following years. This early work would prove to be a prelude to the colonial period, which unleashed a massive effort to convert Europe’s new subjects. Yet the missionary efforts that occurred ahead of Empire had important consequences. At home, reports on the efforts in exotic locales served to elevate the missionary movement from the margins of respectable Christianity to the centre of British public life. In the mission fields the pioneers largely invented through trial and error basic practices and standards. Most importantly, they established beachheads for the later expansion of Christianity by preparing and encouraging converts who in time became the main emissaries of the Word in foreign places.
Before the mid-187os few missionaries could have imagined that almost all the Pacific and Africa would soon become the colonial property of the Great Powers. The pre-colonial history of modern missions is of interest not just for understanding what came later but also for what might have been in the absence of European imperialism. The missionaries of the early nineteenth century conducted their labours as guests of indigenous rulers and peoples, not as colonial agents. Usually far from the protection of their government and sponsors, they relied heavily upon local populations for their security and basic material needs. Most quickly grasped that progress required patience and compromise. By the mid-century, turning necessity into a virtue, Henry Venn, the influential Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, made the rapid creation of autonomous indigenous churches the highest goal of missionary efforts. Some missions came very close to achieving this in the Pacific. While the colonial takeover would stimulate a massive expansion of missionary efforts, ironically enough it set back the goal of creating truly localized churches by many years.
This chapter focuses on developments in missions to the Pacific islands with some comparative notes on Africa in order to highlight the key interactions that shaped the early reception of Christianity on a frontier where indigenous peoples still retained autonomy over their lives. Particularly important were the interactions with local elites, which established the political limits of missionary penetration; interactions with new Christians, which refashioned imported religious ideas to local assumptions and aspirations; and interactions with other European agents on the scene, which, together with missions, conditioned the entry of indigenous peoples into the spreading economic and political hegemony of the Great Powers.
The sponsors of the first missions to the Pacific and Africa possessed an extraordinary confidence that the mere presence of the cross would win ‘savage’ hearts and minds from pagan darkness. The bearers of the cross were, to a large extent, men and women of modest education and means, sent out with scant provisions to distant peoples with whose languages, customs, and political circumstances they were utterly unfamiliar. Furthermore, they travelled to places where interference from European traders and adventurers had already disrupted communities by introducing new diseases and by aggravating violence between competing factions for coveted trade goods. Some missionaries were killed upon arrival, the victims of acts of vengeance against wrongs perpetrated by earlier visitors. Others fell to malaria or fled in the face of war. Those who settled down found that the act of proclaiming the gospel truth carried its own risks. A series of missionaries to the southern New Hebrides met their ends after declaring to the terrified natives that the god they represented was the source of the terrible epidemics decimating their people. Some found solace in the bottle and a few left the mission to live as natives themselves. When reading the accounts of these early days, the greatest wonder is that any missions got established at all.
Survival largely depended on carefully cultivating alliances with local leaders. Mission directors formally required their agents to submit themselves to local authorities and not engage in political activities, although few could resist offering advice to chiefs when the opportunity arose. Further, most missionaries of this period ‘believed in the ultimate rightness of a monarchical form of government’ and succeeded in deluding themselves that the native ‘kings’ they encountered resembled European monarchs in terms of public legitimacy and power. Above all else, they assumed that if they could win over the elite, the rest of the population would soon follow.
By attaching themselves to one or another ‘king’, the early missionaries implicated themselves in long-running political contests they could scarcely comprehend and over which they had little control. The cost of association with a chief on the losing side of a conflict could be exile or sudden death. But ascendant chiefs also caused problems. Once the novelty of the missionaries’ peculiar rituals wore off, and especially once they ran out of supplies and became dependent upon local people for survival, missionaries found themselves in a precarious position, at best tolerated by their patrons. In Tahiti the early missionaries were quickly reduced to rags, living in hovels, their plight made worse by the taunts of small beach communities of castaways and escaped convicts from Australia who curried favour with the chiefs by ridiculing their poverty. In New Zealand, as in southern Africa, the Maori chiefs put ‘their’ missionaries to work as diplomatic liaisons with European powers and to procure and repair firearms. Thus, ‘the Christian community existed in the Maori world on Maori terms’.
With a few exceptions, missionaries to Africa failed to win over local elites prior to the colonial period. Their early converts came mostly from the margins of society: escaped or recovered slaves, war refugees, and other outcasts and displaced people. In the Pacific islands, however, within two decades of their arrival, the missionaries witnessed a massive movement of people from all levels of society into the Church.
Most accounts date the beginnings of Christianity in Polynesia to the arrival in 1797 of thirty ‘godly mechanics’ sent by the London Missionary Society (LMS) to Tahiti; but a strong claim can also be made for Pomare II’s decision in 1812 to become a Christian. The missionary party had tied their fortunes to Pomare’s father in the mistaken belief that he controlled the island. Even within the Pomare faction they found, as John Davies complained in 1806, that there was no ‘sincere desire of instruction manifested by any as to the truths of the Gospel, but on the contrary much aversion’. While friendlier, Pomare II followed his father’s strategy of increasing human sacrifices to the Oro cult to advance his political ambitions while engaging in a fondness for drink and homosexual mahu attendants. The reasons for Pomare’s change of heart remain obscure. Most likely his confidence in Oro had been badly shaken after years of fierce fighting which drove him into exile in 1808. He may also have faltered in the face of a steep population decline in the aftermath of the new diseases, alcohol, and firearms introduced by European intrusions. More positively, he became close to Henry Nott, who stayed on when the other members of the mission party had fled the fighting in 1809. In the end Pomare’s choice may have been dictated less by desperation than by a shrewd calculation that the new god would provide him with a spiritual advantage. In fact, Pomare’s fortunes did change upon his conversion. He won a decisive battle and for the first time united Tahiti under a single ruler. The missionaries returned to assist this unlikely Constantine who made Christianity the state religion. Tahiti became the base from which the LMS expanded steadily westward—eventually arriving in New Guinea sixty years after Pomare’s conversion.
A similar scenario unfolded in Tonga. Unlike Tahiti, Tonga had once been unified under a single ruler, but civil war between the claimants of the three high titles had raged for decades, made more lethal by the introduction of firearms and castaways who knew how to use them effectively. The LMS fled the islands in 1797 after several members of its party were killed. Three decades later Methodists received a warmer reception. A young chief from the northern islands, Taufa‘ahau, requested a teacher and then methodically put the new god through a series of tests. Having defied his own patron deity by, among other things, striking its priestess, he declared himself for the lotu (‘Church’), ordering the destruction of spirit houses in his domain and calling for instruction in Christianity for himself and his people. Following his baptism, ‘King George’ consolidated the three traditional titles in his person through a mix of skilful diplomacy and bloody warfare, cheered on by the missionaries, who perceived him as a modern-day Saul engaged in a holy crusade against heathenism. Taufa‘ahau later helped advance Christianity in neighbouring Fiji by recommending lotu to the warrior chief Cakobau and lending him troops to defeat his rivals.
The Fijian case suggests that the centrality of the chiefs to the acceptance of Christianity went beyond the naked exercise of power. Years before Cakobau accepted baptism, Methodist missionaries had convinced many leaders not only of the reality of the Christian god but of his superiority over their own.
The conversion of the high chiefs signalled the conversion of the body politic because they actually embodied it. Their own authority rested upon their direct descent from the gods. In the more stratified islands the mana (‘sacred potency’) of the aristocracy was indexed by highly elaborated ritual protocols and taboos backed by spiritual sanctions and, for commoners, the threat of instant death. The mana of the chiefs was spectacularly displayed in Tahiti and Hawai’i through large temple complexes and flamboyant religious cults supported by a specialized priesthood. Religion legitimized the chiefs and provided ‘sanctions for controlling the population and harnessing its productivity’ For Pomare, Taufa‘ahau, and Cakobau, recognition of Jehovah provided spiritual legitimacy further confirmed by decisive military victories; but stability in their kingdoms depended upon the rapid re-establishment of a state religion. A variation on this theme was played out in Hawai’i after Ka’ahumanu, the favourite wife of the late Kamehameha I, who had united the islands, ended the system of public taboos on which the old religious system rested. When American Congregationalist missionaries arrived the following year, in 1820, she and her allies quickly grasped the political utility of the new religion as a means of maintaining chiefly control over the commoners. Thus the new Christian kings found themselves quite as much in need of the missionaries as the missionaries were of them.
The missionaries on Tahiti quickly took advantage of their new status by introducing a simple law code in 1819 partly based on one devised by their LMS brethren in southern Africa. It legitimized Pomare II as God’s chosen servant, established the sabbath as a holy day, and promulgated rules based on custom, the Ten Commandments, and evangelical morality. The code was revised almost annually, with similar laws introduced on nearby islands, culminating in an 1824 constitution establishing a parliament of chiefs, a rudimentary tax system, and a judiciary. In 1839 the missionaries implemented a similar code in northern Tonga; however, following his conquest of Tonga, Taufa‘ahau enlarged his consultations from missionaries to beachcombers, ship captains, the governor of New Zealand, and lawyers in Australia. Law codes of 1850 and 1862 reflected Christian preoccupations but also imposed a new governance structure that firmly entrenched the king’s power over the aristocracy and the land. A constitution appeared 1875, written mostly by the Wesleyan missionary Shirley Baker and based partly upon the Hawaiian constitution of 1840. Although Tonga became a British protectorate in the early twentieth century, the monarchy and the amended 1875 constitution endured.
Missionaries reached the zenith of their political influence in the newly formed kingdoms of Tahiti, Tonga, and Hawai’i, by far the most stratified of the Polynesian societies at the time of European contact. Their progress elsewhere in the region also rested heavily upon local elites, even when political structures militated against the creation of unified kingdoms. In Samoa chiefs were elected by local village and district councils, which they needed to consult on matters of governance and war. Samoa thus had a great number of local chiefs. An able and aggressive leader could accrue regional power by gaining any or all of the four most distinguished hereditary titles on the big islands of Upolu and Savai’i, but even so their authority was mostly ceremonial apart from leadership in war. Christianity spread quickly in the 1830s on a village-by-village basis. Missionaries introduced law codes but were frustrated by the tendency of local chiefs to interpret them in terms of local politics and their own ambitions. Despite repeated attempts by missionaries and intervening European powers to establish a kingdom, war between competing chiefs continued through much of the nineteenth century. A missionary kingdom also failed to form in Fiji, largely because of the enduring power of regional chiefs even after Cakobau’s victories and the subsequent rapid expansion of Christianity. In New Zealand, where chieXy power was even more localized and limited, Christianity spread much more gradually, mostly following the formal annexation of the country by Britain in 1840. Progress was even slower in the Melanesian islands to the west of Fiji, where extreme linguistic and political fragmentation meant that Christianity could not be imposed from above but had to be gradually accepted from below.
K. R. Howe argues convincingly that indigenous political structures combined with chiefly ambitions profoundly shaped the forms of Polynesian societies after European contact even if ‘outside influences far beyond the control of the kings and their subjects ultimately determined the fate of the royal regimes’. The same, of course, was true in Africa, where powerful leaders also used their alliances with missions for political advantage. But there was a crucial difference. Few of the African elite accepted baptism and those that did, such as Khama of Botswana, did not trigger mass acceptance of Christianity. Missionaries in Polynesia by the early 1820s faced the daunting challenge not simply of introducing Christianity but of consolidating its hold in the general population.