One cannot begin to make sense of the complex relationships between missionaries and other whites beyond colonial frontiers without bearing firmly in mind that the missions were, first and foremost, religious institutions. At the simplest level, the core functions of even the larger mission settlements centred upon classrooms where the essentials of the faith were taught and churches in which the faithful demonstrated their submission to God. Of course, other European Christians shared their beliefs and performed their devotions before native peoples; but only missionaries made dissemination of the religion their specialized task. At a deeper level, the religious impulse behind the missions affected not only missionaries’ attitudes towards the ‘perishing heathen’ of the tropics but also towards their fellow countrymen both in the field and at home. Stripped to its essence, the missionary vocation rested upon a theological foundation of human similitude, belief that all humans—brown and white, female and male—were equally capable of redemption before God. The evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century had awakened a sense of eschatological urgency in the Nonconforming churches for all individuals to acknowledge their fallen natures and seek forgiveness from God. The missions were thus only one face of a religious movement that was largely concerned with moral reform and spiritual awakening at home. Harsh as missionary condemnations of indigenous cultures often were, they could be just as critical of their own failings and those of their fellow citizens. In the remarkable statistical tabulation of the religious condition of the world’s people that takes up much of William Carey’s evangelical manifesto of 1792, he saved his sharpest rebuke for the ‘fallen Christians’ of northern Europe.
The assumption of human similitude at the core of the mission endeavour coexisted uneasily with the confident and often racist assumption, shared to varying degrees by almost all missionaries, of the superiority of the white ‘race’. In missionary writings and in the planning behind the more ambitious mission settlements, one can detect a concerted attempt to overcome the contradiction by remaking converts into idealized versions of rural Europeans. The visionaries who created model communities like Metlakatla in British Columbia or Livingstonia in Africa saw them not simply as efficient means to ‘civilize’ converts but as utopian communities that simultaneously revealed the capability of non-Europeans to rise to Christian civilization and the moral failings of Europe itself. David Livingstone’s famous equation of ‘Christianity, Commerce and Civilization’ was as much a moral rebuke of Europe as an expression of confidence in its innate superiority. All of these endeavours and fine sentiments would flounder on the missionaries’ inability to convince even themselves that Pacific islanders and Africans could be their equals.
While often among the earliest Europeans to settle among indigenous groups, missionaries were rarely the first to visit or the last to remain. Following the entry of the Spanish into the region in the sixteenth century, Pacific islanders were visited by a succession of temporary visitors from naval expeditions and vessels pursuing whales, sandalwood, and beche-de-mer. By 1800 deserters from visiting ships, castaways, and escapees from the Australian penal colony had begun to haunt the beaches, many to die from violence and drink, but others to stay as clients of chiefs. Small port settlements soon appeared in places like the Bay of Islands, Apia, and Honolulu to provision visiting ships and to participate in commodity exchanges between Polynesians and European commercial interests. While settlers remained small in number and concentrated in a few places, after the mid-century they began rapidly to acquire large tracts of land from indebted chiefs in Hawai’i, Samoa, and Fiji.
Relationships between missionaries and other whites beyond imperial authority were marked by considerable ambivalence. Missions depended on ships for transportation, mail, and provisions. They appreciated visits from naval captains both for companionship and for the aura of security lent by an association with Europe’s military might. Above all, they made use of visiting ships to facilitate the trade of local products for commodities valued by the islanders as a means of winning favour from the chiefs and assuring their survival. Mission dependence on global networks of trade and military force grew and intensified. For their part, many naval captains appreciated the presence of missionaries as forces for good governance in the islands. Traders and settlers alike sought out missionaries for advice, companionship, medical care, aid in negotiations with chiefs, and as business partners.
Still the missionaries’ desire to raise islanders to ‘moral and useful lives’ inevitably clashed with the desire of most other Europeans to find pleasure and profit in islander bodies and resources. The various codes developed by missionaries and their chiefly allies had as much to do with shielding native populations from the barbarism of whites as with leading them into ‘civilization’. Ships’ crews greatly resented Blue laws against public drunkenness and prostitution. In 1826 randy sailors rioted in Honolulu against restrictions on prostitution. Hiram Bingham narrowly avoided being clubbed in the melee. As the century progressed, the stock figure of the ‘evil white man’, whose debaucheries destroyed the moral fibre and body of ‘innocent’ natives, rivalled the witch doctor and sorcerer in mission publications as the enemy of Christian progress. For the most part, missionaries quietly if unhappily tolerated the excesses they witnessed, but on occasion some publicly protested in the colonial and metropolitan presses. Missionary correspondents employed the rhetoric of the anti-slavery movement to denounce passionately the often unsavoury methods—especially kidnapping—used to recruit Melanesian labourers for the Queensland sugar plantations in the 1880s. While they failed to end labour recruiting, their protests led to imperial interventions: reforms, better policing, and eventually a protectorate over the Solomon Islands.
The frustration felt by a sailor thwarted from easy sex was keen but temporary. Those who settled in the islands to make their fortune nurtured larger grievances against missionary ‘interference’, especially when it threatened their own profits. They tended to rephrase their protest into two kinds of complaint: that missionaries were hypocrites lining their own pockets while pretending to minister to the native soul; and that mission education ‘ruined’ the natives, either by draining all of the joy out of their lives or by encouraging the presumption that they were the equal of the white man. Neither complaint can be taken at face value, but neither should they be entirely dismissed. Missions were in part commercial enterprises. The home churches were sparing in their subsidies, forcing local missionaries to develop ways to raise funds for their own upkeep and the expansion to new fields. Beyond this, evangelicals regarded the responsible pursuit of business as a moral good, part of a bundle of cultural values they hoped to instil in their converts. All the same, the scope for missions to develop as business enterprises in their own right was very limited. The daily burden of preaching, teaching, administration, and simple survival left little time for commerce. Those individuals who demonstrated a skill for profitable initiatives were subject to restrictions laid down by society directors and, even more so, the withering criticisms of other missionaries. In the Pacific, as in most places, missionaries who developed a taste for business soon tended to give up their religious vocation.
The question of whether missions made converts more or less compliant to the settler demands, while fiercely debated, must remain a matter of conjecture. There can be little doubt, however, that the widespread acceptance of Christianity had important economic consequences. The missions served to cultivate tastes for certain European products while discouraging others, and they also served to encourage islanders to take up paid labour— when available—but never on a Sunday and much more by men than women, who became increasingly identified with the ‘traditional’ sphere of life. As Christianity expanded and consolidated, church members provided labour and money towards the building of hundreds of churches and the support of their pastors and own missionaries. In the 1820s the annual May meetings of the LMS in Tahiti became the occasion for Bible dramas, hymn- singing, and feasts. The festivals, which became fixtures in most of the Pacific islands, climaxed with a competition in which leading men demonstrated their mana through a public competition of gift-giving. During the 1860s Shirley Baker, the energetic chairman of the Methodist mission in Tonga, made the ceremony staggeringly profitable by increasing both the occasions for gift-giving and the amount by opening lines of credit against promised deliveries of palm oil. Within a decade the contributions from Tonga had grown so enormous they were effectively subsidizing the Australian Church.
The English travellers G. H. Kingsley and the Earl of Pembroke, passing through Tonga in 1871, denounced Baker’s system as ‘pure pillage’, commenting further that ‘the common name of their missionary schooner, ‘‘the Palm Oil Trader’’, is according to their own account, well deserved’. This complaint, like those of settlers, glossed over the fact that islanders were neither just dupes nor victims but agents in their own right with their own motivations and agendas. The chiefs who enforced laws against prostitution in Hawai’i were driven not just by piety but also by a desire to assert control over commoners. The rulers of Hawai’i and Tonga made use of missionary advisers to devise constitutions not only as an acknowledgement of Jehovah but as a means of defending the sovereignty of their kingdoms in the face of a rapidly increasing presence of European commercial interests, backed by the occasional visit of a nation’s warship. Islanders, of course, had entered into commercial arrangements with various traders and settlers in the first place. They were quite capable of ignoring or turning on missionaries when it served their purposes. Thus Taufa‘ahau was led to proclaim the secessionist Free Church of Tonga in 1885 when the Australian board failed to cede control over the Methodist missions. Christianity remained central to the evolving cultures of Tonga, Hawai’i, and elsewhere, but as the presence of other Europeans increased, the influence of missionaries steadily waned.
In the final analysis, there was no clear line between missionaries and other whites in the Pacific or in Africa. Many missionaries in the Polynesian kingdoms came to enjoy very comfortable lifestyles, with staffs of servants tending commodious houses and gardens. While most eventually returned home or settled in white colonies, others stayed, forming large families and using their local connections to advance their personal fortunes. During his furlough in England in the 1830s, John Williams promoted a plan to carry on commercial trading alongside his mission work. After his death, his son settled as a trader and American consul in Samoa. They were by no means the only ones to make such a transition. Most infamously, several descendants of the American Congregational missionaries to Hawai’i became major landowners who in 1893 helped to overthrow the Christian kingdom their predecessors had laboured to create.
Until the 1870s and 1880s missionaries were more or less ‘content to live as guests’ of local rulers. Few anticipated the expansion of imperial powers, ‘although at times they undoubtedly hoped for some sort of backing from Britain to assist and even protect them in difficulty’. In the Pacific missionaries joined calls for a more visible British presence in the form of warships and consuls as traders, sailors, and settlers threatened political stability—and as Roman Catholic missionaries proved a prelude to French colonization. The declaration of a French protectorate over Tahiti in 1843 came as a particularly heavy blow to the LMS, which was expelled from the islands a decade later. All the same, prior to the years of the ‘Scramble’, missionaries rarely appealed to Britain to assume power over a kingdom or region. Once the race to acquire colonial territories began, however, few objected. Their main concerns, beyond a preference for a British takeover, had to do with the protection of the land rights of indigenous populations and non-interference with missionary work. In the mid-1870s the LMS missionary John Mackenzie had petitioned for a protectorate over Bechuanaland, arguing ‘that nothing else could save Africans from white settler rapacity’. When it appeared that Queensland might move to annex eastern New Guinea, James Chalmers urged Britain to step in to prevent a repetition of the tragic fate of the Aborigines. Only a protectorate would do, in which land sales were severely restricted and handled by the government, white settlement discouraged, and labour recruitment for Queensland banned outright.
The Great Powers made liberal use of the rhetoric of Christian benevolence to justify their acquisition of massive colonial empires in the late nineteenth century. Protection of missionaries provided a convenient pretence for French intervention in Hawai’i and Tahiti, and, to a lesser extent, for the British in parts of East Africa. When imperial representatives proclaimed a protectorate or colony, missionaries could prove useful as translators and intermediaries with the local elite. On top of this, the Christian lobby at home contributed as many or more words to public discussions of imperialism as any faction. In the final analysis, however, missionaries possessed very limited political clout. They were not an arm of the State and their work in places like Tahiti or Uganda did not in itself establish British claims or interests. In the aftermath of the Scramble, British missionaries found themselves in German and American territories as well as the British Empire. They hoped that the imposition of imperial power would put an end to incessant fighting between local chiefs in places like Samoa and halt the Arabian slave trade in eastern Africa. They hoped that areas that had been closed to them because of warfare or resistance to their presence from rulers would now be thrown open to evangelization. They hoped that all of this could be accomplished with little confrontation and loss of life. Above all, they hoped—and largely believed—that the expansion of Empire was a matter of Providence and thus mostly benevolent. If indigenous people were to lose their autonomy, at least for a time, it was in order to save them from a dark past and bitter present, for a better and brighter future. Such hopes would be severely tested in the years ahead.