People of the South Pacific region, particularly the eastern island groups, responded rapidly to Christian evangelism. Hundreds volunteered to become evangelists. Charles Forman has estimated that 895 missionaries left Fiji, Samoa, the Cook Islands, the Solomon Islands, and Tonga to proselytize in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu (New Hebrides), and Kiribati and Tuvalu (Gilbert and Ellice Islands). Many more preached in their own or neighbouring communities. Many of these pioneer missionaries did not survive the violence and diseases they encountered, particularly in the western Pacific. Of the LMS Islander pastors sent to Papua New Guinea between 1871 and 1885, almost half died. Ta’unga, a Rarotongan, was one of the few evangelists to return from New Caledonia.
One of the most attractive aspects of Christianity for Pacific Islanders was its association with reading and writing. Elekana, a Rarotongan missionary who arrived on the Tuvaluan island of Nukulaelae after being blown off course, was welcomed when the islanders realized he could read the Bible. He distributed pages of his book to help them read. ‘Day after day old and young men, and women came, requesting me to spell and read to them, and begging for part of my book. Soon none of my book was left.’ The hunger for literacy—even symbols of literacy such as pages of a book—crops up in many of the autobiographical writings of first-generation Christian evangelists in the Pacific region. Two of the most detailed personal accounts to have been published come from the pens of Maretu and Ta’unga, both trained by Charles Pitman of the LMS.
Maretu’s narrative, while strongly influenced by his Christianity, reveals more about the societies in which he lived than many of the other surviving autobiographies. A telling comparison is the hagiographic life of the Tongan Joel Bulu, who evangelized in Fiji. This ‘autobiography’ was written down by a missionary, based on conversations the two had conducted over a period of time. It presents a formulaic account of the young Bulu, ‘quaking with fear and weeping in great anguish’, finding God, and then risking his life to spread the Word among violent cannibals. Maretu’s writings, in contrast, make insightful observations about functioning societies, their hierarchical nature, their social relationships, the traumatic effects of Christian teachings, the awful impact of introduced diseases, and the tensions between evangelists from different island groups. His account of cannibalism is more ethnographic than a representation of evil: ‘No one ate human flesh during times of peace; it was only in times of war Pigs, matured kava plants and fish poison were substituted for human sacrifices in times of peace, for to eat human flesh then was an offence against the rules of the ariki and mataiapo.’ Maretu worked among his own people in the Cook Islands because Charles Pitman would not release him for service in more distant places. His opportunity for independent action did not arise until 1839, when unrest broke out on the neighbouring island of Mangaia, where Tahitian evangelists had been working. Later Maretu travelled to the islands of Manihiki and Rakahanga before returning to Rarotonga. Ta’unga, on the other hand, left Rarotonga in 1842 for New Caledonia, whose people looked strange to him, spoke an unfamiliar language, and practised customs he did not understand. On his arrival he maintained an ethnocentric distance:
These people are a very strange kind of people. They walk about without clothing, both men and women. The latter are indeed more degraded than the former. It is, they say, what they are accustomed to from of old. They are just the same when they sleep. They make a fire in their huts then they lie down and sleep by the side of it.
Ta’unga’s account demonstrates that evangelism could be a dangerous and life-threatening commitment. Sometimes the evangelists were blamed for epidemics that were rife among the New Caledonians; or jealous chiefs wanted them killed. European traders tried to undermine them by claiming that the new religion did not come from Europe, but was being disseminated from Samoa and Rarotonga.
Threats to evangelists' lives eventually became so severe that the mission society insisted they leave; Ta’unga was sent to Mare and other islands in the Loyalty group. Here his main protagonists were Samoans who had previously established a mission to the islanders. Ta’unga was again confronted by strange cultural practices, particularly cannibalism, which he described in some detail: ‘When the enemy is taken, they grab him and chop him up in pieces and give him to the womenfolk who carry him back to their houses.’ In contrast to Maretu’s unembellished description of cannibalism among his own people, Ta’unga claimed that it was not only victims of war that were eaten, but that New Caledonians were so depraved that family members ate each other. Ta’unga was writing for a missionary audience, which possibly accounts for his lurid descriptions of evil customs. He told Charles Pitman, ‘The customs of these islands are innumerable. I have not written about all of them, lest you should not approve of these matters, and perhaps you may not be interested.’
When Ta’unga went back to New Caledonia in an effort to resume his interrupted work, he found the village where he had lived burnt out and deserted. The threats of violence had been carried through. Instead of continuing with pioneering evangelism, he spent twenty-one years on Manu’a in Samoa ministering to an established Christian community. At first he remained aloof from the villagers, who thought him an inferior substitute for the European missionary they wanted, but by the time he left Samoa there were many celebratory legends told about him, including oral accounts which survived into the late twentieth century.
The autobiographies of new Christian evangelists in the Pacific reflect their willingness to sacrifice their lives for the privilege of preaching to the unconverted. All accounts from Pacific Islander evangelists are cast in heroic mode, where failure and danger are ever present. Clement Marau from the Bank Islands in Vanuatu recounted his early despair on the island of Ulawa when he tried to convert a whole village: ‘at first I began wrong, beginning with a great number of people at once, and failed entirely; whereas afterwards I came to see that it is a good thing to begin with one person rather than many’. While frequently discouraged by their lack of success, they retained a sense of their superiority over non-Christians. Evangelizing among those who were at least nominal Christians was not considered a challenge. Fijian evangelists in Papua were fascinated by the prospect of physical danger. The two Rarotongans also sought out perilous situations. The Fijian evangelist Poate Ratu described cannibalism among the Papuans: ‘They cut up the victims like one does fish They are not baked whole, as at one time with us; so if you hear of one of us being killed, you would know that we were not baked in an oven, and roasted, but that we were grilled in small pieces over a fire.’
Although early islander missionaries worked in societies relatively untouched by colonialism, they showed an awareness of cultural issues. Far from accepting the hegemony of overseas missionaries, many declared they were better suited to converting their fellow islanders than Europeans. Having so recently experienced the evils of heathenism themselves, they believed they were better placed to understand and discourage unsavoury customs. They had the advantage of understanding the social and political structures of the communities. However, when Polynesians from societies with inherited chiefs went to the western Pacific communities where the political hierarchies were more fluid, they had great difficulty devising effective evangelical strategies. Latukefu argues that even in these circumstances, and despite their sense of superiority, new Christian evangelists in New Guinea were culturally closer to the people than European missionaries. They participated in village feasting, and readily became absorbed into the clan system of the locals. However, they never totally shook off their outsider status of being associated with innovations, and remained vulnerable to physical attacks.
Evangelists introduced customs from their home societies, but their main aim was to communicate their version of religious truth. Whether they preached a more violent message has been a matter of debate. Some historians have argued that European missionaries emphasized the God of love and the softer side of Christianity, whereas the new Christian evangelists focused on God’s retributive role and tried to instil the fear of hell. The writings of the evangelists belie this generalization. When Maretu showed the people of Manihiki how to build a lime kiln, they lit the fire and exclaimed, ‘Oh Maretu. I suppose the fire of the god of darkness down below is something like this!’ Maretu replied that the fire, which was the anger of God, would die if all people believed in Jesus Christ. His preaching emphasized Jesus’ sacrifice, not God’s wrath. Ta’unga criticized a fellow evangelist for underplaying the love of God in his preaching. He himself balanced the hard and soft sides of Christianity: ‘The crucial things are the anger of God and boundless love. Because of his anger with man for his committing sin, souls went down to hell, but because of his great love, God brought men back from the fire, and the souls reached heaven.’
Preachers not only lauded the new religion but also delighted in exposing the inadequacy of people’s existing beliefs. They used rhetorical devices to show how Christianity could answer questions about the origins of human existence, the soul, and sin, which local religions did not address, as well as the impotence of these religions in the face of epidemic diseases and natural catastrophes. A common evangelical strategy was the destruction of people’s idols and sacred places. Ta’unga insisted that a chief who had embraced Christian prayer must burn the effigies of his old gods. Marau destroyed all the idols of the people of Ulawa and burned down their sacred grove to prove they had no supernatural powers. Maretu recounted how the two Tahitian evangelists who brought Christianity to his own community led the villagers in the destruction of the marae (‘religious grounds’) and idols. Maretu’s own intervention in burning his father’s marae saved his father from a fatal illness. There were other forms of destruction and renewal. When Maretu baptized twenty people on Manihiki, he gave the children biblical names. Soon everyone in the community wanted to be baptized so they could acquire a new name, a social act seen as creating bonds of commitment between the people, the missionary, and his god.
The accounts of Ta’unga and Maretu do not conform to bipolar models of the encounter between European cultural colonialism and indigenous cultural response. New Christians did not simply parrot a European message but communicated their own understandings of the Bible. They transmitted aspects of their own cultural heritage along with ideas received from foreign missions. They encouraged people to cover their bodies, to move into centralized villages, and to adopt new technologies. Sometimes they learned skills and knowledge from their host community. Thus Pacific Christianity was associated with a wide range of multidirectional cultural and intellectual exchanges. Some of these anticipated British imperial control and even facilitated its imposition: in Fiji and New Zealand, British government negotiations with indigenous elites were assisted by the existence of large polities formed in response to the work of missionaries and new Christian evangelists.