The first Pacific islanders’ interactions with Europeans were ‘dialogues of the deaf’ held offshore or on the beach. James Cook described how in 1769 a Maori man went about Cook’s ship ‘touching this and that... [when] any new thing caught his attention he shouted as loud as he could for some minutes without directing his speech either to us or to any one of his countrymen’. Such a performance implied the existence of a script or formula, a shadow text that a prayer book might replace. Thirty-four years later, on Christmas Day 1813, Samuel Marsden preached his first sermon to New Zealanders, drawing on Luke 2:10, and no one understood him either, the preacher admonishing them ‘not to mind that now’. The field of comparative Oceanic religion began with these incomprehensions. Thomas Kendall, in Marsden’s Anglican mission, was the first literate practitioner.9 With the assistance of northern hapu chiefs, he produced a Lord’s Prayer and a grammar, following the method ‘laid down in the Sanscrit Grammars’ of Christian linguists in India (more about which below). Kendall tried to distinguish identities from concepts. The wife of a culture hero could not be the Virgin Mary, but the word ‘atua’ could express ‘the Divinity’, because atua was not a personage. Apparently Maori as in Tangata Maori already meant ‘we autochthones’ in the eighteenth century. Prayer books and portions of Scripture were translated, ‘w[h]akamoari’, meaning ‘us-ified’ into ‘the language of New Zealand’. In 1837 William Colenso of the London Missionary Society (LMS) completed a New Testament, the KoTeKawenata-Hou, standardizing the northern dialect. It was from this time that ‘Maori’ became an ethnicity, and that white settlers’ numbers grew, soon to eclipse them.
In general the Pacific posed a great challenge: hundreds of languages each with tiny numbers of speakers; vast and turbulent seas separating populations; ritualized violence and hostility on individual islands. While most share a basic grammar, their lexicons differ greatly. It was and is common for adults to know two or three of them. In Papua New Guinea some 760 languages have been counted, a third of which have fewer than 500 speakers; several dozen are spoken by a village’s worth of fishwives. Thus it was not possible to follow the example of Colenso with the northern hapu ‘Maori’. The Anglican pioneer George Selwyn began his mission by teaching himself to read Maori aboard ship, with a copy of Colenso’s KoTeKawenataHou—or rather, he taught himself to read the KoTeKawenataHou—and at ‘St Johns’ on Norfolk Island he studied for two weeks with a local man translating a bit of Scripture into his vernacular version. Then he learnt that the man’s dialect was limited to half the southern tip of the island. Ultimately, the solution Selwyn found was the same that Marsden adopted: the daily work of resident missions would be assigned to indigenously ‘Pacific’ pastors who could settle and learn languages related to their own. (See pp. 135-36.) The result was great variety in linguistic practices and strategies in evangelism.
In Melanesia two creole languages eventually predominated: the ‘Motu’ of the colonial police (which first drew personnel from Motu Island), and ‘Pisin Tok’, pidgin talk, which emerged among Pacific migrant workers on Samoan coconut plantations. People learnt them in addition to their natal tongue, and neither became a national identity. When Melanesian Christians shouted ‘I know the one true God’ to identify themselves to other boats, they used the English word ‘God’. As Pacific pastors are aware, it was missionaries’ desire to communicate in English that brought Oceania as a concept into being. In many cases, ‘government and church seem to have been blended and overlaid’ in South Pacific societies. In the Loyalty Islands antagonistic Catholic and Protestant factions of chiefs, abetted by competing missionaries, repackaged their conflicts as ‘religious wars’. Their pastors later disseminated their understandings of Christianity westward. Lay evangelists on Tuvalu used hymns ‘inappropriately’ and formed their own ‘ekalesia’. After a Solomon Islands pastor-chief, Soga, extended his dominion by preaching against local raids and killings (‘headhunting’), the title Soga was taken by paramount chiefs. Anglicans in the Solomons associated themselves with a vunagi kiloau, or ‘church masters’ council—Soga II competed with one—much as a samaj (‘society’) of elders and churchmen emerged among the Rishi (Untouchables) of the Ganges plain, and much as cattle-owning Christians occupied kingships in central and southern Africa. Authority and Christianity spoke the same language, and tended to overlap in many parts of the Empire.
It fell to Selwyn’s junior colleague Robert Codrington to attempt the first broad-based study of Oceanic languages in the 1860s. Not only did Codrington compile the Police (Pal) Motu dictionary, but he also mastered the rudiments of forty other languages, writing a massive comparative grammar. Codrington’s texts established the Oceanic meaning of mana, a word found everywhere, even in New Zealand, as ‘an invisible spiritual force or influence’ deriving from the ancestors; ‘the Melanesian mind is entirely possessed by the belief’ in mana, ‘a supernatural power or influence’. Pacific religion was all about mana, its pursuit and deployment. In his 1911 study History of Melanesian Society the anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers also accepted mana, after conducting his research aboard the Anglican mission ship The Southern Cross, his main informant the son of a ‘native pastor’. Raymond Firth, in Tikopia (1940), further Christianized its meaning as ‘soul substance’.
Recent scholarship suggests mana originally meant only that something ‘worked’, with nothing spiritual in it. According to Roger Keesing, it connoted ‘to be efficacious’, as opposed to drevi, ‘useless’. In this view, Pacific missionaries brought mana into being as a spiritual concept so they could replace it with a Christian alternative. Mana was about ambition and the exertion of will, whereas grace, which the Christian cherished, was something one received. It was mana’s inscription in this opposition that made it exterior and receivable, and requiring faith. Codrington seems to have harboured doubts about mana’s spirituality, but it was his study The Melanesians that defined it so, effectively casting Pacific people’s efforts to be powerful in life, to have ‘juice’, as a superstition.
Pacific people also wrested control of Christian language themselves. Although the first Maori baptism occurred in 1825, by the 1860s nearly all Maori represented themselves as normative Christians, regardless of what missionaries thought. On the East Coast, the Revd William Williams found Maori eager to internalize Christian ideas, and he was crushed when his church later lost nearly all its members to the Kereopa, the local manifestation of the great Pai Marire insurgency in 1865 (See pp. 82-83 and 226-27.). In many respects, however, Kereopa was quite close to Maori Christianity, though it was politicized differently. Even the ‘Maori high god’, Io, was apparently adapted from Scripture. As J. Z. Smith argues, it derived from a Taranaki Maori’s vision of Gabriel in September 1861, at a critical juncture in the insurrection. From that point on Io appeared as the equal and opposite protagonist to the ‘God’ of the Southern Cross. The name was a refitting of Ihowa, or Jehovah. As Smith aptly remarks, homo religiosus is essentially homo faber.