29 RELIGION AND EMPIRE IN THE SOUTH SEAS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

John Gascoigne

In 1815 Lancelot Threlkeld, a former actor with a lifelong predilection for the dramatic, was put through his paces by the London Missionary Society to ascertain whether indeed he was of the stuff of which missionaries are made.

Its determination to keep these two realms apart had been strengthened by earlier experience with empires which had sought to spread an amalgam of Church and State. The first European empires to spread Christianity beyond the bounds of Europe, those of Spain and Portugal, had used the sword to support the Gospel. Even though Spanish missionaries could be among the most strident critics of Spanish imperial behaviour (with the Dominican Bartolome de Las Casas helping to create the ‘Black Legend’ of Spanish brutality in the Americas), the consequences of such a close linkage between church and state had been something of an object lesson to future missionaries on what not to do.

A more positive model for the London Missionary Society was provided by German missionaries, particularly those drawn from the wing of the Lutheran church associated with Pietism.² This religious movement—like the Evangelical revival which spurred on the British Protestant missionary societies of the late eighteenth century—was shaped by a belief in individual conversion following a recognition of one’s sinfulness and the need to acknowledge Christ as one’s saviour. The fact that the eighteenth-century German Mor­avian missionaries belonged to a country which not only did not have an empire but was not even a unified nation until 1871 actually seemed to work in their favour. Untram­melled by imperial ties, the Moravians had made their way across the globe to sites as diverse as the Caribbean, Greenland, North America, southern Africa and India. Their example greatly influenced not only the non-denominational London Missionary Society but also other major Protestant societies founded in the period, including the Church Missionary Society. This body was linked with the established church but shared with the London Missionary Society a strongly Evangelical faith and, in the period after its foun­dation in 1799, its focus was on mission fields which, like New Zealand, lay outside the British Empire.

The character of the early Protestant missionaries, with its Evangelical emphasis which straddled the divide between the established and the non-conformist churches and with its international and, especially, German links, was thus not conducive to shaping the missions into instruments for the spread of empire. This ambivalence about the links between the Union Jack and the Bible was to be played out in the way in which the missionaries responded to the British presence in the South Seas. In that quarter of the world the main British base from 1788 was, of course, the penal settlement of New South Wales, but this did not attract much missionary enthusiasm—another instance of the way in which the links between empire and mission were far from clear or direct. As Britain planted its neo-Britain on the Australian continent, it brought along its church-state culture and clergymen to minister to the spiritual needs of the settlers and, more perfunctorily, to the convicts.

The indigenous population of Australia was, however, to receive only spasmodic and largely fruitless missionary attention.⁴ The way of life of nomadic Aborigines was considered too removed from the pattern of a settled parish or village to be readily amenable to the ministrations of Christianity as the British missionaries understood it: in 1823 the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (founded 1813) concluded that their efforts were best directed to fields other than Australia since, unlike in other mission fields, ‘the Aborigines of this Country have no towns, villages, hamlets of local habitations, but are perpetually wandering about from place to place, without home, and without shelter’.⁵ The Evangelical Samuel Marsden, the Anglican chaplain to New South Wales, and chief agent in overseeing missionary activity in the South Seas, was particularly definite (and influential) on this point, writing in 1819 to the Secretary of the Church Missionary Society regarding the Aborigines that ‘the time is not yet arrived for them to receive the great blessings of civilization and the knowledge of Christianity’.⁶ Tellingly, the Protestant missionaries who had most success with Aboriginal communities were to be the German Lutherans in South Australia.

With clerical activity in Australia largely devoted to white settlers, Protestant missionary activity in the South Seas was, in its early stages, chiefly directed at Polynesian societies. These had received a great deal of attention relatively recently as a consequence of the widespread interest in the journals of Captain Cook and other Pacific explorers—attention which was one of the spurs for the growth of Protestant missionary societies in the late eighteenth century.⁷ The fact that these were societies based around agriculture with relatively settled villages and a distinct social hierarchy provided reassuring points of parallel with the world of the Protestant missionaries. Drawing these societies into the embrace of the British Empire was not, however, an explicit goal of the missionaries even though, as we shall see, missionary activity could widen the reach of empire by indirect and often unconscious means. The missionaries, however, resisted a too direct imperial link. To the proposal in 1802, for example, that a garrison outpost from New South Wales be set up in Tahiti the missionaries responded with alarm least their godly influence on the Tahitians be corroded by godless soldiers and settlers.⁸

After a number of reverses, ultimately the missionaries there successfully pinned their fortunes on the dominant local chief drawn from the Pomare dynasty. The rise of this chiefly family to supremacy over the Society Islands owed much to the way in which Pomare II emulated the role of Constantine by establishing Christianity as the royal religion after his decisive victory over his rivals in 1815. Though this prompted a decisive rejection of the old religion, there remained plenty of work for the missionaries for, as one of their number, Charles Barff, acknowledged, after welcoming Pomare II’s rather belated baptism in 1819: ‘The people in general do not know why they have cast away their Idols any more than that their chiefs told them they ought and that their old religion was a bad one’.

For the missionaries on Tahiti, their chief interest in imperialism was focussed more on the microcosm of the Pomare Empire in the Society Islands than on the macrocosm of the British Empire. The alliance with the Pomares continued after the death of Pomare II in 1821, the strength of this alliance being underlined by the arrangements for the coronation of his son, Pomare III, in 1824. The ritual, as described by the visiting missionary, George Bennett, was intended to emphasise the extent of the Christian character of the Tahitian monarchy:

After prayer &c. a large very handsome Bible will be presented... also a copy of the laws of the land [written in collaboration with the missionaries]... After the ceremony of coronation the King is to proceed in state to the House of God[,] a new Chapel which will then be opened[,] the king leading his people to the acknowledgement and worship of him who is Lord of Lords and King of Kings as the first act after his coronation.¹⁰

With such local support the missionaries were not inclined to complicate matters by creating strong bonds between Tahiti and the British Empire—even though the young Pomare III died in 1827 and his successor, his flighty sister, Pomare IV, proved much less attentive to the missionaries than her brother.¹¹

The increasing presence of the French and, most particularly, of the dreaded French Catholic missionaries did, however, prompt the London Missionary Society to agitate to have Tahiti placed under some form of British protectorate.¹² Such plans, however, came to nothing largely because Britain was reluctant to extend the formal bounds of empire further—particularly as the Society Islands seemed to offer very little by way of strategic or economic advantage.

Plans for a British protectorate, however, did come to fruition in the Tongan archipe­lago (the Friendly Islands), which also came under the sway of the British Evangelical missionary movement, largely in the form of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. As in Tahiti, the missionary fortunes were tied to the goodwill of the local rulers and, in particular, the dynasty which came to assume dominance over the archipelago led by Taufa‘ahau I who became King George Tapou I of Tonga, ruling from 1845 to 1893. Like the Pomares, he linked his monarchy with the Christian religion, the great break­through for the Protestant missionaries coming with his conversion in 1831 when he was ruler of the Ha‘apai group in central Tonga.¹⁵ When the Quaker missionary Daniel Wheeler passed through Tonga in 1836, he viewed the dominance of Taufa‘ahau and his conception of Christianity with some misgivings. The Tongan ruler did indeed observe ‘great promptness... in the due observance of its [Christianity’s] rites and ordinances’ though ‘If any disobey or if any are guilty of a misdemeanour, they are severely punished’. Such chiefly imposed discipline accounted for ‘the present outward appearances of the highly devotional state of the people of the islands’. As a Quaker suspicious of both ritual and state-sanctioned religion, however, Wheeler added that ‘if the present rulers should be removed, that this compulsive mode of making men Christian nominally will then clearly be manifested’. At present, however, it was said ‘that the King does nothing without con­sulting the missionaries’.¹⁶ Thus ensconced, the missionaries had little incentive to involve the British imperial authorities, though the entry of the Germans into the Pacific in the late nineteenth century did eventually prompt the Tongan monarchy to place itself under a British protectorate in 1900 while retaining its sovereignty.¹⁷

In both Tonga and Tahiti, the British missionaries found that the best way of promoting their cause was to work with the imperial ambitions of a local ruler rather than the fluc­tuating policies and methods of the sprawling British Empire. In the Hawaiian archipelago, too, the early American Protestant missionaries largely linked their fortunes to the Kamehameha dynasty—another example of a local chief gaining dominance over an entire archipelago. Such experiences conditioned the missionaries to assume that the most effective way to win over a Pacific society was to convert their rulers. Yet such an approach, while conspicuously successful in some parts of Polynesia, could not be applied across the Pacific generally. Melanesian society, for example, was much less hierarchical than Polynesian society, limiting the extent to which a chief could impose a new religion on a wider population (though the predominately Melanesian Fiji proved something of an exception). Such an experience led one would-be missionary to the Melanesians to com­plain as early as the 1840s that ‘We found no such thing as a king or great chief... No Thakaombau [dominant chief of Fiji], Pomare, or Kamehameha’.¹⁸ As a Polynesian society, New Zealand had a chiefly hierarchical society but the land was too large for any one chief to assume dominance over all the others. The result was that the Protestant missionaries there did play a major role in the incorporation of these islands into the British Empire.

Yet the outlook of the missionaries in New Zealand was not greatly different from those in Tahiti. If there had been there a local ruler able to impose his will and a system of law and order acceptable to the missionaries, the impulse to call in the British might well have been weakened. The main motive of the missionaries was the need for colonial authority as a way of protecting the indigenous peoples against the corrupting influence of the traders and would-be settlers. It was in such terms that the Church Missionary Society sub-committee of the Waimate district in the North Island responded to proposals put forward to the colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, in 1838. The committee at first dwelt reluctantly on the fact that (in contrast to some other parts of Polynesia) there was little prospect of an indigenous ruler assuming effective control: ‘A Native Government can not be formed by Natives. The Natives are without a revenue, divided by petty jealousies and family feuds’. The result was that they could not restrain the European traders and the settlers who ‘are fast buying up the country’—in effect, they warned, ‘Colonization has commenced and British subjects appear to us to be the sovereign of the country’. The need was to impose imperial rule to restrain this increasing European domination: ‘It has ever appeared to us that the only prospect of saving the Natives is by the British Government taking them entirely under their protection’. Such involvement in imperial politics, however, was regarded with some ambivalence by the missionaries: on the one hand, they offered ‘the co-operation of the Missionaries with the Government’; on the other, they were mindful of the danger of going beyond ‘our missionary duties’. Yet the need for action became the more pressing in the mind of the missionaries since, as in Tahiti, the French and especially their Catholic missionaries were intruding into this Protestant sphere of influence from which the Protestant missionaries concluded in 1840 that ‘much evil must be apprehended’.¹⁹

Protestant missionaries may have favoured the expansion of paternalist British control over New Zealand, but in New Zealand, as elsewhere, the missionaries were often a thorn in the side of the European settlers opposing their plans for colonisation. From its foundation in 1837 the New Zealand Association’s plans for settlement were vigorously opposed by the Church Missionary Society.²⁰ Such opposition was echoed by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, which deplored ‘the proposed plan for the establishment of a British Colony in New Zealand’ as ‘one which most seriously affects the rights and interests of the Natives of New Zealand; and which is likely, under present circumstances, very injuriously to interrupt and impede the operation of Christian Missionaries in that country’. It saw the need for ‘devising some plan for the protection of the Natives from the injuries connected with the present system’. Nonetheless, as a body entrusted with the welfare of ‘the Natives under their instruction and care’ and one obliged to maintain ‘general principles of justice and humanity’, they felt obliged ‘to express their painful and anxious apprehension of the evils, which in their judgement, are likely to result from the scheme of Colonization’.²¹ Such opposition later led Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the grand impresario of settler societies in the British Empire in general and New Zealand in particular, to vent his anti-missionary spleen to the colonial secretary in 1844, writing that ‘the origin of all the misery which has occurred in Tahiti and New Zealand is the missionaries not being confined to their own calling’.²²

Tension between missionary protectionism of the Maoris and settler demands for more lands continued to be a backdrop to New Zealand politics in the formative years of the new colony in the decades which followed the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840.²³ Under the rather ambiguous terms of this treaty, the Maori chiefs allowed sovereignty to pass to Queen Victoria while (as they thought) retaining control over their own lands. In retrospect this treaty seemed like a major step along the path of the incorporation of New Zealand into the British Empire, but the missionaries who played a large part in its formulation hoped that it would provide a bulwark against what they considered the morally corrupting influence of the arrival of British colonists and traders. The translation of the Treaty into Maori was largely the work of Henry Williams, the head of the New Zealand Church Missionary Society, and, following its enactment in February 1840, he set off in April to the Cook’s Strait area to publicise the treaty. What he saw there confirmed him in his views about

[the] very serious effect... which the influx of Europeans has already had upon the country around of a most immoral nature, shewing that unless there be a broad line of separation presumed between the Europeans and Natives, the Aborigines must inevitably fall and that in a short period.²⁴

The Protestant missionaries to New Zealand may have seen themselves as attempting to hold back the excesses of empire but, in an increasingly globalised world, it was difficult for them to evade some form of imperial mission. Their justification for involving the British government in the administration of New Zealand was that it was for the welfare of the Maoris. Inevitably, however, the missionaries became intermediaries between government and the indigenous peoples and, whether they wished it or not, they thereby became part of a web of imperial power. The complex network of imperial rule meant that, for exam­ple, the Methodist missionaries received in May 1840 the warm thanks of William Hobson, who became lieutenant governor-general of New Zealand at the beginning of 1840, for their ‘active, zealous and able assistance’ during the negotiations over the Treaty of Wait­angi.²⁵ Five years later, Henry Williams claimed that the missionaries were so essential to the functioning of the colony that the government ‘could make neither war nor peace’ without them.²⁶ Of course, too, the missionaries turned to the British government when they needed protection: very early in its history, in 1827, the Methodist mission invoked the support of the governor of New South Wales ‘for interference on his part in favour of the Missionaries, that the land purchased by them, be assured to them’.²⁷ The gradual steps which led to the incorporation of New Zealand into the British Empire were an object lesson in the ways in which an informal empire could become a formal one.

Some missionaries had become involved in the incremental stages that led to this result with considerable reluctance, but others had sought to involve the British government in advancing their goals from the time when the missionaries first arrived in New Zealand. This was particularly true of Samuel Marsden, who directed much of the South Seas missionary activity and particularly that within New Zealand. When he first arrived in New Zealand and conducted the first Christian service in the Bay of Islands area of the North Island in 1814, he welcomed the way in which the Union Jack was hoisted ‘as the signal and the dawn of civilization, liberty and religion in that dark and benighted land’.²⁸ In Marsden’s mind the achievement of the missionary goals meant the need for the con­straining hand of the British Empire on the British traders and colonists who would cor­rupt the Ma^- oris and subvert the work of the missionaries. Hence his encouragement of the governor of New South Wales to assume greater powers in New Zealand, culminating in the appointment of a British Resident in 183 2.29 It was a progressive extension of imperial reach prompted by missionary paternalism which culminated in the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, two years after Marsden died. His view of New Zealand as an ‘English incipient colony’³⁰ was, no doubt, conditioned by the fact that he was indeed based in the British colony of New South Wales where he was a substantial landowner. In his view of the world the settlement at Sydney played a considerable part in ‘the grand chain of Divine Provi­dence’ since the missions in the South Seas could ‘not have been carried on without this settlement’. Fired by the millenarian enthusiasm which had prompted the great British missionary enterprise of which he was largely the South Seas co-ordinator, Marsden reflected on the way in which the rough and tumble penal colony had played a role in the way in which ‘the Gospel Trumpet of the Jubilee has been sounded from pole to pole’.³¹

For someone such as Marsden involved in co-ordinating the missionary effort over much of the South Seas, the British Empire had very obvious uses in providing protection both for missionaries and indigenous peoples and in enabling passage of missionaries to the far corners of the Pacific. Quite where the cultivation of the informal empire of influence ended and the formal empire over which the Union Jack flew began was often a moot point—as Marsden’s actions in helping to set in motion the processes which led to the appointment of a British lieutenant-governor over New Zealand in 1840 indicate. But the passage from informal to formal empire was not foreordained, as the experience of Tahiti suggested. The foundation of the mission there had been largely directed by Thomas Haweis, in many ways a kindred spirit of Marsden in his determination to advance the Evangelical missionary cause by invoking where possible the support of the British Empire. As the virtual founder of the London Missionary Society, Haweis took a global view of missionary activity from his base in London. To his mind this confirmed the need for turning British commercial and strategic interests to the support of the missionary cause where possible. Promoting the mission in Tahiti involved Haweis in seeking support from any agency of the British state which might prove receptive. He even invoked, with some success, the president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, as a former visitor to Tahiti on Cook’s Endeavour expedition as well as a deft manager of those branches of British government concerned with the promotion of exploration and commercial expansion.³²

From his early 1788 proposal for a missionary society Haweis had sought to interest possible patrons in the commercial and strategic advantages to be obtained from the mis­sion to the South Seas. He referred, for example, to the possibly lucrative trade in san­dalwood (much in demand in China) and pointed to the way in which ‘a Mission if successful would naturally connect any people converted to Christianity more nearly to us, and engage them to a more cordial Union with us as a nation’.³³ Such inducements were held out to the East India Company in a letter of 1796 in order to enlist the support of that monopolistic body which claimed the trade of the South Seas for itself. Haweis sug­gested, for example, that Tahiti would ‘become a most desirable port for refreshment to those ships which may sail in those Seas’. When missionary reinforcements were dispatched on the Royal Admiral in 1800, the captain was asked to ascertain who ‘would be fittest to be placed in office supposing we should determine upon a colonial Establishment’. It was also suggested that it would be in his interest to keep an eye out for useful products such as turmeric. When attempting in 1802 to persuade the British government to arrange the loan of a ship he waxed eloquent on the advantages which Tahiti might provide for the colonies of New South Wales and Norfolk Island as well as its strategic significance as a possible base for commercial activity on the western coast of North America and the Hawaiian islands.³⁴

Such secular blandishments did help in establishing and supplying the sometimes fragile mission. Drawing Tahiti into the trading routes which sustained the British imperial pre­sence in the South Seas did mean that it fell within the British sphere of influence. Such ties were cemented particularly by the burgeoning trade in pickled pork between Sydney and Tahiti. Ties with a larger world in which the British Empire loomed large were, in the nature of things, strengthened by missionaries acting as cultural intermediaries. Their familiarity with the language and customs of both indigenous and metropolitan societies made them natural translators and interpreters.³⁵ Yet Tahiti did not become a formal part of the British Empire. Missionary pioneers like Haweis were, in secular matters, pragma­tists willing to enlist what support was necessary to achieve their religious goals. If these could be realised without drawing a mission field into the formal orbit of empire, Haweis’ men on the ground were quite content to operate within the sphere of indigenous politics. As Tahiti and other Polynesian missionary sites such as Tonga and the Marquesas showed, the flag did not necessarily follow the Bible, even though the larger world of the British Empire in various ways facilitated the arrival of the Bible.

Such an ambiguous relationship between the sphere of the missionaries and that of the empire from which they derived in many ways accorded with the aspirations of those in Britain itself wary of too many colonial entanglements. Indeed, the informal empire that the missionary presence helped to widen was to be in accord with the growing ideology of free trade which achieved a major victory with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Such free traders sought to keep the structures of government and imperial rule as minimal as possible though drawing much of the world within the British sphere of influence through what has famously been called the ‘imperialism of free trade’.³⁶ By the mid-century, therefore, missions could be seen as part of this loose network which projected British power around the globe without all the encumbrances of formal imperial rule.³⁷

The view that missions were agents of informal empire even in situations which did not lead to formal annexation has been extended to argue that they were propagators of forms of cultural imperialism. The most influential exponents of such a view have been Jean and John Comaroff in their seminar two-volume historical anthropology of the impact of Pro­testant missionaries in southern Africa. Without necessarily intending it, argue the Comaroffs, the missionaries imposed their values on African peoples, reshaping their worldview and behaviour in ways that made them more willing subjects of imperial rule and global capitalism. For the Comaroffs the missionaries were ‘bearers of a vocal Protes­tant ideology... the human vehicles of a hegemonic worldview’. As such, they worked to transform the lives of their African congregations through reshaping the very texture of their daily existence and collective outlook. To that end they ‘engage[d] the Africans in a web of symbolic and material transactions that would bind them ever more securely to the colonizing culture’. The effect of such a cultural remoulding was to draw the Africans ‘into the purview of a global, rationalized civilization’. The global, however, began with the highly local as the missionaries set out ‘to remake people by redefining the taken-for- granted surfaces of their everyday worlds’. Driving such a quest to change human beings was the fundamental Evangelical belief in the possibility of conversion and new life allied to a more widespread Enlightenment belief in the extent to which human nature could be reformed and improved.³⁸

Like their Evangelical counterparts in southern Africa, the Protestant missionaries to the South Seas were tireless in emphasising the importance of improving the world around them through the application of disciplined industry. When the Reverend Thomas Haweis sent off the missionaries to Tahiti, it was with a firm admonishment that ‘You are not sent to sit down as Settlers, but to be active as Missionaries’. It followed that the missionaries, who had been chosen for their practical training, should ensure ‘the Exercise of the Mechanical Arts in which you are skilled’, this being ‘as essential to the benefit of your own Souls, as they will endear you to the Heathen who must learn from you’. From the point of view of the Tahitians whom they wished to convert both to Christianity and civilisation (as Europeans understood them), ‘Your example will be a living Sermon, and produce effects yet more blessed than your discourse’. Practical improvement, though it needs always to be ‘in Subordination to the great Object [spiritual conversion]’, should, where possible, lead to cultivation and the exploitation of ‘whatever may be curious, or valuable, of dyes, gum, woods, cotton, or any substances you may have discovered’.³⁹

Such instructions bore fruit: after the missionaries’ arrival on the island of Huahine in the Tahitian archipelago, reported the missionary Charles Barff in 1819, they planted sugar as a means ‘to stimulate the natives to industry’. The best means of achieving such a goal was ‘by example; for when we urge them they will answer us. Let us see you build neat houses and we will do so too. Let us see you plant cotton, sugar &c. and we will do so too’.⁴⁰ Gratifyingly, those who had been baptised were indeed making neat houses, con­firming the missionary belief in the nexus between conversion and civilisation. The formal report of the missionaries on Huahine at the end of the same year made similar points about ‘the improvement in the outward condition of the people, and their progress in civilization’. It dwelt at some length on the transformation in that most tangible aspect of everyday habit, forms of dress, noting that

The females especially are much improved in their habits and appearance, when they procure a few yards of foreign cloth, it is not as formerly, carelessly bound round their loins, but made up into a gown: which gives them a much more decent appearance.

Missionary wives, too, had provided instruction in needlework to good effect. The report also outlined the advances that had been made in education and, indeed, throughout the South Seas, missions were accompanied by schools.⁴¹ As literacy spread among the people of the South Seas so, too, did the demand for printed material in their own languages with the missionaries responding with translations of the Bible and other religious texts. A report from the Methodist missionaries in Tonga in 1834, for example, itemised the printing of parts of the Bible in a range of indigenous languages, including Fijian and Samoan. The Tongan press also produced some basic educational texts: ‘about 15,000 Alphabets or first books of 4 pages making a total of about 50,000 books issued from the Press’.⁴² By such activities, ironically, the missionaries helped to preserve both the language and some of the culture of the pre-contact indigenous world.⁴³

It was important both to the missionaries and their supporters that there was evidence of tangible progress in the outward manifestations of conversion and change of life—this the more so since it was so difficult to make ‘windows into men’s souls’ to gauge the success of the message of conversion. When John Davies, the missionary-historian of the Tahitian mission, reflected on what had been achieved by 1830, he pointed to the extent of improvement as an outward and visible sign of interior conversion:

decent places of worship, and Schools erected... many boats were also built for a more safe and comfortable voyaging from one island to another[,] new articles of dress made and used, the making of cocoanut oil, some attempts at sugar and salt making more cultivation of the ground &c. &c.44

Change in habits of life was also an indication of the extent to which the indigenous people had sufficiently absorbed the missionaries’ message to be ready for entry into the church. After the London Missionary Society spread to the Cook Islands in 1821, one of the questions put to candidates for baptism was ‘Are you willing to erect a comfortable house—attend to cleanliness within and without?’ The next question concerned the can­didate’s willingness to learn to read with, of course, the primary goal being study of the Bible.45 The missionaries took almost literally the adage that ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’ or, as the Comaroffs put it, for them ‘Grease... was the opposite of Grace’.⁴⁶ Missionaries brought with them changes of habit which meant that the peoples of the South Seas were connected with a larger world by print and by trade. Much of this trade, particularly textiles, was, too, of benefit to Britain,⁴⁷ providing evidence of the extent to which missionaries could act as agents of cultural imperialism.

Yet, the missionaries were much less powerful and the indigenous people retained much more agency than the term ‘cultural imperialism’ might suggest.⁴⁸ Unlike the conquest of the Americas, the missionaries in the South Seas had no armed support and had to rely on the co-operation of those whom they sought to convert. The trials of missionary life are brought out by some of the early reports of the missionaries to New Zealand. In 1824, a year after the former naval officer, Henry Williams, took over the direction of the Church Missionary Society giving it new energy and purpose, the report from the Rangihoua sta­tion of the Society, in the Bay of Islands, reflected on the progress of both agriculture and education. Both had their problems: the account acknowledged that it would probably be cheaper to buy the food from Sydney, but it was worth persisting with such cultivation for the sake of ‘the improvement of the Natives and the benefit they receive by the Trade and payment for their labour in the cultivating of it’. School attendance had been impeded by the fact that the boys had ‘been with their Parents helping to get the harvest of sweet Potatoes up’. Later there was further disruption to the school since the pupils ‘left to accompany their friends to a funeral and promised to return in a few days instead of which they joined their parents on a fighting expedition in land’. The parents also proved less than co-operative about sending their children to school since ‘they had not so much food as they wished them to have’. Henry Williams himself had to acknowledge that the task ahead was a difficult one: the promotion of improvement had slowed: ‘From the unsettled state of the Natives since their late fights we have not been able to set any Native Sawyers to work’. The missionaries had attempted to disseminate their message concerning the ‘natural depravity of man and the only way of salvation’, but when a crisis struck in the Maoris’ lives, such as grave illness, they would ‘resort to their old superstitious ideas’.⁴⁹

The indigenous people basically took what they thought helpful to them from what the missionaries offered. The missionaries themselves could see that: in 1824 a pioneering Church Missionary Society missionary told his colleagues that ‘very little will be done towards the establishment of Schools until the Natives have some idea of the blessings which Schools will lead to’.⁵⁰ By the 1830s a significant number of Maoris thought that the missionaries’ message offered a way of coming to terms with a fast changing world.⁵¹ In their own time and in their own way, then, they began to adopt their own form of Chris­tianity and the forms of civilisation which the missionaries had made clear were linked with it. A Church Missionary Society sub-committee of 1838 drew comfort from the extent to which the Ma^- oris ‘are in many respects an altered people’: the advance of at least some of the forms of civilisation was, however, ‘confined to those parts of the Island brought under the influence of Missionary exertions’. Another development which greatly heartened the missionaries was the extent to which the Maoris—like other Polynesian peoples—had come to recognise the advantages of literacy and hence of schooling.⁵² A meeting in the previous year at Manukau (near Auckland) had remarked on ‘the desire to learn to write having become very general in many parts of the Southern District’. As a consequence it was recommended that ‘the advisability of striking off lithographic “copies” for the general use of the natives be suggested to the Northern brethren’.⁵³ Possibly, Maori appreciation of the power of the written word was one of the major reasons for the consolidation of Christianity around 1840 with over one-half of Maoris regularly attending Christian ser­vices by 1845.⁵⁴

The Church Missionary report of 1838 also pointed to another respect in which the Ma^- oris themselves displayed considerable agency in the process of conversion—thus qua­lifying a too simplistic model of missionary cultural imperialism. For, wrote the mis­sionaries approvingly,

when a Native embraces Christianity he immediately becomes an instructor to his countrymen in those truths he may have learned. Independent of the above principle a number of Natives have been employed and are still employed in giving instruction to their countrymen.⁵⁵

In the following year William Williams (brother of Henry) warmly reported on the Maori missionaries sent to the Poverty Bay area who were ‘actively employed in their appointed work, and receiving from the natives an astonishing degree of attention’.⁵⁶ Such reliance on indigenous missionaries was characteristic of missions throughout the South Seas⁵⁷ emphasising, once again, the limitations of any model of cultural imperialism which underestimates the reciprocal quality of the indigenous interaction with the message of the missionaries. On the other hand, the Comaroffs have a point in arguing that such indi­genous agency ‘always ran up against the ambivalence of the European mission towards the indigenisation of their faith’.⁵⁸ A Church Missionary Society meeting in New Zealand responded to enthusiastic reports such as that by William Williams on Maori missionaries with the comment that ‘Native Teachers are undoubtedly important assistants but the best are but young in the faith but comparatively ignorant and unless every where visited by the regular Missionary much evil will arise from their agency’.⁵⁹

Missionaries had their own goals, which might or might not coincide with the goals of empire. The British Protestant missions which were catapulted into the South Seas from the very end of the eighteenth century in the wake of the Evangelical Revival were wary of too direct a tie with the formal machinery of Empire—the result of having viewed with some dismay the fruits of attempts of imperial evangelising through the imposition of a church-state culture. Their goals were conversion, improvement and protection of the indigenous peoples. Where empires proved useful in promoting such goals by providing logistical support or systems of law and order, missionaries and agents of empire might work together. Where goals clashed, as in making indigenous land more readily available to settlers, missionaries and the advocates of imperial expansion might also clash.

The very presence of British missionaries meant, however, an inevitable projection of British influence around the globe and the colourful reports which missionaries sent back of exotic climes stimulated the British public’s interests in the far reaches of empire. Mis­sionaries were, by their nature, concerned with the translation of one culture to another, which often made them at least informal agents of empire. Their assumptions about the need for inner conversion being reflected outwardly in a pattern of life characterised by disciplined industry meant, too, that they could act as agents of ‘cultural imperialism’. Such influence, however, depended very largely on the responses of the indigenous people to whom they ministered. The missionaries’ message was, in any case, often disseminated not by Europeans, but by indigenous converts who preached a version of Christianity coloured by their own cultural assumptions. Missionaries and empires were intermittent but uneasy allies. Missionaries could supply the means for effective imperial rule but through education and enculturation they could also provide the means to challenge imperial rule. When empires fell, however, Christianity often survived and even grew (albeit not necessarily in forms which the missionaries would have recognised)⁶⁰—keeping some distance between God and Caesar was to have long-term benefits.

Acknowledgement

This paper has greatly benefited from the work of Dr Patricia Curthoys in drawing toge­ther relevant material from microfilm sources. This research assistance was made possible by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.

Notes

1 ‘Threlkeld’s answers given at his ordination to missionary work, 8 November 1815, ‘South Sea Mission’ papers, c. 1800-1915, M[itchell] L[ibrary], Sydney, A381 (mf. CY877), p. 81. Ironically, he was singularly unsuccessful at staying out of political controversy. Anna Johnston, The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture and Power in Colonial.New South Wales (Crawley, Western Australia, 2011).

2 Andrew Porter, ‘Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780­1914’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1992), p. 377; Andrew Walls, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Protestant Missionary Awakening in Its European Context’, in Brian Stanley (ed.), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Grand Rapids, 2001), pp. 30-34.

3 Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700--1914 (Manchester, 2004), p. 56.

4 J. Bollen, ‘English Missionary Societies and the Australian Aborigine’, Journal of Religious History, Vol. 9 (1977), pp. 263-291.

5 Minute-book, 18 Dec. 1822-15 Jul. 1829, [Central] Missionary Committee, M[ethodist] Missionary] S[ociety], School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London [hereafter MMS], Minutes of a meeting of the committee, 8 October 1823 (A[ustralian] J[oint] C[opying] P[roject mf], M119).

6 John Rawson Elder (ed.), The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden, 1765-1838 (Dunedin, 1932), p. 232.

7 Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853 (Montreal, 2002), p. 51.

8 Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas 1797--1860 (Melbourne,

1978), p. 141.

9 ‘South Sea Mission' papers, ML, A381, p. 137.

10 To Catherine Read, 30 Sept. 1823, Sheffield City Archives, MD 5690, AJCP 2725.

11 John Garrett, To Live Among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania (Suva, 1982), p. 28.

12 Gunson, Messengers, p. 142.

13 British Library, Add. MS 40467, fol. 154v.

14 Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge, 1997), p. 131.

15 James Boutilier, ‘“We Fear Not the Ultimate Triumph”: Factors Effecting the Conversion Phase of Nineteenth-Century Missionary Enterprises', in Char Miller (ed.), Missions and Missionaries in the Pacific (New York, 1985), p. 32.

16 Loose extracts from the journal of Daniel Wheeler, Quaker missionary to Tahiti, and letters to friends, 24 May 1834-1838, Cleveland County Archive, Middlesborough Library Collection, 1/1, pp. 36, 56, AJCP M2855.

17 K.R. Howe, Where the: Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Sydney, 1991), p. 197.

18 Ibid., p. 306.

19 Minutes of missionaries' meetings, with reports, accounts, etc. 1823-77, Australasia Mission (N.Z.), C[hurch] Missionary] S[ociety] records, C.N./O 4, Birmingham University Library [hereafter CMS], Minutes of meetings Waimate, March 1, 1838, pp. 1-2 and at Paihia, July 9, 1839 (Mr H. Williams' report), AJCP M214.

20 Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand, 1830-47 (Auckland, 1977), p. 94.

21 Minutes of Meetings of the [Central] Committee, 20 December 1837-11 July 1851, Minutes of a meeting of the committee, 20 December 1837, p. 1, MMS, AJCP M120.

22 British Library, Add. MS 40550, fol. 141.

23 John Stenhouse, ‘Church and State in New Zealand, 1835-1870: Religion, Politics, and Race', in Hilary Carey and John Gascoigne (eds), Church and State in Old and New Worlds (Leiden, 2011), pp. 233-260.

24 Minutes of meeting, Waimate, September 9, 1840, CMS, Rev. H. Williams' report, AJCP M214.

25 District Committee Minutes, Australia, VDL and NZ, MMS, 1 Dec. 1840-6 Jan. 1841, AJCP M121.

26 Stenhouse, ‘Church and State in New Zealand', p. 238.

27 MMS, 6 June 1827, pp. 422-424, AJCP M119.

28 W. Allen Young, Christianity and Civilization in the South Pacific (Oxford, 1922), p. 21.

29 Porter, Religion versus Empire, p. 142.

30 Gunson, Messengers of Hope, p. 141.

31 Elder, The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden, pp. 217-218.

32 John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire. Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 183-185.

33 Haweis Family Papers, Thomas Haweis, Miscellaneous Papers, 1788-1798, ML, MSS. 1961/2, Y839, ‘Scheme for a Missionary Society, 1788', pp. 18, 290 (on p. 384 is Haweis' report from Sir Joseph Banks who ‘Highly approves the object we have in view').

34 Collection of papers of Rev. Thomas Haweis and others relating to early missions to the South Seas, 1795-1802, ML, MSS. 4190X, Vol. 1, Mitchell Library, Sydney, 3b. Draft of letter to the East India Company [1796], p. 63; 4 7/8, Detailed letter of instruction to Captain Wilson of the Royal Admiral [1800], p. 89; Letter of Haweis to ? 6 September 1802, p. 291.

35 Elbourne, Blood Ground, p. 13.

36 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade', Economic History Review, Vol. 6, No. 6 (1953), pp. 1-15.

37 Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, 1999), p. 156.

38 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. I, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, Vol. II, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1991-1997), Vol. II, pp. 310, 313, 412.

39 Papers of Rev. Thomas Haweis et al., ML, MSS. 4190X, Vol. 1, ‘Circular letter to clergy and missionaries’, pp. 39, 41-42.

40 ‘South Sea Mission’ papers, ML, A381, pp. 136, 138.

41 Charles Barff, John Davies, William Ellis, First report of the Mission at Huahine, Dec. 1819 (printed), ‘South Sea Mission’ papers, ML, A381, pp. 136, 141 b,c.

42 District Minutes, Fiji and the Friendly Islands, MMS, Report of the Tonga Station for 1834, AJCP M123.

43 Rod Edmond, ‘Translating Cultures: William Ellis and Missionary Writing’, in Marguerette Lincoln (ed.), Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 155.

44 C.W. Newbury (ed.), The History of the Tahitian Mission 1799--1830, written by John Davies (Cambridge, 1961), p. 329.

45 Gunson, Messengers of Hope, p. 343.

46 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. II, p. 336.

47 Gunson, Messengers of Hope, p. 146.

48 Andrew Porter, ‘“Cultural Imperialism” and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780-1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 25, No. 3 (1997), pp. 385-388.

49 CMS, Quarterly Committee of the Missionaries held at Kidde Kidde the 6th April 1824, reports of Messrs Hall, King, Kemp, Williams, pp. 3, 30, AJCP M213.

50 Ibid., report of Mr Hall, p. 21.

51 Judith Binney, ‘Christianity and the Maoris to 1840: A Comment’, New Zealand Journal of History, Vol. 3 (1969), p. 146.

52 G.S. Parsonson, ‘The Literate Revolution in Polynesia’, The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 2 (1967), pp. 48-49.

53 CMS, ‘Remarks of Sub Committee on Society’s letter of August 9th, 1838, p. 1; Half yearly meeting held at Maukau April 11th 1837, AJCP, M214.

54 Allan K. Davidson, ‘“Culture and Ecclesiology: The Church Missionary Society and New Zeal­and’, in Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley (eds), The Church Missionary Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999 (Richmond, 2000), p. 207.

55 CMS, ‘Remarks of Sub Committee on Society’s letter of August 9th, 1838, p. 2, AJCP M214. See Raeburn Lange, ‘Indigenous Agents of Religious Change in New Zealand, 1830-1860’, The Journal of Religious History, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2000), pp. 279-295.

56 CMS, Half yearly meeting held at Paihia, July 9, 1839, Rev. W. Williams’ report, AJCP M214.

57 Doug Munro and Andrew Thornley (eds), The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the Pacific (Suva, 1996).

58 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. II, p. 87.

59 CMS, Half yearly meeting held at Paihia, July 9, 1839, Rev. W. Williams’ report, AJCP M214.

60 David Maxwell, ‘Decolonization’, in Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empires. Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford, 2005), p. 286.

Further reading

Brock, Peggy (ed.), Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change (Leiden, 2005).

Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. I, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa; Vol. II, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1991-1997).

Daughton, J.P., An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Oxford, 2006).

Elbourne, Elizabeth, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853 (Montreal, 2002).

Etherington, Norman (ed.), Missions and Empires. Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford, 2005).

Gascoigne, John, ‘Introduction: Religion and Empire, an Historiographical Perspective', in John Gascoigne (ed.), Special issue on Religion and Empire, Journal of Religious History, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2008), pp. 159-178.

Gunson, Niel, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas 1797--I860 (Melbourne, 1978).

Howe, K.R., Where the: Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Sydney, 1991).

Porter, Andrew, ‘Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780­1914', The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1992), pp. 370-390.

Porter, Andrew, ‘“Cultural Imperialism” and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780-1914', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 25, No. 3 (1997), pp. 367-391.

Porter, Andrew, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700--1914 (Manchester, 2004).

Stanley, Brian, The: Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1990).

Stanley, Brian (ed.), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Grand Rapids, 2001).

Strong, Rowan, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700-1850 (Oxford, 2007).

Thorne, Susan, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, 1999).

Ward, Kevin, and Brian Stanley, The Church Missionary Society and World Christianity, 1799 1999 (Richmond, 2000).