Missionaries: Sixty Years from a Killing on Erromango

John Williams, 1839

John Williams of the London Missionary Society landed at Dillon's Bay on Erromango in November 1839 and was killed within minutes of coming ashore, along with his companion James Harris. The deaths were widely reported in Britain and made Erromango notorious in mission literature for the rest of the century.

The killing did not come from nowhere. Sandalwood crews had been working the island for years, and the distinction between a trader and a missionary was not one the community had reason to draw.

The Presbyterians on Tanna and Aneityum

John Geddie arrived on Aneityum in 1848 and worked there for more than two decades. Aneityum became the base from which Presbyterian missions spread through the southern islands. John Paton's work on Tanna from 1858 was less successful and he left after four years; his published account shaped British opinion for a generation.

Islander missionaries

Much of the actual work was done by teachers from Samoa, Rarotonga and other already-converted islands. They arrived first, stayed longest and died in the greatest numbers, largely of malaria, and they appear in the European accounts only in passing.

What it changed

Christianity is now the majority religion across Vanuatu and is held alongside kastom rather than in place of it. Village life in most of the country runs on both, and there is no general contradiction felt between them.

Why Erromango

Williams chose Erromango because it was close to the mission base already established in Samoa and because he had islander teachers ready to place. What he did not account for was that sandalwood crews had been on the island for over a decade, and that their behaviour had made any arriving ship a threat.

Geddie on Aneityum

John Geddie landed on Aneityum in 1848 with his wife Charlotte and stayed twenty-four years. The island converted substantially within a decade, and a plaque in the church there records that when he arrived there were no Christians and when he left there were no heathen — a formulation that says as much about mission rhetoric as about Aneityum.

Aneityum then became the base for expansion south and west, and the printing press there produced scripture in the local language.

Paton on Tanna

John Paton arrived on Tanna in 1858. His wife and infant son died within months. He stayed four years, made almost no converts, and left after his house was surrounded. His autobiography sold enormously in Britain and Australia and shaped a generation’s picture of the Pacific — a picture in which islanders appear chiefly as obstacles.

The teachers nobody counted

Most mission stations were founded and held by Samoan, Rarotongan and Niuean teachers placed years before any European arrived. They had no immunity to malaria, which is not present in their home islands, and they died in large numbers. The European accounts name them rarely and record their deaths in a line.

What survived

Christianity is now the majority religion and is held alongside kastom rather than in place of it. The denominational map still follows the mission map: Presbyterian in the south, Anglican in the north, Catholic where French missions worked.

Measles, and what it did

A measles epidemic in the 1860s, introduced by shipping, killed a substantial share of the population across the southern islands. On Aneityum, where the mission was most successful, the toll approached a third of the island in a single outbreak. The missions recorded these deaths carefully, and their registers are among the better sources for estimating what the century cost.

Language work

The missions produced the first written forms of a number of Vanuatu languages, translating scripture and printing primers on presses shipped in from Sydney. That work is the reason several languages have a documented nineteenth-century state at all, and linguists still use the mission texts — which is an outcome none of the people involved intended.