Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys’ Adventure Novel

Michelle Elleray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367235505
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000752991
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Attending to the mid-Victorian boys' adventure novel and its connections with missionary culture, Michelle Elleray investigates how empire was conveyed to Victorian children in popular forms, with a focus on the South Pacific as a key location of adventure tales and missionary efforts. The volume draws on an evangelical narrative about the formation of coral islands to demonstrate that missionary investments in the socially marginal (the young, the working class, the racial other) generated new forms of agency that are legible in the mid-Victorian boys' adventure novel, even as that agency was subordinated to Christian values identified with the British middle class. Situating novels by Frederick Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne and W. H. G. Kingston in the periodical culture of the missionary enterprise, this volume newly historicizes British children's textual interactions with the South Pacific and its peoples. Although the mid-Victorian authors examined here portray British presence in imperial spaces as a moral imperative, our understanding of the "adventurer" is transformed from the plucky explorer to the cynical mercenary through Robert Louis Stevenson, who provides a late-nineteenth-century critique of the imperial and missionary assumptions that subtended the mid-Victorian boys' adventure novel of his youth.

1
The Juvenile Missionary Magazine

Agency and Discipline

In 1860, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine (1844–87) ran a series on the Missionary Museum that included a passage in which the author imagines a child exploring the space:

The first thing which is sure to fix the eyes of many young friends who visit the Missionary Museum is the beautiful model of their own ship, “The John Williams,” which they will see in the picture of the glass case in this Number. And there it stands, just in its right place, surrounded by many objects which show the condition in which the Polynesians were when the Missionary vessel first visited their shores. These objects plainly prove that they were very ignorant and very cruel before they received the Gospel.

(“Missionary Museum” 88–89)

Despite the words indicating obviousness and assurance—“sure,” “in its right place,” “plainly prove”—the passage raises a series of questions for us now: What ship? Why the possessive signalling a relationship between the ship and the child visiting the Museum? What is the relationship of the periodical in which this museum series appears to the ship, and the people and objects of the South Pacific? Apparently the only thing we can be sure of today is that we no longer readily recognize the reference points enabling us to decode the relationship between the Pacific material on display and the British missionary periodical in which the information is found; in short, we no longer participate in the structure of feeling that informs this article on the Missionary Museum.

Awareness of the South Pacific and its missionary links was not specialist but rather assumed knowledge for the mid-Victorian reader, as we see in Little Dorrit (1855–57) when Charles Dickens refers without elaboration to “the ugly South sea gods in the British Museum”—the same gods we will see discussed in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine—in order to critique evangelicalism by equating one with the other in their restrictive “ taboo ” (23). This chapter establishes these reference points by addressing the early history of the LMS in the South Pacific, and the Pacific’s portrayal to British children through the Juvenile Missionary Magazine.¹ It introduces John Williams, a prominent LMS missionary who worked and died in the South Pacific, the LMS missionary ship named after Williams that journeyed between Britain and the South Pacific, and the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, a popular LMS publication for British children that tracked the missionary ship’s movements, provided updates of missionary work, and included writing by and about the newly converted. The chapter ends with these new Christians, focusing in particular on Kiro, a Cook Islander who lived in Britain in the middle of the century. The historical circumstances from which the Juvenile Missionary Magazine emerges, and the narrative it presents of the South Pacific and Pacific Islanders, provide the basis for understanding the missionary thread of boys’ adventure writing addressed in subsequent chapters. The concern here is not the theological debates or institutional histories of evangelicalism, but instead the means by which missionary culture was disseminated in popular form, in this case the juvenile missionary periodical, and the affective relations thereby established between the British child reader and Pacific peoples.

This chapter explores ways in which the empire impacted metropolitan culture through the coral “insect” (technically not an insect at all, but a polyp) and textual representations of Pacific Island peoples and objects. Drawing from contemporary scientific debates on the formation of coral islands, I argue that the deployment of the coral polyp as a cultural fable enabled a new perspective on the agency of children in missionary efforts. From the coral insect the chapter moves to the representation of the Pacific through material objects in the Missionary Museum, and accounts of and by converted Pacific Islanders in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, demonstrating that these provide a disciplinary mechanism that enjoined a deeper commitment to Christianity on the part of the British child reader and constrained the child’s agency to evangelically approved goals. The relationships established here between British children and Pacific Islanders provide a framework for the readings of Pacific Islander Christians who appear in subsequent chapters.

John Williams: Missionary and Vessel

Prior to David Livingstone’s cultural prominence later in the Victorian period, one of the most widely known British missionaries was John Williams, an LMS missionary who worked in the South Pacific. Although now largely forgotten, it was to John Williams that the LMS looked when they sought to arouse British children’s interest in the missionary endeavour. In 1819 Williams had arrived at Ra‘iatea in the Society Islands as part of the LMS’s second wave of missionaries to the South Pacific. Having begun his working life as a blacksmith prior to his evangelical awakening and decision to pursue missionary work, his mechanical skills proved a benefit to the mission community in the South Pacific: Williams joined in the important work of printing translated texts in order to teach Mā‘ohi to learn to read and write, finished a ship abandoned from a lack of knowledge of ironwork (named the Haweis), and, as repeatedly celebrated in missionary texts, built a boat from local materials at Rarotonga in what is now the Cook Islands (the Messenger of Peace). In the latter case, presumably his fame resided in his ability to build a Western boat from Pacific materials since the local Cook Islanders had, of course, been building seafaring vessels for some time already.

Missionary fame connected Williams to Rarotonga in another way also, since Westerners credited him with “discovering” Rarotonga and thus enabling the conversion of its inhabitants. Yet as Williams relates, his knowledge of Rarotonga’s existence stemmed from the information of other Cook Islanders (including Rarotongans on his ship) who gave him directions to this “new” island, and thus hagiographies of Williams as explorer need to be circumscribed to a Western field of reference—indeed, Williams’s specific claim in A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Seas (1837) is to have discovered an island that Captain James Cook had missed. The conversion of the Rarotongans to Christianity likewise relies upon Pacific Islanders’ knowledge and efforts, as Williams notes in his narrative when he highlights the roles of Tapairu Ariki, a Rarotongan “woman of great intrepidity” who protected the first Mā‘ohi missionaries to land, and Papehia, the Mā‘ohi missionary who began the work of conversion when the others left.² In a pattern to be replicated for over a century in the region, a white Protestant missionary converts a Pacific Islander, who in turn converts other Pacific Island communities, thereby disseminating Christianity across the Pacific despite the paucity of metropolitan-trained missionaries in proportion to the geographical expanse.

Williams’s fame in the 1830s and 1840s saw the ascendancy of the missionary hero in British culture, a period marked at the other end by Livingstone. Initially Williams came to metropolitan prominence with his return visit to England from 1834 to 1837. As well as providing evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines regarding the need to ensure the welfare of the peoples with whom British traders and settlers were now interacting, he engaged in a speaking tour and published Missionary Enterprises in an attempt to get the British public to donate enough funds for a missionary ship to facilitate the LMS’s work in the South Pacific.³ Williams’s account of the conversion of Pacific Islanders was widely read, including by the then evangelical Mary Ann Evans (not yet George Eliot), who described it as “deeply interesting” and as having been “purchased by all denominations,” although her biographer notes she later became sceptical of missionary work as coercive (qtd. in Henry 39). Missionary Enterprises sold 38,000 copies in six years and attracted attention across diverse British groups, from members of the nobility to the cabman who refused to take Williams’s fare as his contribution to the mission.⁴ Through public lectures and his book, Williams raised enough money to buy the Camden, on board which he returned to the South Pacific. Then in 1839 Williams sailed to Erromango, in what is now Vanuatu, intending to convert the ni-Vanuatu. Williams’s fame was assured, however, not by heathen conversion but by his death when he was killed by the locals. Those in missionary circles accepted that the ni-Vanuatu had earlier suffered violence at the hands of unscrupulous Western traders and therefore sought to kill the next Westerner to land on their shores; thus Williams was understood to have died in retribution for the sins of others.⁵ Following so shortly after Williams’s highly successful stay in Britain, his violent death (not to mention the spectre of cannibalism) caused a sensation, raising the profile of missions generally among the British public and enshrining Williams’s fame in his title, the “Martyr of Erromanga.”⁶ Williams’s death recalibrated the South Pacific mission through the narrative mode of martyrdom and thus, as Sujit Sivasundaram has pointed out, generated the expectation that the ni-Vanuatu would convert to Christianity, thereby retrospectively justifying Williams’s death.⁷ Through conversion from violent savage to peaceful Christian, the narrative trajectory would render the chaos of Williams’s sudden end productive, the violence subordinated ultimately to the order and civility understood to be inherent in Christianity. Martyrdom, it turns out, is a beginning, not an end.

The circumstances of Williams’s demise created a conundrum for the LMS: how to capitalize on British sympathy for the missionary cause by reconciling the violence of Williams’s death with the vision of Christian conversion of the non-Western heathen. Seeking to turn the setback to productive ends, the LMS initiated fundraising for a missionary ship to be deployed in the South Pacific, thereby continuing the cause for which Williams had sought donations during his final stay in Britain. The effort differed from earlier fundraising efforts, though, because at the suggestion of Joseph John Freeman—the LMS Home Secretary and subsequent editor of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine—the task was delegated specifically to children.⁸ While children had participated in juvenile missionary organizations since the 1800s, this LMS project marked a distinct development in children’s philanthropic involvement, since in the missionary ship they had a specific fundraising goal for which they were solely responsible.⁹ By donating their pocket money or collecting contributions penny by penny, half-penny by half-penny, the children gathered a combined total of £6,237. The philanthropic exercise was envisioned specifically as a way to create ties between British children and missionary activities in the South Pacific, with Freeman suggesting to the other LMS Directors that it “might help to familiarise them with the progress of Missions in that part of the world [the South Pacific] by giving them a permanent interest in the voyages and visits of a Ship that had been obtained chiefly by their efforts” (Board Minutes, 1838–46, item 38, 442–43). A suggestion from William Hordle on behalf of the Sunday schools at Harwich saw the vessel named the John Williams (Letter to LMS Directors), though the vessel was also known as the “Children’s Ship,” the “Missionary Ship,” or, in LMS circles, simply “the Ship.”

The children’s philanthropic efforts are inserted into the intersecting histories of the LMS, missionary activity in the South Pacific, and the ships mythologized in this early missionary work. Thanks to Victorian children’s efforts the first John Williams was launched in 1844 and was followed by many others, all named John Williams, until 1971, with children continuing to fundraise for the purchase and maintenance of the successive iterations. In his history of the LMS missionary ships, Ebenezer Prout states that in 1850 the children raised £3,200 for ship repairs, and in 1855 £3,673, while in 1865, after the John Williams sunk off Pukapuka in the Cook Islands, the children raised nearly £12,000 for its replacement.¹⁰ This later incarnation of the John Williams displayed a bust of Williams as the ship’s figurehead, with Williams pointing to the passage from Mark 16:15, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”¹¹ Emphasizing the privilege rather than the financial liability of the children’s relationship to the John Williams, the LMS’s Editorial Secretary, George Cousins, writes, “The [LMS] Directors wish the children to feel that the vessel is theirs, that in a very honourable sense they are the owners ” (124, emphasis in original). Nor was rhetorical ownership the only perceived benefit to the children:

Many missionaries, in successive generations, have declared that their first vision of the possibility of missionary service was kindled by stories of the John Williams and thousands of the most devoted friends of the [London Missionary] Society acknowledge that their interest and support began with their participation in childhood in the annual New Year Offering for the ships.

(Goodall 411)

Thus, in addition to the conversion of Pacific Islanders, the missionary ship’s efficacy was also evident in metropolitan engagements with Christianity.

The highly successful participatory model used to generate funds for the initial John Williams demonstrated the value, both financial and (hopefully) spiritual, of the children’s role in missionary work. Seeking to reward and sustain the children’s demonstrated commitment to missionary activities, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine was begun in 1844 under the editorship of Freeman and provided ongoing information on the John Williams as she was outfitted, launched, and sailed to the South Pacific. The first issue of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine celebrates the children’s efforts in fundraising for the John Williams, devoting the entire issue to coverage of the missionary ship bought with these proceeds. Later the periodical published letters from missionaries on board the John Williams, as well as letters from missionaries in the field, on the success of the labours facilitated by the Children’s Ship. In his introductory address Freeman announced, “I want the young people to take up the affair of this Magazine, just as they did the Ship ” (“Editor’s Salaam” 6, emphasis in original), and apparently the children did, since he states that 200,000 copies were published in the periodical’s first half year (Preface 1844 vi), and four...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note
• Introduction
• 1 The Juvenile Missionary Magazine: Agency and Discipline
• 2 Masterman Ready’s Grave: Deliverance and the Sailor
• 3 The Coral Island: Savagery, Manliness, and Faith
• 4 Slavery in the Pacific: “Do Right,” or, “That’s No Business of Mine”
• 5 The Ebb-Tide: Seeking Pearls
• Works Cited
• Index