The Savage South Seas

by E. Way Elkington

On the 21st of August the missionary ship which was to carry them to the islands left Sydney, and was in less than a fortnight high and dry on a reef, but she did not become a total wreck. She was taken back to Sydney for repair, leaving there again on the 15th of November, to become a total wreck on the 8th of January; her passengers were landed, minus all their belongings, on an almost unknown {201} and uninhabited island. The notorious Bully Hayes, however, rescued them from this spot and took them to Samoa. Eventually James Chalmers and his wife reached Raratonga safely after a voyage extending over seventeen months—the passage now takes about six weeks.

“Tamate’s” life in the South Seas was a life of sheer hard work, but he always felt, and properly so, that he was making headway. At the beginning of his career at Raratonga he set to work on the young men, as he thought in them lay the future hopes of the civilisation of the islands. When one knows the risks he ran in going back into the bush, where white men were so dreaded that they were often shot on sight, one cannot help feeling that a special providence was looking after him. He took no half measures and made few concessions, but went boldly to work at the start as he intended to go on to the end.

Many of the natives had been in the habit of fancying that the missionaries were weak men, but in “Tamate” they met one who was their equal in most things and could beat them at many.

As a sportsman and a man of pluck he immediately won their hearts, in fact every one who {202} came in contact with him speaks of him as a Man before all else.

One missionary said at the court in Sydney that, in his dealings with the natives, he remembered before all else that he was an Englishman, then a man, and lastly a missionary; but in “Tamate” every one recognised the Man.

From Raratonga Chalmers worked diligently amongst all the adjacent islands, and when later he had his yacht he was able to extend his operations and win many of the worst savages to better ways, and by joining in with the other missionaries some splendid work was accomplished. Throughout he saw the need of native teachers, and it was this branch of the work he set himself to push on, with the result that now there are native teachers and preachers in every island in the Pacific.

The chief trouble with which he and other missionaries had to contend was the climate; the unhealthy districts they had to visit often laid them up for weeks at a time. Finally Tamate’s wife, after a long and distracting illness, died and left him broken-hearted, for through all his difficulties she had been his mainstay. She died at sea on the 25th of October 1900. Her end was a very sad and disappointing one, as is shown by a letter Chalmers {203} wrote to one of his friends at the time. “We had dreamt of a little rest together in a cottage out of London somewhere, before we crossed the flood. We shall dream no more, she waits on the other side, as she said ‘I shall be waiting for you all.’”

It was not long she had to wait either, for on the 7th of April of the following year James Chalmers was massacred in the Aird River district, a part of the islands where he was not well known. The following account of the massacre was written by the Rev. A. E. Hunt, who accompanied His Excellency the Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony on a punitive expedition. “The Niue (Chalmers’ yacht) anchored off Risk Point on the 7th of April, and a crowd of natives came off. As it was near sunset Tamate gave them some presents, and made signs that they were to go away and the next day he would visit them ashore. At daylight the next morning a great crowd of natives came off and crowded the vessel in every part. They refused to leave, and in order to induce them to do so Tamate gave Bob, the Captain, orders to give them presents. Still they refused, and then Tamate said he would go ashore with them, and he told Tomkins (his right-hand man) to remain on board. The latter declined and went ashore with Tamate, followed by {204} a large number of canoes. When they got ashore the whole party were massacred and their heads cut off. The boat was smashed up, and the clothing, etc., distributed. All the bodies were distributed and eaten.”

Chalmers evidently felt that his end was coming, though it cannot be supposed he knew how it would come. A few weeks before his death he wrote to a friend: “Time shortens, and I have much to do. How grand it would be to sit down in the midst of work and hear the Master say, ‘Your part is finished, Come.’”

Some time before Chalmers’ death Williams and many other missionaries were massacred; in fact it is in this way most of them have died, but their work will always remain as a memento. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, when bunching the good and bad missionaries together: