“Expect nothing from us,” he wrote, “but bring with you as large a spiritual treasure as you can. Come to help rather than to be helped.” Two years later in 1849, when he at last heard that Mr. Abraham was able to come, he wrote to his close friend, Edward Coleridge,
“My heart beats with joy at the prospect of Abraham coming. O what a blessing it will be to a mind not only beginning to be overwrought but beginning to be conscious of it.... Abraham will sustain part of the spiritual and intellectual strain which falls upon the head of such an institution as this.... If I could but feel that I was so growing in grace as to increase in fitness for the work as the work itself increases, I could then bound over the sea and over every New Zealand forest and mountain with the lightest of hearts and the most buoyant of hopes. But if the work should increase faster than the supply of inward strength, and if help should be withheld in the form in which it would be most welcome, by the subdivision of the diocese, it is not any bodily decay which I fear so much as that overmuch service may make my mind careful and troubled about many things, and unable even in old age, to sit in contemplation at the feet of Christ.”
CHAPTER V
THE CALL OF THE PACIFIC
It will be remembered that through a clerical error, the Melanesian Islands had been included in Bishop Selwyn’s diocese. He did not forget this, but he believed that his first duty was to get to know New Zealand itself. When by his various journeys on land, on foot or on horseback, up the rivers in canoes, and round the coast in little sailing vessels, he had learned to know the work and needs of the Church in New Zealand, and had by a second Synod held in 1847 arranged for its organization, his thoughts were free to go out to the vast stretch of ocean and islands which by a mere accident had been entrusted to his charge. An opportunity to make a preliminary voyage to the islands was given to him by the request that he should act as chaplain on the Dido, a warship which was being sent at the end of 1847, to investigate the causes of an affray between the natives and two English vessels. The islands were much visited by traders chiefly in search of sandal wood, and the conduct of these traders had again and again aroused the animosity of the natives, who had often avenged themselves by murder and treachery, so that landing on the islands was reputed very unsafe. On this first voyage to the Pacific, the Bishop learned a lesson of great use to him afterwards. He wanted to land on the Isle of Pines, an island which had a bad reputation. The captain and the officers of the Dido in vain tried to dissuade him, but he got into a small boat and rowed himself into the lagoon. There to his surprise, he found an English schooner. Its captain was trading for sandal wood and, when Selwyn asked him how it was that he could smoke his pipe contentedly in the lagoon of one of the worst islands of the Pacific, where a man-of-war was afraid to enter, he answered, “By kindness and fair dealing I have traded with these people for many years. They have cut many thousand feet of sandal wood for me and brought it on my schooner. I never cheated them. I never treated them badly—we thoroughly understand each other.” In talk with this man, Captain Paddon, Selwyn learned much about the islanders, how their confidence could be won and how to treat them, and also the necessity of avoiding those islands where unprincipled traders had aroused suspicion and anger. He used always to speak of Captain Paddon as his tutor.
The voyage on the Dido was a voyage of observation. The Bishop had to discover how the problems presented by Melanesia could best be met. There were already missions of various denominations at work in the islands. Heroic work had been done especially by the London Missionary Society. Both missionaries and Christian natives had suffered death for their faith. At Tonga he visited a Wesleyan station and made friends with Mr. Thomas, the senior missionary who had spent twenty years in the islands. Selwyn was charmed with his schools full of smiling children, and with the beautiful mission chapel, which he described as “a noble building, without nails, bound together with the cocoa nut rope, beautifully arranged in variegated patterns.” In visiting the missions of other denominations, the Bishop did not feel it right to join in their public services, but was glad, when their guest, to share their family prayers. In one island he found a village divided into rival factions by the rivalry of two native teachers, “separate chapels, services and systems attesting the power of Satan, even in this peaceful island, in dividing the house of Christ against itself.... This is one instance out of many, and it will surely strike every thoughtful Christian, that I, who have been charged with bigotry and intolerance for advocating unity and opposing dissent, should have had the evils of schisms again and again brought under my notice by members of the English Independent body and of the Scottish secession.” How to avoid adding to the confusion caused by religious differences, was one of the chief problems which the conditions in Melanesia presented to him, but he seemed to see the future development clear before him. He was determined not to encroach on islands already occupied by other missions nor to “inflict upon those simple islanders all the technical difficulties of English dissent.” He wrote:
“Nature has marked out for each missionary body its field of duty. The clusters of islands together like constellations in the heavens seem formed to become new branches of the Church of Christ, and each a Church complete in itself. It is of little consequence whether these babes in Christ have been nourished by their own true Mother, or by other faithful nurses provided that they have been fed by the sincere milk of the word. The time must come, I think, when they will be no longer under tutors or guardians, for this present government by English Societies is admitted to be preparatory to the introduction of self-government by native Churches, and then I shall be free to communicate with every branch of the great Polynesian family as with bodies in no respect liable to the imputation of dissent or schism.”
Another problem was presented by the great variety of dialects spoken, sometimes more than one in the same small island. Selwyn wrote:
“Nothing but a special interposition of the divine power could have produced such a confusion of tongues as we find here. In islands not larger than the Isle of Wight, we find dialects so distinct that the inhabitants of the various districts hold no communication with one another. Here have I been for a fortnight working away as I supposed at the language of New Caledonia and just when I have begun to see my way, I learn that this is only a dialect used in the southern extremity of the island, and not understood in the parts I wish to attack first.”
There were also difficulties caused by the unscrupulous conduct of the traders, and the fear of consequent treacherous action on the part of the natives. The number of the islands made it impossible to contemplate providing English teachers for each. The Bishop decided that the only way to meet the need was to aim at securing a sufficient supply of native teachers and to raise up a native ministry. As he thought over the call that came to him from this vast region, he reproached himself for the enforced delay in responding to it and wrote:
“While I have been sleeping in my bed in New Zealand, these islands have been riddled through and through by black slug, the bêche-de-mer, has been dragged out of its hole in every coral reef to make black broth for Chinese Mandarins, by the unconquerable daring of English traders, while I, like a worse black slug, as I am, have left the world all its field of mischief to itself. The same daring men have robbed every one of these islands of its sandal wood, to furnish incense for the idolatrous worship of Chinese temples, before I have taught a single islander to offer up his sacrifice of prayer to the true and only God. Even a mere Sydney speculator could induce nearly a hundred men from some of the wildest islands in the Pacific to sail in his ships to Sydney to keep his flocks and herds, before I, to whom the Chief Shepherd has given commandment to seek out His sheep that are scattered over a thousand isles, have sought out or found so much as one of those which have strayed and are lost.”