“To select a few promising youths from all the islands, to prove and test them, first by observation of their habits on board a floating school; then to take them for further training to New Zealand; and, lastly when they are sufficiently advanced, to send them back as teachers to their own people, if possible with some English missionary to give effect and regularity to their work. All the ordinary losses by sickness, violence and theft which occur frequently where missionaries are stationed at once on unknown ground will be avoided.”
From this first voyage he brought back five boys, enough to crowd his tiny cabin. They reached Auckland safely:
“The walk from Auckland to the College was most amusing from the frequent exclamations of surprise raised by my native companions at every new object which they saw.”
Some months afterwards he had to start on a second voyage to take back the boys to their own homes, lest they should suffer from the New Zealand winter. He could then write:
“We find that even this first experiment, small and imperfect as it has been, has opened to us a way for future these islands as strangers, but we have our own scholars as friends and interpreters to explain our objects. The report seems to be favourable, as we have now several applications from the New Caledonian youths for leave to go to New Zealand. At present I have no intention of taking any, as the winter is coming on and they would find the change to our climate very uncomfortable. But if it should please God to prolong my life, I hope to return, and with increased means of information to select carefully the next class of scholars and to take them with me to New Zealand.”
He rejoiced in the beauty of the islands and felt hopeful about the future development of their inhabitants.
“It is not true that only man is vile, these people are the most friendly people in the world.... To go among the heathen as an equal and a brother is far more profitable than to risk that subtle kind of self-righteousness which creeps into mission work, akin to the thanking God that we are not as other men are.”
He wished to put this Pacific work on a permanent basis and believed that, if God would enable him before his death “to lay out the ground plan of a great design, succeeding bishops would not refuse to add each his course of stone to the rising edifice.” When shortly after his return from this cruise he went in September, 1850, to a meeting at Sydney of the Synod of the Church in Australia, one of his chief objects was to persuade the Australian Bishops to form a Board of Missions. especially with a view to the needs of Melanesia. His proposals were sympathetically received, the Australasian Board of Missions was formed, and the Melanesian mission was solemnly adopted by the Australian and New Zealand colonies. Selwyn expressed himself as willing to do the active work of the Mission if Australia would assist him with the necessary funds. Money was raised in New South Wales to supply a vessel of one hundred tons, the Border Maid, for the Bishop’s voyages to and fro to the islands with his pupils, and Bishop Tyrrell, of Newcastle, New South Wales, an old Cambridge friend, agreed to accompany him on his first voyage in the new mission ship.
On his return to Auckland Selwyn at once founded a Branch of the new Board of Missions, thus making the New Zealand Church from the first recognize its missionary responsibilities; his ambition was to make his diocese the great missionary centre of the Southern Ocean. The carrying out of his many schemes had been made easier for him by the arrival this year of his friend, Mr. Abraham, with his wife. Abraham had at last found himself free to leave Eton and now came to be head of St. John’s College at Auckland. With him came Mr. Lloyd, another helper, and their arrival and the hopes thus given of further development so encouraged Selwyn that he was wont to call this year, 1850, his Annus Mirabilis.
The sight of what Selwyn had already accomplished made a deep impression upon Abraham, which finds expression in a letter home from Mrs. Abraham.