Mission Centenary

Methodists Revive Memories of First Landing in Fiji

SO many desire to attend the centenary celebrations of the landing of the first Methodist missionaries (Revs. W. Cross and D. Cargill), which will begin at Lakemba, Fiji, on October 12, that prob ably two special steamers will be run from Sydney to Fiji.

The work begun by Cross and Cargill, the massacre of those who followed them, and the present-day activities of the 27 missionaries (apart from native teachers, all trained in the mission stations at Fiji), will be commemorated by services, the unveiling of tablets, and the opening of a new Cross and Cargill memorial church. The history of their hardships will be told, together with the story of the savage killing of their converts, and the impassioned appeal by the Rev.

James Watkin that touched the hearts of Christian workers in England, Among the volunteers who responded to the appeal were a Lincolnshire plough boy, John Hunt; the son of a Yorkshire farmer, James Calvert; and others, whose names will always be associated with the early missionary work of Fiji.

They and others who followed them car ried on undaunted by the threats of murder, and living for a time in huts only a few yards from the ovens of the cannibals. The missionary history of

Fiji tells of the revolting sights they witnessed, sights made more hideous by the yells of blood-maddened savages, and of the way Hunt and others were seized and threatened by the cannibals. Still they laboured on, refusing a free passage away from Fiji offered them by Com modore Wilkes, of the United States exploring expedition.

Cross died in 1842 and Cargill a year later. After 17 years’ missionary work, James Calvert returned to England.

Visitors to the centenary celebrations may visit the iron-railed grave on the top of the hill at Rewa, which bears the simple inscription, “John Hunt, Oct. 4, 1848. Aged 36.”

Part of the centenary celebrations will be the unveiling of a tablet by Miss Baker, a prominent mission worker, at the La Perouse aborigines’ camp, near Sydney, erected to the memory of her father, the Rev. Thomas Baker, the first white missionary to lose his life in Fiji.

In 1865 he was appointed missionary in the interior, with headquarters at Davui levu, but, with seven native mission helpers, he was killed at the order of a native mountain chief. The son of Mr.

Baker’s murderer later became a Chris tian and a local preacher.

A descendant of the first missionary in Fiji now living in Sydney is the Rev.

M. C. Howard, of the Methodist Church at Enfield, who is a great-grandson of the Rev. W. Cross.