“De-Bunking” The Early Missionaries

Letter to the Editor.

r NOTICE from a review in a recent issue of the P.I.M. that two American authors have been “de-bunking” the early missionaries to the Pacific.

I know that the genial game of “de-bunk ing” the past is one of the favourite re creations of our time, but personally I always feel that it is too easy to be really sporting—rather like shooting sitting birds, in fact. I have no doubt that it would be quite easy to “de-bunk” George Washington and Abraham Lincoln: in deed, it may have been done already, for aught I know. Certainly, no American need come to the South Seas in search of horrid examples of Puritan narrow mindedness and intolerance; he can find all he needs, and more, in the history of his own country.

No one at this date wants to gloss over the shortcomings of the pioneers of the Duff, and the other early missionaries of the L.M.S. in the South Seas. As a matter of fact, they were very frankly recognised in the Official History of the London Mis sionary Society, published nearly forty years ago.

But it is grossly misrepresenting them to suggest that they were freaks and fanatics. On the contrary, they were typical of their time. The views which they held on the indecency of nakedness and the sinfulness of sport, grotesque as they seem to us to-day, were the views of a large proportion of the people of Eng land at that time. One may feel that the Pacific was unlucky in engaging the mis sionary attention of the Church at a period in which it had lost, for the time being, the graciousness of its Founder.

But it is childish to criticise the individu als chiefly concerned for being products of their own age.

And, after all, was the Pacific so un lucky? When all their faults and mis takes have been taken into account, it re mains a fact that, as you yourself, Mr.

Editor, have generously pointed out on more than one occasion, the presence of those men in the Pacific, at that particu lar period, did save the islanders from some of the major cruelties that have been perpetrated by our “civilisation” on natives of other parts of the world—not excluding the homeland of our latest “de bunkers.”

May I be permitted a further word on the subject of clothes?

It is undoubtedly true that missionaries are to blame for introducing the clothing habit into the South Seas; but it is equally true, and frequently overlooked, that it is the traders who are responsible for perpetuating it. The missionaries— most of them, anyway—long ago saw the error of their ways; but the traders were not willing to forego their profits.

It is not my job to blame them, least of all the small man who finds it all he can do to get a living. But when, as sometimes happens, the trader turns round and says bitter words about the missionary for having taught the native the unhealthy practice of wearing clothes, one begins to feel that Judas Iscariot wasn’t such a bad fellow after all!

As a matter of fact, the commonly drawn picture of the white man forcing his culture on the unwilling native is sheer myth, and does an injustice both to

trader and missionary. In most cases, the native is pathetically, and often tragically, anxious to buy the white man’s goods, to wear his clothes, and to imitate indis criminately both the good and the bad in his mode of life.

Where natives are earning wages and have access to a store, it is a labour of Sisyphus to restrain them from buying and wearing European clothes. Person ally, I number myself among those who consider that a native is never more healthy nor more becoming than in his own native garb, however scanty.

But I am coming to doubt whether those of us who have the welfare of the native at heart are wise in expending our energy in fighting a losing battle against clothes. We should be better advised, I think, to accept the inevitable; and to devote ourselves to fostering a healthy and reasonably becoming style of dress ing, and to teaching the next generation how to keep the clothes they will wear clean and tidy.

I am, etc.,

Percy Chatterton.

London Missionary Society, Pt. Moresby, July 15.