Armed For Sabbath

Service

When the Rev Dr John Geddie took up missionary work on the island of Aneityum, the southernmost island in the New Hebrides, in 1848, he thought that place was ‘certainly less inviting as a field of missionary labour than many islands in the Pacific.’ ‘lt is inhabited by the Papuan, and Austral negro race, who in many respects are inferior to the Polynesians,’ he said in a letter to friends at home in Nova Scotia, Canada. ‘They are a most degraded people.

Many of the worst features of heathenism exist among them. The men are very indolent; and the cultivation of the land is usually performed by the women. Polygamy is common; and j-h!^r°t CO h^r^wT e nr , y hr^ r ‘nr more’wives h * ; At wife or wive are strangleS ’ and all children unable to take care of themselves are put to death.’

Dr Geddie went on to say that he and fellow missionary, the Rev Thomas Powell, together with three Samoan and two Rarotongan teachers, had taken a determined stand against the islanders’ ‘horrid’ practices and that some of the chiefs had promised to discontinue them. However, he thought any little excite-

ment would cause them to ‘break through all restraint.’

The natives will not venture any distance from their house without a spear or a club,’ he went on. ‘Even on the sabbath day they come armed to service . . . and so while we tell them of the Gospel of peace,, the front of our little chapel is usually adorned with the implements of destruction.’

Dr Geddie’s letter is one of hun dreds of documents concerning his career on Aneityum which have re cently been microfilmed for the Paci fic Manuscripts Bureau, Canberra, in Nova Scotia xhe originals are housed in Maritime Conference Archives, Pine Hill> Divinity Hall, Halifax.

The documents are in 13 folders, They cover the period from 1844, when the Synod of the Presbyterian Ch “ rch <* Novia , Sc °‘ ia * end a m.ss.onary to the South Seas, down *° Gedd * s death 'V There are also some documents concerning other Presbyterian mission aries * n New Hebrides between 1851 and 1877, namely I. Archibald, William McCullagh, J. W. Matheson, G. N. Gordon, J. McNair, J. Inglis, J* G. Paton and Joseph Annand.

Some of the material is printed, but most of it is in manuscript form.