Life of John Coleridge Patteson : Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands

'"How have you heard the Gospel?"

'"Because God sent you to us."

'"And now, listen. How are all your people still in ignorance to hear it? What have I often told you about that?"

'Whereupon the scholars looked shy, and some said softly, "We must teach them."

'"Yes, indeed you must!"

'And so the lesson ended with questioning them on the great duty and privilege of prayer for God's Holy Spirit to give them both the will and the power to do the work to which God is calling them.

'So we constantly tell them "God has already been very merciful to you, in that He has called you out of darkness into His marvellous light. He has enabled you to receive the knowledge of His will, and to understand your relations to Him. He has taught you to believe in Him, to pray to Him, to hope for salvation through the merits of His Son's death and resurrection. He has made you feel something of the power of His love, and has taught you the duty of loving Him and serving your brother. He calls upon you now to rouse yourself to a sense of your true position, to use the gifts which He has given you to His glory and the good of your brethren. Don't suppose that you are unable to do this. You are unable to do it, as you were unable to believe and love Him by yourselves, but He gives you strength for this very purpose that you may be able to do it. You can do it through Christ, who strengtheneth you. Our fathers were not more able to teach their people once than you to teach your people now!"

'We make no distinction whatever between English and Melanesian members of the Mission as such. No Melanesian is excluded from any office of trust. No classification is made of higher and lower kinds of work, of work befitting a white man and work befitting a black man. English and Melanesian scholars or teachers work together in the school, printing-office, dairy, kitchen, farm. The senior clergyman of the Mission labours most of all with his own hands at the work which is sometimes described as menial work; and it is contrary to the fundamental principle of the Mission that anyone should connect with the idea of white man the right to fag a black boy.

'Young men and lads come to us and say, "Let me do that. I can't write the languages, or do many things you or Mr. Pritt or Mr. Palmer do, so let me scrub your floor, or brush your shoes, or fetch some water." And of course we let them do so, for the doing it is accompanied by no feeling of degradation in their minds; they have seen us always doing these things, and not requiring them to do them as if it were the natural work for them, because they are black, and not proper for us, because we are white.

'Last night, a young man, sitting by the fire, said to the Bishop, "They want you to stop with them in my land."

'"I wish with all my heart I could."

'"Yes, I know, you must go to so many places."

'"But they are different in your land now."

'"Oh! yes, they don't fight now as they used to do; they don't go about armed now."

'"Well, that is a thing to be thankful for. What is the reason of it, do you think? "

"Why they know about you, and see you now and then, and Henry Tagalana talked to them, and I talked a little to them, and they asked me about our ways here, and they want to learn."

'"Well, there are now five of you from your island, and you must try hard to learn, that you may teach them, for remember you must do it, if God spares your life."'

'During the year 1865 a great advance was made in the industrial department of our work. About seventeen acres of land were taken in hand and worked by Mr. Pritt, with the Melanesian lads. We have our own dairy of thirteen cows, and, besides supplying the whole Mission party, numbering in all seventy-seven persons, with abundance of milk, we sell considerable quantities of butter. We grow, of course, our own potatoes and vegetables, and maize, &c., for our cows. The farm and dairy work affords another opportunity for teaching our young people to acquire habits of industry.'

Cooking, farm, gardening, dairy-work, setting out the table, &c., were all honourable occupations, and of great importance in teaching punctuality and regularity, and the various arts and decencies of life to the youths, who were in time to implant good habits in their native homes. Their natural docility made them peculiarly easy to manage and train while in hand; the real difficulty was that their life was so entirely different from their home, that there was no guessing how deep the training went, and, on every voyage, some fishes slipped through the meshes of the net, though some returned again, and others never dropped from their Bishop's hands. But he was becoming anxious to spare some of his scholars the trial of a return to native life; and, as the season had been healthy, he ventured on leaving twenty-seven pupils at St. Andrew's with Mr. and Mrs. Pritt, among them George and Sarah Sarawia.

After Trinity Sunday, May 27, the 'Southern Cross' sailed, and the outward voyage gave leisure for the following letter to Prof. Max Muller, explaining why he could not make his knowledge of languages of more benefit to philology while thus absorbed in practical work:—

'"Southern Cross," off Norfolk Ireland: June 6, 1866.

'My dear Friend,—I am about to tire your patience heavily. For I must find you some reasons for doing so little in making known these Melanesian dialects, and that will be wearisome for you to read; and, secondly, I cannot put down clearly and consecutively what I want to say. I have so very little time for thinking out, and working at any one subject continuously, that my whole habit of mind becomes, I fear, inaccurate and desultory. I have so very many and so very different occupations, and so much anxiety and so many interruptions, as the "friction" that attends the working, of a new and somewhat untried machine.'

'You know that we are few in number; indeed (Codrington being absent) I have but two clergymen with me, and two young men who may be ordained by-and-by. Besides, had I the twenty troublesome men, whom you wish to banish into these regions, what use would they or any men be until they had learnt their work? And it must fall to me to teach them, and that takes again much of my time; so that, as a matter of fact, there are many things that I must do, even when all is going on smoothly; and should sickness come, then, of course, my days and nights are spent in nursing poor lads, to whom no one else can talk, cheering up poor fellows seized with sudden nervous terror, giving food to those who will take it from no one else, &c.

'Then the whole management of the Mission must fall upon me; though I am most thankful to say that for some time Mr. Pritt has relieved me from the charge of all domestic and industrial works. He does everything of that kind, and does it admirably, so that our institution really is a well-ordered industrial school, in which kitchen work, dairy work, farm work, printing, clothes making and mending, &c., are all carried on, without the necessity of having any foreign importation of servants, who would be sure to do harm, both by their ideas as to perquisites (= stealing in the minds of our Melanesians), and by introducing the idea of paid labour; whereas now we all work together, and no one counts any work degrading, and still less does any one qua white consider himself entitled to fag a Melanesian.

'Mr. Tilly, R.N., has also quite relieved me from my duties as skipper, and I have no trouble about marine stores, shipping seamen, navigating the vessel now. I cannot be too thankful for this; it, saves me time, anxiety, and worry; yet much remains that I must do, which is not connected with peculiar work directly.

'I can't refuse the Bishop of New Zealand when he presses me (for want of a better man) to be trustee of properties, and to engage in managing the few educational institutions we have. I can't refuse to take some share in English clerical work while on shore; indeed, in 1865, my good friend Archdeacon Lloyd being ill, I took his parish (one and a half hour distant from Kohimarama), the most important parish in Auckland, for some three months; not slacking my Melanesian work, though I could only avoid going back by hard application, and could make no progress. Then I must attend our General Synod; and all these questions concerning the colonial churches take some time to master, and yet I must know what is going on.

'Then I must carry on all the correspondence of the Mission. I am always writing letters. Every £5 from any part of New Zealand or Australia I must acknowledge; and everyone wants information, anecdotes, &c., which it vexes my soul to have to supply, but who else can do it? Then I keep all the accounts, very complicated, as you would say if you saw my big ledger. And I don't like to be altogether behindhand in the knowledge of theological questions, and people sometimes write to me, and their letters need to be answered carefully. Besides, take my actual time spent in teaching. Shall I give you a day at Kohimarama?

'I get in the full summer months an hour for reading by being dressed at 5.30 A.M. At 5.30 I see the lads washing, &c., 7 A.M. breakfast all together, in hall, 7.30 chapel, 8-9.30 school, 9.30-12.30 industrial work. During this time I have generally half an hour with Mr. Pritt about business matters, and proof sheets are brought me, yet I get a little time for preparing lessons. 12.45 short service in chapel, 1 dinner, 2-3 Greek Testament with English young men, 3-4 classics with ditto, 5 tea, 6.30 evening chapel, 7-8.30 evening school with divers classes in rotation or with candidates for Baptism or Confirmation, 8.30-9 special instruction to more advanced scholars, only a few. 9-10 school with two other English lay assistants. Add to all this, visitors interrupting me from 4-5, correspondence, accounts, trustee business, sermons, nursing sick boys, and all the many daily unexpected little troubles that must be smoothed down, and questions inquired into, and boys' conduct investigated, and what becomes of linguistics? So much for my excuse for my small progress in languages! Don't think all this egotistical; it is necessary to make you understand my position.

'If I had spare time, leisure for working at any special work, perhaps eleven years of this kind of life have unfitted me for steady sustained thought. And you know well I bring but slender natural qualifications to the task. A tolerably true ear and good memory for words, and now something of the instinctive insight into new tongues, but that is chiefly from continual practice.

'But when I attempt to systematise, I find endless ramifications of cognate dialects rushing through my brain, by their very multitude overwhelming me, and though I see the affinities and can make practical use of them, I don't know how to state them on paper, where to begin, how to put another person in my position.

'Again, for observation of the rapid changes in these dialects, I have not much opportunity. For no one in Melanesia can be my informant. It is not easy where so many dialects must be known for practical purposes, for the introductory part of Mission work, to talk to some wild naked old fellow, and to make him understand what I am anxious to ascertain. It is a matter that has no interest for him, he never thought of it, he doesn't know my meaning, what have we in common? How can I rouse him from his utter indifference, even if I know his language so well as to talk easily, not to a scholar of my own, but to an elderly man, with none but native ideas in his head?

'All that I can do is to learn many dialects of a given archipelago, present their existing varieties, and so work back to the original language. This, to some extent, has been done in the Banks group, and in the eastern part of the Solomon Isles. But directly I get so far as this, I am recalled to the practical necessity of using the knowledge of the several dialects rather to make known God's truth to the heathen than to inform literati of the process of dialectic variation. Don't mistake me, my dear friend, or suspect me of silly sentimentalism. But you can easily understand what it is to feel "God has given to me only of all Christian men the power of speaking to this or that nation, and, moreover, that is the work He has sent me to do." Often, I don't deny, I should like the other better. It is very pleasant to shirk my evening class, e.g. and spend the time with Sir William Martin, discussing some point of Melanesian philosophy. But then my dear lads have lost two hours of Christian instruction, and that won't do.

'I don't need to be urged to do more in working out their languages. I am quite aware of the duty of doing all that I can in that way, and I wish to do it; but there are only twenty-four hours in the day and night together! I feel that it is a part of my special work, for each grammar and dictionary that I can write opens out the language to some other than myself. But I am now apologising rather for my fragmentary way of writing what I do write by saying that what I find enough, with my help given in school to enable one of my party to learn a dialect, I am almost obliged to regard as a measure of the time that I ought to spend on it.

'Another thing, I have no outline provided for me, which I can fill up. My own clear impression is that to attempt to follow the analogy of our complicated Greek and Latin grammars would not only involve certain failure, but would mislead people altogether. I don't want to be hunting after a Melanesian paulo-post-futurum. I had rather say, "All men qua men think, and have a power of expressing their thoughts. They have wants and express them. They use many different forms of speech in making that statement, if we look superficially at the matter, not so if we look into it," and so on. Then, discarding the ordinary arrangement of grammars, explain the mode of thought, the peculiar method of thinking upon matters of common interest, in the mind of the Melanesian, as exhibited in his language. An Englishman says, "When I get there, it will be night." But a Pacific Islander says, "I am there, it is night." The one says, "Go on, it will soon be dark." The other, "Go on, it has become already night." Anyone sees that the one possesses the power of realising the future as present, or past; the other now whatever it may have been once, does not exercise such power. A companion calls me at 5.30 A.M., with the words, "Eke! me gong veto," (Hullo! it is night already). He means, "Why, we ought to be off, we shall never reach the end of our journey before dark." But how neatly and prettily he expresses his thought! I assure you, civilised languages, for common conversational purposes needed by travellers, &c., are clumsy contrivances! Of course you know all this a hundred times better than I do. I only illustrate my idea of a grammar as a means of teaching others the form of the mould in which the Melanesian's mind is cast. I think I ought to go farther, and seek for certain categories, under which thought may be classified (so to say), and beginning with the very simplest work on to the more complicated powers.

'But I haven't the head to do this; and suppose that I did make such a framework, how am I to fill it in so as to be intelligible to outsiders? For practical purposes, I give numerals, personal, possessive, and demonstrative pronouns, the mode of qualifying nouns, e.g., some languages interpose a monosyllable between the substantive and adjective, others do not. The words used (as it is called) as prepositions and adverbs, the mode of changing a neuter verb into a transitive or causative verb, usually by a word prefixed, which means do or make, e.g., die, do-die, do-to-the-death, him.

'Then I teach orally how the intonation, accentuation, pause in the utterance, gesticulation, supply the place of stops, marks of interrogation, &c.

'Then giving certain nouns, verbs, &c., make my English pupils construct sentences; then give them a vocabulary and genuine native stories, not translations at all, least of all of religious books, which contain very few native ideas, but stories of sharks, cocoa-nuts, canoes, fights, &c. This is the apparatus. This gives but little idea of a Melanesian dialect to you. I know it, and am anxious to do more.

'This last season I have had some three or four months, during which I determined that I must refuse to take so much English work, &c. I sat and growled in my den, and of course rather vexed people, and perhaps, for which I should be most heartily grieved, my dear friend and leader, the Bishop of New Zealand. But I stuck to my work. I wrote about a dozen papers of phrases in as many dialects, to show the mode of expressing in those dialects what we express by adverbs and prepositions, &c. This is, of course, the difficult part of a language for a stranger to find out. I also printed three, and have three more nearly finished in MS., vocabularies of about 600 words with a true native sehdia on each word. The mere writing (for much was written twice over) took a long time. And there is this gained by these vocabularies for practical purposes: these are (with more exceptions, it is true, than I intended) the words which crop up most readily in a Melanesian mind. Much time I have wasted, and would fain save others from wasting, in trying to form a Melanesian mind into a given direction into which it ought, as I supposed, to have travelled, but which nevertheless it refused to follow. Just ten years' experience has, of course, taught me a good deal of the minds of these races; and when I catch a new fellow, as wild as a hawk, and set to work at a new language, it is a great gain to have even partially worked out the problem, "What words shall I try to get from this fellow?" Now I go straight to my mark, or rather I am enabling, I hope, my young friends with me to do so, for of course, I have learnt to do so myself, more or less, for some time past. Many words may surprise you, and many alterations I should make in any revision. I know a vast number of words not used in these vocabularies, in some languages I daresay five times the number, but I had a special reason for writing only these. The rest must come, if I live, by-and-by.

'Of course these languages are very poor in respect of words belonging to civilised and literary and religious life, but exceedingly rich in all that pertains to the needs and habits of men circumstanced as they are. I draw naturally this inference, "Don't be in any hurry to translate, and don't attempt to use words as (assumed) equivalents of abstract ideas. Don't devise modes of expression unknown to the language as at present in use. They can't understand, and therefore don't use words to express definitions."

But, as everywhere, our Lord gives us the model. A certain lawyer asked Him for a definition of his neighbour, but He gave no definition, only He spoke a simple and touching parable. So teach, not a technical word, but an actual thing.

'Why do I write all this to you? It is wasting your time. But I prose on.—(A sheet follows on the structure of the languages.)

'Well, I have inflicted a volume on you. We are almost becalmed after a weary fortnight of heavy weather, in which we have been knocked about in every direction in our tight little 90-ton schooner. And my head is hardly steady yet, so excuse a long letter, or rather long chatty set of desultory remarks, from

'Your old affectionate Friend,

'J. C. PATTESON.'

A little scene from Mr. Atkin's journal shows how he had learnt to talk to natives. He went ashore with the Bishop and some others at Sesaki for yams:—

'It has been by far the pleasantest day of the kind that I have seen here. The people are beginning to understand that they can do no better than trade fairly with us, and to-day they on the whole behaved very well. A very big fellow had been ringing all the changes between commanding and entreating me to give him a hatchet (I was holding the trade bag). When he found it was no use, he said, "I was a bad man, and never gave anything." I said "Yes, I was." He said the Bishops were very good men, they gave liberally. He had better go and ask the Bishop for something, for he was a good man, though I was not.'

After landing Mr. Palmer at Mota, the vessel went onto the Solomon Isles, reaching Bauro on the 27th:—

'About 8.30 in the evening the boat was lowered, and the party pulled towards the village, which was the home of Taroniara, in a fine clear moonlit night, by the fires which people had lit for the people on shore, and directed by Taroniara himself to the opening in the reef. They landed in the midst of a group of dark figures, some standing in a brook, some by the side under a large spreading tree, round a fire fed by dry cocoa-nut leaves; and in the background were tall cocoa-nuts with their gracefully drooping plumes, and the moon behind shining through them made the shade seem darker and deeper as the flashing crests of the surf, breaking on the reef, made the heaving sea beyond look murkier. It was a sight worth going a long way to see,' so says Mr. Atkin's journal.

The next sight was, however, still more curious. The Bishop relented so far towards 'the Net,' as to write an account of it on purpose for it. Ysabel Island is, like almost all the rest, divided among many small communities of warlike habits. And some years previously the people of Mahaga, the place with which he was best acquainted, had laid an ambush for those of Hogirano, killed a good many, and, cutting off their heads, had placed them in a row upon stones, and danced round them in a victorious suit of white-coral lime. However, a more powerful tribe, not long after, came down upon Mahaga and fearfully avenged the massacre of Hogirano. All were slain who could not escape into the bush; and when the few survivors, after days and nights of hunger, ventured back, they found the dwellings burnt, the fruit trees cut down, the yam and taro grounds devastated, and more than a hundred headless bodies of their kindred lying scattered about.

This outrage had led to the erection of places of refuge in the tops of trees; and Bishop Patteson, who had three Mahagan scholars, went ashore, with the hope of passing the night in one of these wonderful places, where the people always slept, though by day they lived in the ordinary open bamboo huts.