taken to any heathen rites, but given to himself to be trained up as a child of God.' The parents consented: 'Then,' he continues, 'we knelt, and in the middle of the village, the naked group around me, the dying child in its mother's lap, I prayed to God and Christ in their language to bless the child according to His own promise, to receive it for His own child, and to convey to it the fulness of the blessing of His holy Sacrament. Then while all were silent, I poured the water on its head, pronouncing the form of words in English, and calling the child John, the first Christian child in the Banks Islands. Then I knelt down again and praised God for His goodness, and prayed that the child might live, if it were His good pleasure, and be educated to His glory; and then I prayed for those around me and for the people of the island, that God would reveal to them His Holy Name and Word and Will; and so, with a few words to the parents and people, left them, as darkness settled down on the village and the bright stars came out overhead.'
The innocent first-fruits of Mota died three days later, and Mr. Patteson found a great howling and wailing going on over its little grave under a long low house. This was hushed when he came up, and spoke of the Resurrection, and described the babe's soul dwelling in peace in the Kingdom of the Father, where those would join it who would believe and repent, cast away their evil practices, and be baptized to live as children of God. Kneeling down, he prayed over it, thanking God for having taken it to Himself, and interceding for all around. They listened and seemed touched; no opposition was ever offered to him, but he found that there was much fighting and quarrelling, many of the villages at war with each other, and a great deal too much use of the bow and arrow, though the whole race was free from cannibalism. They seemed to want to halt between two opinions: to keep up their orgies on the one hand, and to make much of the white teacher on the other; and when we recollect that two unarmed Englishmen, and twelve blacks from other islands, were perfectly isolated in the midst of a heathen population, having refused protection from a British man-of-war, it gives a grandeur to the following narrative:-
'June 7th.-One of their chief men has just been with two bread-fruit as a present. I detected him as a leader of one of their chief ceremonies yesterday, and I have just told him plainly that I cannot accept anything from him, neither can I suffer him to be coming to my place while it is notorious that he is teaching the children the very things they ought not to learn, and that he is strongly supporting the old false system, while he professes to be listening attentively to the Word of God. I made him take up his two bread-fruit and carry them away; and I suppose it will be the story all over the village that I have driven him away.
''By-and-by we will listen to the Word of God, when we have finished these ceremonies.'
''Yes, you hearken first to the voice of the evil spirit; you choose him firsthand then you will care to hear about God.''
The ceremony was to last twenty days, and only affected the lads, who were blackened all over with soot, and apparently presented pigs to the old priest, and were afterwards admitted to the privileges of eating and sleeping in the separate building, which formed a kind of club-house for the men of each village, and on which Mr. Patteson could always reckon as both a lecture room and sleeping place.
The people kept on saying that 'by-and-by' they would make an end of their wild ritual, and throw down their enclosures, and at the same time they thronged to talk to him at the Mission station, and built a shed to serve for a school at Auta.
Meantime the little estate was brought into order. A pleasant day of landscape-gardening was devoted to clearing gaps to let in the lovely views from the station; and a piece of ground was dug and planted with pine- apples, vines, oranges, and cotton, also a choicer species of banana than the indigenous one. Bread-fruit was so plentiful that breakfast was provided by sending a boy up a tree to bring down four or five fruits, which were laid in the ashes, and cooked at once; and as to banana leaves 'we think nothing of cutting one down, four feet long and twenty inches wide, of a bright pale green, just to wrap up a cooked yam or two.'
The first week in July, with Wadrokala, Mark, and two Malanta men, Mr. Patteson set forth in the boat that had been left with him, for an expedition among the other islands, beginning with Saddle Island, or Valua, which was the proper name.
The day after leaving Eowa, the weather changed; and as on these perilous coasts there was no possibility of landing, two days and the intervening night had to be spent in the open four-oared boat, riding to a grapnel!
Very glad they were to get into Port Patteson, and to land in the wet, 'as it can rain in the tropics.' The nearest village, however, was empty, everybody being gone to the burial wake of the wife of a chief, and there was no fire to cook the yams, everything dreary and deserted, but a short walk brought the wet and tired party to the next village, where they were made welcome to the common house; and after, supping on yams and chocolate, spent a good night, and found the sea smooth the next day for a return to head-quarters.
These first weeks at Mota were very happy, but after that the strain began to tell. Mr. Patteson had been worn with anxiety for his father, and no doubt with awe in the contemplation of his coming Episcopate, and was not in a strong state of health when he left Kohimarama, and the lack of animal food, the too sparing supply of wine, and the bare board bed told upon him. On the 24th of July he wrote in a letter to his Uncle Edward:-
'I have lost six days: a small tumour formed inside the ear about two inches from the outer ear, and the pain has been very considerable, and the annoyance great. Last night I slept for the first time for five nights, and I have been so weary with sleeplessness that I have been quite idle. The mischief is passing away now. That ear is quite deaf; it made me think so of dear Father and Joan with their constant trial. I don't see any results from our residence here; and why should I look for them? It is enough that the people are hearing, some of them talking, and a few thinking about what they hear. All in God's own time!'
Mr. Dudley adds: 'His chief trouble at this time was with one of his ears. The swelling far in not only made him deaf while it lasted, but gave him intense and protracted agony. More than once he had to spend the whole night in walking up and down the room. But only on one occasion during the whole time do I remember his losing his patience, and that was when we had been subjected to an unusually protracted visitation from the 'loafers' of the village, who would stretch themselves at full length on the floor and table, if we would let them, and altogether conduct themselves in such a manner as to call for summary treatment, very different from the more promising section. The half jocular but very decided manner in which he cleared the house on this occasion, and made them understand that they were to respect our privacy sometimes, and not make the Mission station an idling place, was very satisfactory. It was no small aggravation of the pain to feel that this might be the beginning of permanent deafness, such as would be fatal to his usefulness in a work in which accuracy of ear was essential.'
However, this gradually improved; and another boat voyage was made, but again was frustrated by the torrents of rain. In fact, it was an unusually wet and unwholesome season, which told upon everyone. Mark Chakham, the Nengonese, was brought very near the grave by a severe attack of dysentery. All the stores of coffee, chocolate, wine and biscuit were used up. The 'Southern Cross' had been due full a month, and nothing was heard of her through the whole of September.
Teaching and conversation went on all this time, trying as it was; and the people still came to hear, though no one actually undertook to forsake his idols.
'I am still hopeful about these people,' is the entry on September 18, 'though all their old customs and superstitions go on just as before. But (1) they know that a better teaching has been presented to them. (2) They do not pursue their old habits with the same unthinking-security. (3) There are signs of a certain uneasiness of mind, as if a struggle was beginning in them. (4) They have a vague consciousness, some of them, that the power is passing away from their witchcrafts, sorceries, by which unquestionably they did and still do work strange effects on the credulous people, like 'Pharaoh's magicians of old.'
This was ground gained; and one or two voyages to Vanua Lava and the other isles were preparatory steps, and much experience had been acquired, and resulted in this:-
'The feasibility of the Bishop's old scheme is more and more apparent to me. Only I think that in taking away natives to the summer school, it must be understood that some (and they few) are taken from new islands merely to teach us some of their languages and to frank us, so that we may have access in safety to their islands. Should any of them turn out well, so much the better; but it will not be well to take them with the expectation of their becoming teachers to their people. But the other section of the school will consist of young men whose behaviour we have watched during the winter in their own homes, whose professions we have had an opportunity of testing- they may be treated as young men on the way to become teachers eventually to their countrymen. One learns much from living among a heathen people, and only by living in our pupils' homes shall we ever know their real characters. Poor fellows! they are adepts in all kinds of deceitfulness at a very early age, and so completely in our power on board the schooner and at Kohimarama, that we know nothing of them as they are.'
The very paper this is copied from shows how the stores were failing, for the full quarto sheets have all failed,
