7 - Missionary writing in Polynesia

Summary

… that interesting class of any truthful narrative, however imperfect, of the trials and triumphs of Christian missionaries in Polynesia

Truthful but imperfect narratives of missionary enterprises in Polynesia proliferated in the nineteenth century. This chapter looks closely at such texts, with rather more interest in their imperfections than in their truthfulness, specifically identifying key tropes within missionary writing. A variety of texts are analysed here, including the LMS ‘Reports’, but the two main publications from which I draw evidence of gender and cultural interactions are Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet's Journal (1831) and John Williams' Missionary Enterprises (1837). Before I discuss specific modes of missionary representation in Polynesia, however, I need to address issues of context, authorship, and structure in these textual interventions into Pacific cultures.

Tyerman and Bennet were engaged by the LMS in order to undertake a deputation to their mission stations ‘in the South Sea Islands, China, India &c. between the years 1821 and 1829’. Daniel Tyerman was a clergyman associated with the LMS and George Bennet was a Sheffield businessman – their joint appointment exemplified the LMS home constituency of religious middle-class business-men. The compiler of their Journal stated that they were engaged for the purposes of ‘cheering the hearts and strengthening the hands of the Missionaries and, as representatives of the Christian community at home, to witness and report what great things the Lord had done for the heathen there’.