In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, missionary print culture presented the British populace with tantalizing tales of faraway lands and cultures as well as detailed catalogs of missionary projects across the globe. Technological developments in printing permitted the mass publishing of texts, and missionary publications became a key feature of the modern market for print, recycling and circulating extracts from missionary writings in order to argue for the spread of the gospel. Yet periodicals printed in Britain, and the dynamic engagement of their readership in the mission field, also played a significant role in shaping these world-spanning knowledge networks.
The London Missionary Society’s (LMS) early mission to Tahiti was one such site where periodicals emerged as a vital component in the intellectual infrastructure of the developing mission. From the mission’s outset in 1796, Pacific-generated material was integrated into the publications that graced the British periodical market. Yet this was far from a one-way stream of cultural traffic. Missionary letters, journals, and administrative records chronicled the movement of periodicals from Britain to Tahiti, from the ship to the shore. Missionaries depended on these periodicals to fabricate ties to their home societies and to ease feelings of dislocation as they negotiated new lives in the Pacific. In the mission stations, readers scrutinized these texts with pen in hand, debating the content and participating in transnational communication networks even at the periphery of the British Empire. Periodicals sent from Britain thus reconfigured how missionaries conceived of the binary between “home” and “mission” amid complex and often difficult cross-cultural encounters on the ground.
Histories of Missionary Print Culture and Knowledge Networks
This article builds on a growing and now geographically diverse scholarship by examining the specific role that periodicals printed in Britain played in shaping world-spanning missionary knowledge networks. Much academic research has studied how the missionary periodical industry contributed to the cultural underpinnings of the British Empire and its crafting of powerful discourses of cultural difference in relation to race, gender, class, and religion.Footnote 1 Periodicals produced in Britain have been a key source base in this scholarship. As missionary societies emerged in Britain in the wake of the evangelical revival, they quickly latched onto the developing medium of the periodical. Portable, relatively affordable, and published at routine intervals, periodicals provided evangelicals with a means to spread the gospel and to pull in money for the expensive endeavor of establishing foreign missions. Historians and literary scholars of the British Empire have pored over these texts, analyzing what they reveal about the construction of a colonial “other” in the metropole, the role of religion in histories of colonialism, and the moral debates that became embedded in imperial expansion.Footnote 2 Scholars of Indigenous history have also utilized these texts in important ways, reading against and with the grain to locate complex histories of social and religious change. The close reading of periodicals has uncovered the textual contributions of Indigenous Christians and their role in shaping the religious encounter, often in contexts of extremely unequal colonial power relations.Footnote 3
There is a tendency in some works on missionary publishing to emphasize disconnect between the mission field and the printing offices of European missionary societies—the great distance between the “events” on the ground and their printed iterations in the metropole. The historian of empire Andrew Porter, for example, has discussed the “sanitized” and “censored” character of missionary society publications, and their dislocation from the realities they attempted to reconcile.Footnote 4 The historian of Christianity Adrian Hastings has similarly argued that the most “negative and painful passages” in missionary literature came “from the pens of mission organizers and backers who were never in the field.”Footnote 5 While the editors of missionary periodicals certainly transformed the handwritten material of missionaries for the printed page in Britain, a new wave of scholarship offers a way of reevaluating the disconnect these texts supposedly represented. This body of work focuses on the mobility and materiality of missionary texts.
The literary scholar, Isabel Hofmeyr, in particular, has inspired this approach, shedding light on the diverse forms of agency that went into the making and reception of print in sites of mission and empire. Hofmeyr’s work is deeply attuned to the existence of texts as material things—things that are assembled, handled, and distributed.Footnote 6 Focusing solely on the text, Hofmeyr suggests, limits our understanding of how ideas were forged and manufactured, and how writings and their audiences interacted.Footnote 7 Following Hofmeyr’s intervention in the field, several studies have shown how local actors in colonial contexts appropriated and repurposed printed texts, like Bibles, missionary-authored books, and newspapers.Footnote 8 Relatedly, a surge of research demonstrates how Indigenous peoples and communities used the written word to forge new social and political identities and to assert intellectual power within the oppressive structures of colonial rule. Challenging colonial demarcations between “literate” and “non-literate” cultures, these studies have investigated the interwoven relationship between writing and orality.Footnote 9 This has helped to uncover the “hidden, forgotten, neglected or marginalized cultural innovators” who used and produced the written word in creative ways.Footnote 10
Vanessa Smith’s landmark study on nineteenth-century literary culture in the South Pacific similarly argues for writing as a “material process” that is “embedded in a context of exchange.”Footnote 11 Smith maintains that missionaries portrayed themselves as both the agents of change and the “preservers of a cultural record” in the region.Footnote 12 Assuming the status of insiders, missionaries asserted their ethnographic and linguistic authority over other European writers, especially critics of evangelical missions.Footnote 13 In treating writings as objects of exchange, Smith’s study extends Nicholas Thomas’s research on the exchange of objects between Pacific peoples and European newcomers. While sensitive to the immense power imbalances of colonial interactions, Thomas argues that objects become entangled when they are cross-culturally exchanged. They assume old and new appropriations.Footnote 14 Or, as Smith explains in her study, “the meanings of objects are up for grabs.”Footnote 15
The study of periodical culture and the LMS mission to Tahiti enriches our understandings of the enmeshment of the Pacific and European worlds in the nineteenth century. Missionaries drew distinctions between different genres of print; the periodical genre was linked to the liminal status that missionaries often came to occupy in the South Pacific. Missionary news was one aspect of a vibrant evangelical periodical culture. In Tahiti, missionaries accessed all sorts of contemporary updates, literary extracts, book clippings, and testimonies from the periodicals that arrived by ship. A range of evangelical interests—not just foreign missions—filled their pages. Since most printed material in the British Empire evaded copyright rules, the mobility and reuse of stories occurred openly and regularly. These were thus assembled texts. As Isabel Hofmeyr and Antoinette Burton have argued, the cut-and-paste production that characterized periodicals resembled the incoherent and uneven contours of empire.Footnote 16 Tony Ballantyne likewise refers to colonial newspapers as assemblages, the products of complex social and material processes that came together to link “individuals into public conversations.”Footnote 17 In collating an expansive assortment of intelligence, helped by the growing network of overseas missionaries, the editors of evangelical periodicals were important contributors to these conversations.
The intense, assembled quality of evangelical periodicals benefited from the evangelicals’s focus on the written word and the accumulation of knowledge. Periodicals became an important form of knowledge dissemination in a dynamic web of books, handwritten manuscripts, and oral performances, including public sermons and lectures.Footnote 18 As a highly portable medium that stitched together snippets and reports from far-flung places and chronologies, periodicals could draw together different texts and cast them widely. In Tahiti, the missionaries prized the periodicals sent from Britain for the glimpses of home they offered, for their rallying power, and for the transnational dialogue they facilitated. Their clipped, cropped, and assembled format, however, could also prove deeply dissatisfying. The format, especially as produced in Britain, could never fully capture the range of missionary experiences in Tahiti, the moments of fear, anxiety, border crossing, and liminality, which were so often cut from the page. This highlights the need for localized studies of periodical culture, within histories of global connection.
The decades between 1790–1830 capture the early development of evangelical periodical culture, alongside the expansion of the British missionary movement. The LMS mission to Tahiti was one of the first sites of British evangelistic activity, and it was richly documented in the British periodical press. LMS archival material, meanwhile, illuminates the reception of periodicals and how evangelicals made sense of the developing medium. As revealed in missionary correspondence, their experiences overseas could reconfigure the types of knowledge that were communicated through evangelical print networks. While overwhelmingly authored by European, male missionaries, the archival writings from the early years of the mission were shaped by local developments, and in particular, the processes of translating and transmitting local languages onto paper.Footnote 19
These insights from the missionary archive open fresh ways of thinking about the production and reception of evangelical periodicals. They show that, as well as considering the textual components of periodicals, it is illuminating to examine their mobility and material dimensions. This form of analysis uncovers a dynamic publishing industry, one that cultivated histories of globalization, as well as the making of local evangelical networks that could inform and intersect with “top-down creations.”Footnote 20 The literary theorist, Michael Warner’s work on publics and counterpublics offers a useful vocabulary for historical research on the complex trajectories of printed texts, and the publics they both address and establish.Footnote 21 Warner imagines a type of public that is drawn into existence in “relation to texts and their circulation.”Footnote 22 Missionary periodicals thus contributed to the creation of an evangelical public. Their circulation projected a public, both real and “notional.” This was by no means a stable or coherent public, free from tension or conflict. As Warner writes, a “public is always in excess of its known social basis … It must include strangers.”Footnote 23 Periodical culture helped to extend and maintain evangelical networks overseas, which rapidly expanded as missionary societies emerged in Britain from the late eighteenth century. Meanwhile, manuscript and print traditions came together in the making of evangelical periodicals, interlacing events in the Pacific mission field and Britain. Tensions developed as missionaries conveyed and received intelligence across vast geographic distances, complicating the boundaries they drew between home and mission, and drawing them into public debates in Britain.
The Rise of Evangelical Periodical Culture
In eighteenth-century Britain, urbanizing and industrializing forces brought forth an active and energetic print culture. The periodical market thrived, with the medium celebrated for its egalitarian potential, its ability to circulate knowledge in a “progressive and accumulative” fashion.Footnote 24 As evangelicalism also developed in Britain, with a defining focus on spreading the gospel, leaders of the movement harnessed the periodical format, keen to subdue the formation of a secular, “seditious” print landscape.Footnote 25 Their interest in periodicals also expressed a mood of “evangelical entrepreneurship,” as Michael Ledger-Lomas explains. Both lay and clerical evangelicals sought to save souls by “adopting the businessman’s eye for expanding markets and cutting costs.”Footnote 26
The preface to the first volume of the Evangelical Magazine (1793) conveys how early evangelicals conceived of the medium. Printed monthly in London, the Evangelical Magazine became one of the most sought-after periodicals in the British market for religious print.Footnote 27 The opening comments to the first volume celebrated the innately egalitarian quality of periodicals, describing them as cheap, portable, “level to every one’s capacity, and suited to every one’s time and circumstances.”Footnote 28 In sum, they were a “powerful engine in the moral world.”Footnote 29 They could transform evangelical energy into action, directing people toward moral and spiritual improvement, and most importantly, toward the gospel. In 1799, George Burder’s promotional comments about the Religious Tract Society (RTS) in the Evangelical Magazine reiterated evangelical aspirations for compact printed texts. “Let the fair picture of Religion hang in public,” he wrote, “Let volumes be condensed into a few pages; let pious ingenuity toil—while twice ten thousand hands distribute the salutary produce from family to family, and from country to country.”Footnote 30 As well as publishing cheap religious tracts, the RTS came to produce periodicals for children and Sunday schools.Footnote 31
Several factors explained why evangelicalism and the periodical market became so intertwined. First, one of the defining components of periodicals—their seriality—allowed evangelicals to create, extend, and maintain social relationships. The mechanisms involved in their distribution established networks of exchange, as Leah Price suggests.Footnote 32 These networks were transformational, even if the material was not necessarily closely studied. People were continually drawn together to give and receive evangelical material, mobilizing “assemblages” of horses, carriages, and ships in the process.Footnote 33 As the British Empire and missionary movement expanded, these networks extended overseas. In New South Wales, for example, the missionary-turned-storekeeper, Rowland Hassall maintained correspondence with Burder. In 1803, Burder had become the editor of the Evangelical Magazine. That year, Burder wrote to Hassall that he hoped Hassall would read the magazine, as it reported on missionary progress on the other side of the world, as well as in other regions: “Indeed there is a great desire in England to spread the gospel both at home & abroad.”Footnote 34
On a theological level, evangelicals connected the seriality of periodicals to the pathway of spiritual growth. They conceived that receiving issues at regular intervals would refresh, affirm, and develop people’s faith in the gospel.Footnote 35 The seriality of periodicals also matched the rhythms and rituals of evangelical associational life. Evangelicals gathered frequently through weekly church attendance, scheduled committee meetings, lectures series, and charitable services among the poor. Periodicals fulfilled a similar function, routinely assembling an evangelical public. This relates to one of the defining qualities of evangelicalism: activism.Footnote 36 Evangelicals distinguished themselves by their vigor, the idea that no time must be wasted in spreading the message. They took pride in their busy diaries and calendars, the tenacity with which they engaged the world.Footnote 37 The seriality of periodicals embodied this ongoing work of spreading the message.
The periodical format emerged from an earlier print landscape of news sheets, broadsides, and handbills.Footnote 38 This commercial legacy relates to the second key reason why evangelicals became so invested in the periodical market: its propagandistic potential and power to draw funds and supporters. Periodicals could function as both “pulpit and collecting-bag,” particularly with regard to the growing missionary movement.Footnote 39 As missionary societies formed from the late eighteenth century onward in Britain, leaders of the movement increasingly relied on periodicals for support. In 1813, for example, the Evangelical Magazine merged with an LMS periodical to become the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle. Subscribers were encouraged to donate money and goods to the LMS, and their names typically appeared in the magazine’s last pages.Footnote 40 Missionaries in the South Pacific recognized the power of this communication network. In a letter to the LMS, for instance, Thomas Heath called for missionary reports to be circulated more widely, referencing the success that the Quakers, the Anti-Slavery Society, and the Peace Society had achieved through extensive print distribution.Footnote 41
Highly emotive narratives in evangelical periodicals helped create momentum for the missionary movement in Britain. In the mission reports, detailed stories of immorality, violence, and painful deaths among non-Christian societies were designed to mobilize people into action.Footnote 42 Tales of adventure and exotic locations additionally drew subscribers and likely galvanized young men to become missionaries. Peter Pels cites the “push of duty, and the pull of desire.”Footnote 43 Missionary application records demonstrate the rallying power of periodicals. Robert Bourne, a 24-year-old Sunday school teacher in London, explained in an 1811 letter that an advertisement in the Evangelical Magazine had encouraged him to apply. He aspired to be “useful to the rising generation in distant lands.”Footnote 44 By the 1830s, hopeful missionaries had to complete a questionnaire to join. One question asked applicants what drew them to missionary work. Alongside references to rousing sermons from returned missionaries, men cited the Evangelical Magazine and other monthly publications as key influences.Footnote 45 Additionally indicating the rallying power that evangelicals ascribed to printed texts, 25-year-old Alfred Smee wrote in his questionnaire that he had entered the “printing business” because he thought it would best suit missionary work. At the time of his application, he was working as a letterpress printer on Fleet Street in London.Footnote 46
Finally, the assembled character of periodicals—their ability to present the highlights of multiple texts—suited evangelical aspirations for “continual improvement.”Footnote 47 As evangelicals grappled with Enlightenment ideals of progress and the advancement of humanity, they conceived that educating people about God’s works (whether through the arts, history, or the sciences) would move people toward the Bible. Lecture notes from the Missionary Seminary in Gosport provide a window into this thinking. The LMS established the Missionary Seminary at the beginning of the nineteenth century to better prepare men for missionary work. The Reverend David Bogue, who led the institution, delivered an 1815 lecture entitled “Of the Studies of a Missionary” in which he described Christianity as a “religion of knowledge” and explained the need for “continual improvement.” He urged aspiring missionaries to study numerous subjects because without “diligent application for this purpose the mind will grow rusty & barren, & the person will go backwards.”Footnote 48
In presenting the highlights of multiple texts, periodicals could bring attention to multiple sources of knowledge. Illustrations in evangelical periodicals, for example, showed the variety of cultural and natural objects that missionaries brought back for display in British museums. The LMS museum in London, established in 1815, displayed objects in a way that propagated evangelical conceptions of human cultural development, especially regarding the triumph of biblical truth over naturalism.Footnote 49 The LMS periodical text that accompanied the illustrations of these objects affirmed this messaging. In 1818 the periodical Missionary Sketches, for example, celebrated the iconoclasm of the “glorious spoils of idolatry” in reference to the ancestral objects that were sent from Tahiti.Footnote 50
The relationship between periodical and book culture was perhaps the most important textual overlap for evangelicals at the turn of the nineteenth century. Periodicals could serve as gateways to the most sacred book of all, the Bible. In addition to recycling book extracts, evangelical periodicals commonly included reviews of recently published books. As explained in the Evangelical Magazine in 1793, book reviews oriented readers toward the writings of the “wise and godly.”Footnote 51 The Eclectic Review, established in 1805, exemplified evangelical aspirations for a culture of informed reading, which was centered around the Bible. It provided monthly commentary on theological, historical, scientific, and political texts. John Clayton’s published sermon from 1807, The Danger of Reading Improper Books, celebrated the Eclectic Review as an “antidote to the poison, which the press constantly emits.”Footnote 52
The dynamic relationship between periodical and book culture was crucial to the intellectual foundation of the mission to Tahiti. The initial missionaries who travelled to Tahiti typically came from the “mechanic” classes, and they were tasked with transmitting a “combined gospel of biblical and technical instruction” among the Indigenous population.Footnote 53 Articulating this philosophy, one of the founders of the LMS, Thomas Haweis, pronounced in 1799 that the men selected for mission work in the South Pacific would not become “preachers, gentlemen, or idle.” They would instead be “active labourers,” and examples of “Purity and Industry.”Footnote 54 This did not mean that print culture was a later development in the mission’s history. In fact, even on the first voyages to the South Pacific at the turn of the nineteenth century, missionaries were encouraged to study both scripture and instructional print for their own journeys of self-improvement. “Many persons,” the LMS leadership argued in 1800, “have read and studied more at sea than they could have done the same time on shore.”Footnote 55
Missionaries kept records of their reading material, showing their combined focus on both books and periodicals. In 1800, for instance, the LMS organized a third expedition to Tahiti. Initial attempts to start missions in Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, and Tonga had largely ended in disaster, with several missionaries absconding or being killed. Travelling on the convict vessel, the Royal Admiral, the next band of missionaries documented the goods they transported, acquired, and lost during the voyage. They noted the texts they “used” on the ship, which they gave away to fellow passengers and the convicts who were being transported to New South Wales. These included 94 bibles, 25 hymn books, some unspecified tracts, 12 spelling books, and John Brown’s Catechism. Footnote 56
Their inventory also illuminated the personal print collections of missionaries. During the voyage, the missionary Stephen Morris died from fever. Seventeen of his books were to be sold and dispersed among his colleagues, each noted in the inventory. His personal journal and two of his books—Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and William Dyer’s The Believer’s Golden Chain—were to be sent back to his relatives, indicating how some texts could develop into mementoes of the deceased.Footnote 57 The publications listed in the inventory sent by the LMS also included histories of previous missions, books of theology, hymns, and psalms, various tracts, and all issues of the Evangelical Magazine up to June 1800.Footnote 58 The already resident missionaries were to be sent copies of the Missionary Voyage by William Wilson, in addition to unspecified periodicals.
As well as being tied up in evangelical notions of “continual improvement,” the transportation of printed texts to Tahiti was part of a wider project to introduce goods that would serve as “testimonies to Christian superiority.”Footnote 59 Missionaries, therefore, valorized the founding of libraries. In 1825, the LMS directors committed to sending “Books and Philosophical Apparatus” to the mission library in Tahiti. They also committed to “regular series of the Evangelical Magazine [being] sent out from time to time, to each missionary.”Footnote 60 In 1834, the missionaries in Tahiti carefully recorded each of the titles in the library. The list illustrates that missionaries often blurred the boundaries between different print formats. Volumes of periodicals were situated among the books. In 1834 the library included the Eclectic Review (7 volumes), the Evangelical Magazine (26 volumes), Missionary Transactions (3 volumes), the Missionary Register (1 volume), the Theological Magazine (1 volume), and the Youth’s Magazine (6 volumes). Each volume typically encompassed a year’s worth of issues. The volume format indicates that the missionaries did not always treat periodicals as ephemeral texts, but as important for future reference.Footnote 61 In the library, they were durable, and meant to be kept and studied. Brian Maidment connects the egalitarian vision for periodicals to the haphazard dialogue that existed between serial publications and the volume format in Britain at the time.Footnote 62 In the context of the LMS mission to Tahiti, periodicals were fixtures in the intellectual landscape, and integral to the evangelical knowledge networks that had started to extend across the seas.
The LMS Mission to Tahiti and its Connections to Evangelical Periodical Culture
Evangelical periodical publishing encompassed a far-flung and mobile network of papers, drawing together manuscript and print traditions. This was a history that intersected with events in the mission field. Writing to some of the earliest missionaries who left for the South Pacific, the LMS leadership asked them to “keep a journal of all material occurrences,” and to write home as “frequently as possible” with any plans that appeared “practicable for the spread of the Gospel.”Footnote 63 Missionary correspondence and journals updated the leadership about the needs of the mission stations. Publishers then edited, cut up, and printed such reports in periodicals like the Evangelical Magazine or the Transactions of the Missionary Society. At the meetings of the LMS in London, the latest intelligence was read, reviewed, and considered for publication. The archival material bears traces of the editorial process such as lines through text, arrows and comments in the margins, and the insertion of headings.
In the periodicals, the cut-and paste presentation of missionary letters and journals announced the global circulation of these texts.Footnote 64 The date, the details of the recipient, and the location of the author were typically reproduced, contributing to the projection of an evangelical public. Some of the earliest LMS letters published in the Evangelical Magazine were written on the Duff, the ship that transported the first missionaries to the South Pacific. From the harbor of Rio de Janeiro in 1796, the missionary John Jefferson wrote about seasickness on board, the “fiery” sun, and how his colleagues attempted to learn the local languages. Since several of the missionaries did not take the chance to write home from South America, Jefferson requested the LMS leadership to make their “present situation as public as possible, through the medium of the Evangelical Magazine.”Footnote 65 The magazine often highlighted instances of broken communication with the missionaries in this period—how letters and journals were lost or held due to storms, conflict, or bureaucratic hurdles. An issue from 1797 invited anyone who had received letters to send copies or extracts to the Fleet Street offices of the LMS directors in London.Footnote 66
For the most part, missionaries wrote to the LMS expecting that their writings would be printed and circulated in the press. The assembled nature of LMS periodicals—what was included, reinterpreted, or cut from the manuscripts—could cause intense frustration. In October 1808, for example, John Davies reported that the ship, the Perseverance, had arrived in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, from New South Wales. Anxious to receive news from England, the missionaries rushed to the shore to retrieve a box of publications from the ship. The contents brought disappointment. Davies contested the glowing portrayal of the mission in several issues of the Reports of the Directors, arguing that it did not accurately reflect the sense that they had been abandoned by the LMS in London.Footnote 67 With few signs of religious success, the first decade of the mission involved numerous personal disasters, including instances of shaken faith, sexual transgressions, disease, and premature deaths.Footnote 68 Missionaries also entered an intensely tumultuous political climate in Tahiti. One of the key patrons and protectors of the mission, Pōmare II, was attempting to claim paramountcy over the island, bringing threats of warfare. In 1807, he wrote to the LMS in London to request muskets and powder, reasoning: “should I be killed, you will have nothing in Tahete do not come here when I am dead. Tahete is a regardless country.”Footnote 69 The ari‘i rahi (holders of supreme authority) who opposed his efforts forced him and his supporters to flee the island for nearby Moʻorea at the close of 1808.Footnote 70 With the protection of Pōmare II severely compromised, most of the missionaries took temporary refuge in New South Wales.
Referencing the periodicals that arrived on the Perseverance, Davies explained that while the missionaries did not have a problem with their correspondence being published in periodicals, they expected it to be “done fairly.” They noticed that only “partial extracts” were making it into print.Footnote 71 Missionary William Henry also remarked on the editing process. When responding to the complaint that his writings delved too much into “personal and domestic” matters, Henry wrote to the LMS that it saved him from having to send multiple reports to friends and family. From the “inaccuracies” he had observed in the periodicals, he assumed the LMS would extract what they wanted for publication.Footnote 72
At other times, missionary authors specified what should remain private. In 1815, Pōmare II returned to Tahiti to defeat his rivals in battle. The victory consolidated his political and spiritual rule as King Pōmare II of Tahiti, and he aligned with the missionaries once more to spread Christian beliefs and scriptural laws.Footnote 73 When Henry Nott, who worked closely with Pōmare II of Tahiti on translations, forwarded some personal letters to the LMS in 1821, he specified that they should not be published. He also asked the LMS to avoid publishing “anything against King Pomare as the consequence will be very great.”Footnote 74 A few years earlier, William Ellis had reported that Pōmare II was “much pleased with the portraits in the Evangelical Magazine, and some prints of Natural History.”Footnote 75 The presentation of translated letters from Pōmare II and other Indigenous leaders in LMS periodicals shows how local developments in Tahiti affected evangelical publishing in Britain.Footnote 76 Scholars have justifiably remarked on the propagandist qualities of these recycled letters, and their transformation into “curiosities” that demonstrated the mission’s progress to an evangelical public.Footnote 77
A large proportion of missionary work involved getting material ready for publication, not only for the presses in Britain, but for those on the ground in the mission stations. In Gosport, Bogue lectured to aspiring missionaries about the need to become proficient in printing. Books, he argued, could be “spread far & wide & carried where missionaries [could not] go.”Footnote 78 Above all, they were expected to translate and distribute the books of the Bible. The agency of written texts, their ability to “make ‘moves’ in the world and … to reshape it,” was a profound concept to evangelicals.Footnote 79 They connected the authority of written communication, particularly the Bible, to the transcendent response it encouraged among readers. The “timelessness” of the scriptures was viewed as central to its power.Footnote 80 Missions, therefore, emerged as key sites of textual production where this intense faith in written communication was put to the test and negotiated.
Print production brought Pacific peoples and missionaries into local and global networks of exchange. Among Mā‘ohi leaders like Pōmare II, literacy represented the chance to harness new and powerful sacred knowledge.Footnote 81 In a time of increasing trade in Tahiti, the mission additionally offered access to the “literate world economy.”Footnote 82 Furthermore, in terms of connections between Britain and the Pacific, the British evangelical press keenly documented the translation of the gospels. This prompted British evangelicals to send paper and writing tools to the mission. The British and Foreign Bible Society, for example, sent paper that enabled 3,000 copies of the Gospel of Luke: Te Evanelia na Luka, iritihia ei parau Tahiti to be printed in Moʻorea.Footnote 83 Much like the circulation of periodicals, the mechanical processes behind print production symbolized new social relationships and the strengthening of evangelical communities.
In his Polynesian Researches, Ellis conveyed these themes in a triumphalist narrative about establishing the mission’s first printing press in the district of ‘Āfareaitu in Moʻorea in 1817. According to Ellis, people from all of the island’s districts rushed over to catch glimpses of the “wonderful machine,” and to observe the missionaries and Indigenous assistants, who labored for hours each day to produce spelling books and the Gospel of Luke. Pōmare II visited often, helping to prepare the first pages printed on the island. Ellis described how Pōmare II dabbed the metal type with the ink ball and turned the handle of the press, delighted with the large black script that emerged on paper.Footnote 84 Ellis’s narrative established a tension. He recorded evidence of Pōmare II’s involvement in the material aspects of printing, but he also inscribed the colonial trope of introducing “modern” technologies to enthralled and grateful Indigenous populations.Footnote 85
The decades-long process of translating the Bible involved complex forms of cross-cultural negotiation, as chronicled in missionary journals and letters. In Moʻorea, John Orsmond documented how printed vocabularies were assembled in 1817. In his journal, he described how he had been out conversing with local people to collect “words & phrases with [his] pencil and paper in [his] hand,” and that he was about to fix his tent next to the printing press in ‘Āfareaitu.Footnote 86 Orsmond also worked alongside Pōmare II, copying out terms he had written.Footnote 87 Davies recorded more explicit instances of negotiation at the press. When translating the Gospel of Luke in 1817, he explained that they had to “adopt and introduce a great number of Greek and other foreign words, altering and modifying some of them a little, that they might comport with the genius of the Tahitian.” Every word or syllable had to end in a vowel, so “Christ” was translated as “Mesia,” which could be more easily pronounced.Footnote 88 As in other sites of mission, translation opened “fields of manoeuvre” between different linguistic codes.Footnote 89
Operating the printing presses also forced the missionaries to reckon with the materiality of texts. As Emma Hunter and Leslie James argue, the “materiality of print media entails all the stages of its life: from the physical tools and networks used to make it, to the physical format and layout of the media, to the physical spaces in which it is received.”Footnote 90 In their handwritten correspondence, the missionaries were frank about the difficulties of working the machinery. In 1817, Ellis described the printing process as “very debilitating” due to the island’s climate.Footnote 91 Around the same time, his colleague William Crook wrote that printing was “not so convenient” as in England and that it would take a long time before they made any progress with the gospels.Footnote 92 Lack of readily available materials complicated the process. From Tahiti in 1818, David Darling attempted to make the “woodwork of a press” himself, while John Williams worked on the ironwork. Their colleagues doubted the success of their efforts due to the poor-quality iron they had assembled.Footnote 93 In 1831, Darling thanked the LMS for the new press they had sent, writing that the old one was now “completely rotten.”Footnote 94
While evangelical print culture helped to engineer material and intellectual connections between Britain and Tahiti, there were, of course, tensions within this network that were exacerbated by vast oceanic distances. Smith cites some decisive moments in Tahiti when the transcendent value of the scriptures was tested and the tools of print production were converted to serve secular purposes.Footnote 95 During Pōmare II’s rise to power, for example, the mission houses were ransacked; book pages were turned into cartridge papers and printing types were melted into ammunition.Footnote 96 In narrating such instances, missionary texts betrayed a “disconcerted sense that the culture of print, in new hands, [threatened] to escape them.”Footnote 97 Mā‘ohi repurposed paper and metal for their own reuse, making legible another way in which materials of print culture could be appropriated in unexpected directions.
Although missionaries may have espoused the radically transformative power of print technologies, the introduction of literacy and paper-based communication to Pacific peoples was not a “big bang” moment, erasing all previous traditions.Footnote 98 Bruno Saura’s research challenges the idea that the development of writing in the Society and Austral Islands initiated drastic intellectual, social, and political shifts among the Indigenous population. Focusing on puta tupuna, or Indigenous manuscripts, he shows how literacy and orality worked together, and in the process reconfigured European frameworks to fit Indigenous knowledge.Footnote 99 Saura examines, for example, a manuscript written by an unknown Indigenous author on the histories of Huahine and PoraPora. The manuscript traces the uptake of Christianity in these islands, narrowing in on the ari‘i and their genealogies, as opposed to the histories of the European missionaries. The text, as Saura writes, does not depict a defeat in the face of foreigners, but a “salutary and voluntary indigenous religious acculturation.”Footnote 100 Some parts resemble the oral histories that Orsmond wrote down in the early 1800s. These were later published in the book Ancient Tahiti in 1928. The author likely learned the same recitations as Orsmond’s informants, meaning the similarities can be interpreted as clues of orality.Footnote 101
The texts in the mission library in Tahiti in the 1830s embodied some of the complex cross-cultural histories that shaped the early history of printing in Tahiti and the wider Society Islands. They also reveal how periodicals were embedded in a much wider system of knowledge production. Alongside the English-language books and volumes of periodicals, the library presented works in reo Mā‘ohi (the Indigenous language), including the entire New Testament, the Minor Prophets, books of prayer, hymns, catechisms, tracts for the young, and spelling and grammar books.Footnote 102 Recognizing the complexities in this print landscape is helpful for unpacking the varied and sometimes contradictory responses of the missionaries when accessing periodicals in the mission stations. If missionaries often found comfort in the pages of the periodicals sent from Britain, they also rallied against representations that they considered incorrect or harmful to the success of the mission.
“Home,” “Mission,” and the Reading of Evangelical Periodicals Sent from Britain
Whether recording their daily activities in their correspondence with the LMS, transcribing reo Mā‘ohi in their notebooks, or assembling and operating the printing presses, the missionaries in Tahiti were working within “networks of exchange” as they pieced together or contributed to printed texts.Footnote 103 To understand how evangelical periodicals shaped the intellectual scaffolds of the early mission, it is important to locate missionaries’s reading habits within this context of exchange as well. Missionary letters reveal their active reading of the periodicals that arrived by ship. More specifically, they show how these texts complicated the intellectual boundaries that missionaries drew between home and mission.
Away from their home countries, missionaries were keen to convey their thoughts on contemporary events as relayed in the periodicals, and to assert some sense of control over how their own activities were depicted. Their responses to periodicals could appear contradictory. Sometimes they read them with annoyance, dismissive of the editor’s spin on faraway events. Other times, they expressed joy at reports of church building in Britain and across the globe. As much as periodicals were assembled or patched together, reading them was a process of disassembling. In stitching together “cuttings from elsewhere,” the periodical format encouraged multiple ways of repurposing and responding to information.Footnote 104
It was not uncommon for missionaries to dispute the reports they read in periodicals, to point out the distance between their experiences in Tahiti and the printing houses of Britain.Footnote 105 Evangelical ambitions for the print market created a constant pressure among both editors and contributors to construct uplifting and edifying narratives, narratives that did not always reflect material realities. There were, therefore, instances of intense disillusionment. In 1818, Lancelot Threlkeld described the prevalence of disease in Tahiti, writing that the “publick accounts of these Islands are very false and erroneous.” He pinned the false information on the writings of “sea faring men,” who, he claimed, would have viewed the South Pacific as a “Mahometan paradise.”Footnote 106 Other missionaries complained explicitly about LMS publications. George Platt accused the LMS leadership of luring young men to a hellish landscape, deceiving them with visions of paradise.Footnote 107
The realities of life in the mission stations encouraged another common reaction to periodicals: the sense of renewed religious fervor. Religious, moral, and sexual transgressions plagued the early years of the mission to Tahiti. One missionary, Thomas Lewis, for example, was thrown out of the mission for living with a non-Christian Mā‘ohi woman; he later died in suspicious circumstances. Other missionaries were expelled following crises of faith. Benjamin Broomhall came to question the “evidence of the immortality of the soul,” explaining that his faith was shaken when a “certain matter transpired on this side the water,” which caused him to “reason on the fanaticisms, and extravagancies of some professors of christianity.”Footnote 108 Transgressions could occur at any point in the missionary’s journey to Tahiti. When the Royal Admiral stopped in New South Wales in 1801, James Mitchell abandoned his LMS colleagues to become a mechanic in the colony. They had warned him: “Some who once stood high, in the Missionary List, have in this country been entangled and overcome with the World, look at their example, consider yourself as still in the Body, and Beware of the Rocks upon which they have split.”Footnote 109 Scholars have increasingly interpreted missionary transgressions through the lens of cross-cultural entanglement. Migrating to and inhabiting new cultural worlds could unsettle evangelical sexual politics in particular.Footnote 110
These instances of boundary crossing and lost faith were connected to why missionaries so often expressed feeling reinvigorated by the periodicals that arrived from Britain. They symbolized the opportunity for spiritual renewal and nourishment. In Moʻorea in 1812, for example, the missionaries collectively wrote to the LMS, requesting them to “regularly transmit” the Evangelical Magazine and other publications. These texts, they wrote, had a “tendency to quicken & refresh” them. In reviewing recent periodicals from Britain, they were especially pleased to learn about the “prosperity of all other missionary societies,” and the news of the Bible Society’s success, which brought to their “hearts much thankfulness to the author of all good.”Footnote 111 In 1819, Henry repeated these sentiments when he wrote to the LMS about receiving a regular transmission of periodicals for each of the mission stations. On their emotional impact, he said: “the perusal of such publications refresh, comfort, quicken, and reinvigorate our spirits; and tends to revive and increase our missionary ardour and zeal.” Henry described missionary reading practices too, noting that they read the sermons printed in the periodicals at meetings. A recent sermon by Reverend Doctor Holloway “warmed [his] own heart, & much refreshed & reinvigorated [his] spirit.”Footnote 112 As Hunter and James have argued, the oral and communal “performance” of printed texts thus contributed to the creation of the evangelical public.Footnote 113
In evangelical periodicals, the ongoing and serialized reminders of the grand evangelistic project were aimed at readers who had ample opportunity to stray from the straight and narrow. To flip through the pages of most evangelical periodicals was to encounter dichotomies between heaven and hell, darkness and light, the saved and the lost. These pretenses of certainty help to explain the feelings of “reinvigoration” that missionaries ascribed to the medium. The periodicals that arrived by ship addressed their fears of isolation, failure, backsliding, and loss of faith overseas. Warner suggests that the “punctual rhythm of circulation is crucial to the sense that ongoing discussion unfolds in a sphere of activity.”Footnote 114 The “rhythms of circulation,” however, were disrupted in the context of the mission to Tahiti.Footnote 115 Instead, distance and communication delays could heighten the emotional value of periodicals, the sense of certainty and connection they provided. This also related to the material form of periodicals shelved in mission libraries, and their existence as volumes to be studied and preserved. One missionary in Tahiti in 1818, for example, requested volumes of the Evangelical Magazine from “1794, 1796 to 1818,” excluding a few years. He clarified that he was “destitute of books,” and the few he had previously owned “were lost in the war, and some disposed of at Port Jackson [in New South Wales] for food.”Footnote 116
This is not to say that missionaries did not value periodicals for the contemporary updates they shared. Sending their correspondence via China, India, and New South Wales, the early missionaries often went for long periods without hearing anything back from Britain, with the directors blaming fragile and unreliable shipping networks. Jefferson summarized missionary concerns from Tahiti in 1803, writing that they were “waiting with some degree of anxious solitude to hear from England: to hear of the state of our native countries, of the churches of Christ there, our relatives, &c. and how the gospel plough is making its way in the unfallow grounds of other lands that are sitting in darkness.”Footnote 117 Three years later, missionary despondency had increased in Tahiti, with John Youl writing to the LMS that “the want of mutual correspondence damps our spirits, and causes our hands to hang down … very near six years has elapsed since the date of the last letters from you.”Footnote 118 Missionaries, dependent on these vital injections of faith from home, felt acutely the absence of this fragile information pipeline.
On behalf of the missionaries in Tahiti in 1808, Davies even wrote to the president of the Massachusetts Missionary Society in Boston, attempting to secure communication links via American ships. He explained that it had now been eight years since the missionaries in Tahiti had heard anything from London, causing “great anxiety” and “inconvenience.” In the meantime, copies of the New York Missionary Magazine and the Evangelical Magazine had informed them of a “most glorious revival of Religion” in parts of the United States. According to Davies, this news had “rejoiced” their hearts. He and his colleagues wished to know more about the “several missionary societies there, or other particulars relative to the Success of the Gospel.”Footnote 119
With their increasingly global scope, evangelical periodicals presented the missionaries with news of far-flung missions, as well as the spread of the gospel in their homelands. “Home” and “mission” was an especially powerful dichotomy in evangelical literature. As Pels writes, the dichotomy affirmed both a sense of self and that of the “other”, and it helped to patch over the “essential instability” of the missionary movement.Footnote 120 Illustrating how missionaries valued periodicals for their portrayal of “home,” Henry wrote to the LMS in 1820 to request the Hibernian Evangelical Magazine or “any other Irish periodical publication” that would afford him “intelligence respecting the state of religion” in the “Land which gave [him] birth.”Footnote 121 Similarly, in Tahiti in 1830, the missionaries penned a letter stating: “Situated as we are in this distant part of the world, with so few opportunities of hearing from our native countries anything in the shape of information will be most gratefully received.” They noted their inability to attend the “anniversaries of the numerous Societies in England and elsewhere.”Footnote 122
As evidenced by the cases of “backsliding” missionaries, the binary of “home” and “mission” was a difficult reality to be managed. It was not only a rhetorical device in the press; it helped to generate the intense pressure that evangelicals put on themselves and their audiences. Evangelical periodicals did not leave a lot of room for liminality, the sense of a “middle ground,” or the moments of creative misunderstanding and conciliation that so commonly defined early missionary and cross-cultural histories.Footnote 123 Neither could they fully capture the intimacies of these histories.Footnote 124 The “spaces in between” printed extracts—the experiences excluded from the pages of evangelical periodicals—provoked some missionaries to compile their own narratives. In 1829, Davies wrote to the LMS about his manuscript on the history of the mission to Tahiti. Davies hoped his account would be both “fair and impartial,” illuminating the shortcomings of the mission to help future missionaries. He argued that while many works on the subject already existed, most relied on the “published Documents” of the LMS, documents that he considered “very brief,” “unconnected,” and sometimes “incorrect.”Footnote 125 Davies’s concern to convey the “truth” and “real facts” in his history of the mission shows the disputed foundations of missionary knowledge production, along with his dissatisfaction with the periodical format.
His concerns also hint at a consciousness among the missionaries that whatever they read or wrote down would be cut up and recycled in a variety of print outlets. The culture of recycling texts in the making of periodicals encouraged readers (and thereby missionaries) to engage in public debates, to pick apart reports, and to contribute further material to the exchange. Evangelical periodicals were not the final repository for missionary intelligence. There is extensive research on how missionary texts contributed to British humanitarian politics in the 1830s, which ushered in more interventionist forms of British colonial power.Footnote 126 The periodical market drew missionaries into debates about the Select Committee on Aborigines (1836–37), for instance. The eventual report (commonly titled the “Buxton Report” after member of Parliament Thomas Fowell Buxton) concluded that British colonial settlement was destroying Indigenous communities and had hindered the growth of Christianity. The proposed solutions included installing metropolitan guardianship over Indigenous and settler relations, which, as Elizabeth Elbourne suggests, ultimately implied “the moral recreation of sinful settlers and non-Christian indigenes alike, and their eventual joint assimilation into an imagined Christian community of the virtuous.”Footnote 127 Ellis provided evidence to the Committee, and missionaries were sent copies of the report. From Huahine in 1839, Charles Barff sent thanks to the LMS for conveying a copy, in addition to several periodicals and works on the colonization of New Zealand. He wrote that reading about the global success of missionaries was “truly refreshing to our spirits,” and had inspired them to “not fail to follow so good an example by increasing our exertions to do good to our fellow men.”Footnote 128
Missionary texts also featured in publications critical about the mission. In 1810, the evangelical philanthropist Joseph Fox published a pamphlet on the social, economic, and moral failings of the LMS leadership. Fox focused on how the directors mistreated Tapeoe and Tomma from Tahiti in London, as well as the returned missionary Henry Bicknell.Footnote 129 In addition to quoting material from the Evangelical Magazine to support his claims, Fox called attention to the “motley assemblage” of advertisements that appeared on its cover monthly. Promoting quack medicines and beauty products, these advertisements, according to Fox, were “certainly not calculated for the perusal of the persons into whose hands the Magazine usually falls.”Footnote 130
News of Fox’s criticisms reached the mission in Tahiti, prompting the missionaries to respond in ways that conveyed the intense emotional impact of print communication. During Sarah Hayward’s dying moments, her missionary husband supposedly read Fox’s words out loud. Here, the relationship between the performance of print and the creation of an evangelical public was further signaled.Footnote 131 Their colleague wrote that this was like prescribing a “malignant dose,” and that her “worst enemy could do no more than try to give her a deadly stab at that time.”Footnote 132 In further correspondence, the pamphlet was described as “Fox’s Trash.”Footnote 133 A similar incident related to Frederick William Beechey’s Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait. In 1832, Orsmond read a review of the book in the Edinburgh Review, which arrived in Tahiti via New South Wales, along with letters from the LMS. The review condemned the LMS mission in the South Pacific, arguing that the missionaries were “wasting their time in fantastical experiments,” while “gross and unblushing licentiousness” prevailed.Footnote 134 Orsmond wrote in his public journal: “One of the most preposterous things in life is to a man in the pages of his books decrying scenes, habits and evils in which he joined with sordid pleasure.” He added: “I have fully explained to our people the nature and contents of those letters. They are indignant at the man and his book.”Footnote 135 The missionary women Eliza Pritchard and Sarah Simpson likewise derided Beechey’s work in correspondence with the LMS. They described how his “unfounded testimony” supported harmful reports in the Quarterly Review. As much as the periodical exchange facilitated the circulation of ideas, it also encouraged readers to compare and contrast sources of knowledge and to engage in debate across transnational lines.Footnote 136
Conclusion
Evangelical missionaries were prolific record keepers and, consequently, instrumental in shaping thinking on foreign cultures and landscapes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In explaining this history, it is useful to examine the intellectual influences and mechanisms that facilitated the production of knowledge. Evangelical periodicals were a key medium. Mobile texts constituted their pages and connected readers across far-flung locales. More than acting purely as vehicles of propaganda, they worked to extend evangelical networks, and they fit into wider systems of knowledge production. In particular, a dynamic relationship existed between periodical and book cultures, fashioning the periodical market into a key component of evangelical intellectual worlds.
As evangelicalism developed in Britain, so too did an active evangelical periodical culture, one in which readers were encouraged to seek, produce, and circulate knowledge as part of an ongoing dialogue. Evangelical aspirations for the periodical market meant that religion and technology were deeply entangled, a relationship further revealed in missionary narratives about establishing the first press in Moʻorea. The early development of print culture in Tahiti and the wider Society Islands encompassed local and global networks of exchange, impacting missionary contributions to the periodical market. While primarily addressed to readers in Britain, periodicals produced in London printing houses found additional audiences in the mission stations. Their assembled character meant they could elicit complex emotional responses among readers, whether joy and a sense of religious renewal, or deep dissatisfaction and disillusionment. With the constant recycling of texts, missionaries were keen to contribute to the flow of information and to assert some sense of control over what was being represented in the British press. Meanwhile, though the confined contents of periodicals could provide comfort to missionaries—establishing binaries of “home” and “mission”—sometimes the exclusion of the broader context in the mission inspired frustration. The editor’s heavy hand fractured some missionary authors’s faith in the format. Matters were made worse when critics of the mission extracted their own narratives, revealing the unintended trajectories along which missionary knowledge could travel and the contested scaffolds of knowledge about the Pacific in Britain.
These conclusions predominantly relate to Anglophone periodicals printed in Britain, and the early period of the LMS mission to the Pacific. A subsequent stage in the history of missionary print culture in this region was the development of Indigenous-language periodicals, a stage heralded by the arrival of a new and modern iron press sent by the LMS to Huahine in 1832.Footnote 137 The LMS archival material from the 1830s hinted at the transformation brought on by locally printed periodicals. In Tahiti in 1837, Darling wrote that the press at “Burder’s Point” was printing tracts, schoolbooks, and a “quarterly Periodical, lately established” for the instruction of the Indigenous people in “general knowledge.”Footnote 138 By this point, the LMS had expanded across the South Pacific, largely through the work of Indigenous Christians. From Monono in Sāmoa in 1839, Heath reported on the founding of the locally printed periodical “Sulu Samoa,” which he translated as the “Samoa Torch.” In explaining its formation, Heath described that “religious periodicals do not give sufficient prominence to the missionary cause.”Footnote 139 There is, therefore, much more to be written on the creation of these publics.
Yet it is clear that from the 1790s, the British evangelical publishing industry was brought into a globalized context through the mobility of missionary knowledge. The material mechanisms through which this knowledge traveled helped those engaged in these projects negotiate the relationship between “home” and “mission.” It was precisely the serialized and assembled nature of these periodicals that allowed the messages they transported to be remade, repurposed, and renewed in the mission field, sustaining the ongoing work of evangelizing at the edges of empire.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David Maxwell for his comments and encouragement. Thanks also to the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide and especially Muthuraj Swamy for offering a forum to present and receive feedback on the topic. I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers as well as the editors of this journal for their careful reading and hugely helpful advice. Please address any correspondence to kejt2@cam.ac.uk.
Kate Tilson is a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge. She is a historian of missions, print culture, and medicine, with a particular focus on the Pacific and Britain.
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