Monument to a missionary: C. W. Abel and the Keveri of Papua

Abstract

professed a reverence for the secure and respectable, and was easily convinced of the superiority of his own mode of thought. But Abel was also more intelligent than most of his colleagues and was a more violent partisan. In him ordinary qualities were magnified to an extraordinary degree. A self-educated emigrant who had worked at the age of 18 as a labourer among Maoris in New Zealand, Abel returned to England in 1884 to acquire an elementary knowledge of ethnology at Cheshunt College.1 Arriving in British New Guinea in 1890, Abel wrote a monograph on the Logea Islanders of eastern Papua into which he threw his characteristic passion for thoroughness. No one ever saw the habits of Logea man with a more dispassionate eye, nor recorded them with a more objective pen, than the Rev. Charles Abel. What were his legends? How did he collect food? * Part of the research upon which this article is based was derived from the Kwato Archives held by the University of Papua and New Guinea, which at the time of writing had not been catalogued. l R. W. Abel, Charles W. Abel of Kwato (New York 1934), 24. Founded in 1768, Cheshunt College was primarily a theological school which broadened its curriculum in the mid-19th century to include a missionary course. This emphasized theology and the art of preaching, and included elementary ethnology.