Pioneers and patriarchs

Abstract

southern part of mainland New Guinea as employees of the London Mis sionary Society. Apart from two parties of Loyalty Islanders, the teachers were from the Polynesian islands of Niue, Rarotonga and Samoa, with a small number of Tahitians.1 From the 1820s, when Tahitian teachers had begun to spread the faith of Evangelical Christianity to the Cook Islands and Tonga, the use of Islands agents had become a standard part of Protestant missionary practice. The Methodists had raised an auxiliary group of local preachers and class-leaders in the islands where they went. The Samoan pastors, or faifeau Samoa, whose first party arrived at Port Moresby in 1883, 12 years after the founding of the New Guinea Mission, were the last 'national' group among the L.M.S. Islands teachers in New Guinea. But on the frontiers of the western Pacific they were no less pioneers than other Islands teachers. Missionary ex pansion in New Guinea, as in other parts of Oceania, would have been difficult without the Samoan pastors. As a significant strand in the Evangelical missionary movement, the work of the Islands teachers invites attention. The 1,100 Polynesian and Melanesian teachers and their wives who travelled to other Pacific islands have so far received little scrutiny by historians, and the records of the L.M.S. and Methodist missions in New Guinea contain valuable documentation of the