The Strange Career of William Ellis

Abstract

and Madagascan missionary, ethnographer, London Missionary Society Foreign Secretary, author of at least eight books and numerous pamphlets, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, father of four, and husband of two impressive women-spanned the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1794-1872). A working-class boy of unknown parentage, Ellis rose to a position of social influence that could only have been effected by the social mobility provided by evangelical Protestantism and the British Empire. No less impressive has been his afterlife in contemporary scholarship, a literary longevity Ellis secured by carefully documenting his encounters with other peoples and cultures in the far-flung locales opened by early nineteenthcentury imperialism. In crossing between British and colonial cultures, Ellis provides a prism capable of refracting the complex effects of imperial intervention in the Pacific. Ellis spent only nine years in the mission field (1816-25), a brief time compared to the career missionaries who lived for decades in the islands. Yet his experience across a range of Pacific cultures belied the short period of his tenure: he worked on Moorea, Huahine, and, unusually for the period, often in collaboration with American missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands. His experience as a printer trained by the London Missionary Society (LMS) allowed him to represent the workings of Pacific evangelism in ways that differed markedly from his compatriots and colleagues. Print and textuality were, in fact, key to his achievements, which included orchestrating the first printing of missionary tracts in the Pacific. Horne recounts the most indescribable excitement and enthusiasm that eminated from Hawaiians when, under Ellis's direction, King Pomare set up the first types, and printed the first sheets on the island (42). The celebratory missionary narratives Ellis produced in this way came to represent monuments of modernity and repositories of Western cultural capital. Their moral