Books: Life of John Coleridge Patteson

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After Trinity Sunday, May 27, the 'Southern Cross' sailed, and the
outward voyage gave leisure for the following letter to Prof. Max
Muller, explaining why he could not make his knowledge of languages
of more benefit to philology while thus absorbed in practical work:--

'"Southern Cross," off Norfolk Ireland: June 6, 1866.

'My dear Friend,--I am about to tire your patience heavily. For I
must find you some reasons for doing so little in making known these
Melanesian dialects, and that will be wearisome for you to read; and,
secondly, I cannot put down clearly and consecutively what I want to
say. I have so very little time for thinking out, and working at any
one subject continuously, that my whole habit of mind becomes, I
fear, inaccurate and desultory. I have so very many and so very
different occupations, and so much anxiety and so many interruptions,
as the "friction" that attends the working, of a new and somewhat
untried machine.'

'You know that we are few in number; indeed (Codrington being absent)
I have but two clergymen with me, and two young men who may be
ordained by-and-by. Besides, had I the twenty troublesome men, whom
you wish to banish into these regions, what use would they or any men
be until they had learnt their work? And it must fall to me to teach
them, and that takes again much of my time; so that, as a matter of
fact, there are many things that I must do, even when all is going on
smoothly; and should sickness come, then, of course, my days and
nights are spent in nursing poor lads, to whom no one else can talk,
cheering up poor fellows seized with sudden nervous terror, giving
food to those who will take it from no one else, &c.

'Then the whole management of the Mission must fall upon me; though I
am most thankful to say that for some time Mr. Pritt has relieved me
from the charge of all domestic and industrial works. He does
everything of that kind, and does it admirably, so that our
institution really is a well-ordered industrial school, in which
kitchen work, dairy work, farm work, printing, clothes making and
mending, &c., are all carried on, without the necessity of having any
foreign importation of servants, who would be sure to do harm, both
by their ideas as to perquisites (= stealing in the minds of our
Melanesians), and by introducing the idea of paid labour; whereas now
we all work together, and no one counts any work degrading, and still
less does any one qua white consider himself entitled to fag a
Melanesian.

'Mr. Tilly, R.N., has also quite relieved me from my duties as
skipper, and I have no trouble about marine stores, shipping seamen,
navigating the vessel now. I cannot be too thankful for this; it,
saves me time, anxiety, and worry; yet much remains that I must do,
which is not connected with peculiar work directly.

'I can't refuse the Bishop of New Zealand when he presses me (for
want of a better man) to be trustee of properties, and to engage in
managing the few educational institutions we have. I can't refuse to
take some share in English clerical work while on shore; indeed, in
1865, my good friend Archdeacon Lloyd being ill, I took his parish
(one and a half hour distant from Kohimarama), the most important
parish in Auckland, for some three months; not slacking my Melanesian
work, though I could only avoid going back by hard application, and
could make no progress. Then I must attend our General Synod; and
all these questions concerning the colonial churches take some time
to master, and yet I must know what is going on.

'Then I must carry on all the correspondence of the Mission. I am
always writing letters. Every £5 from any part of New Zealand or
Australia I must acknowledge; and everyone wants information,
anecdotes, &c., which it vexes my soul to have to supply, but who
else can do it? Then I keep all the accounts, very complicated, as
you would say if you saw my big ledger. And I don't like to be
altogether behindhand in the knowledge of theological questions, and
people sometimes write to me, and their letters need to be answered
carefully. Besides, take my actual time spent in teaching. Shall I
give you a day at Kohimarama?

'I get in the full summer months an hour for reading by being dressed
at 5.30 A.M. At 5.30 I see the lads washing, &c., 7 A.M. breakfast
all together, in hall, 7.30 chapel, 8-9.30 school, 9.30-12.30
industrial work. During this time I have generally half an hour with
Mr. Pritt about business matters, and proof sheets are brought me,
yet I get a little time for preparing lessons. 12.45 short service
in chapel, 1 dinner, 2-3 Greek Testament with English young men, 3-4
classics with ditto, 5 tea, 6.30 evening chapel, 7-8.30 evening
school with divers classes in rotation or with candidates for Baptism
or Confirmation, 8.30-9 special instruction to more advanced
scholars, only a few. 9-10 school with two other English lay
assistants. Add to all this, visitors interrupting me from 4-5,
correspondence, accounts, trustee business, sermons, nursing sick
boys, and all the many daily unexpected little troubles that must be
smoothed down, and questions inquired into, and boys' conduct
investigated, and what becomes of linguistics? So much for my excuse
for my small progress in languages! Don't think all this
egotistical; it is necessary to make you understand my position.

'If I had spare time, leisure for working at any special work,
perhaps eleven years of this kind of life have unfitted me for steady
sustained thought. And you know well I bring but slender natural
qualifications to the task. A tolerably true ear and good memory for
words, and now something of the instinctive insight into new tongues,
but that is chiefly from continual practice.

'But when I attempt to systematise, I find endless ramifications of
cognate dialects rushing through my brain, by their very multitude
overwhelming me, and though I see the affinities and can make
practical use of them, I don't know how to state them on paper, where
to begin, how to put another person in my position.

'Again, for observation of the rapid changes in these dialects, I
have not much opportunity. For no one in Melanesia can be my
informant. It is not easy where so many dialects must be known for
practical purposes, for the introductory part of Mission work, to
talk to some wild naked old fellow, and to make him understand what I
am anxious to ascertain. It is a matter that has no interest for
him, he never thought of it, he doesn't know my meaning, what have we
in common? How can I rouse him from his utter indifference, even if
I know his language so well as to talk easily, not to a scholar of my
own, but to an elderly man, with none but native ideas in his head?

'All that I can do is to learn many dialects of a given archipelago,
present their existing varieties, and so work back to the original
language. This, to some extent, has been done in the Banks group,
and in the eastern part of the Solomon Isles. But directly I get so
far as this, I am recalled to the practical necessity of using the
knowledge of the several dialects rather to make known God's truth to
the heathen than to inform literati of the process of dialectic
variation. Don't mistake me, my dear friend, or suspect me of silly
sentimentalism. But you can easily understand what it is to feel
"God has given to me only of all Christian men the power of speaking
to this or that nation, and, moreover, that is the work He has sent
me to do." Often, I don't deny, I should like the other better. It
is very pleasant to shirk my evening class, e.g. and spend the time
with Sir William Martin, discussing some point of Melanesian
philosophy. But then my dear lads have lost two hours of Christian
instruction, and that won't do.

'I don't need to be urged to do more in working out their languages.
I am quite aware of the duty of doing all that I can in that way, and
I wish to do it; but there are only twenty-four hours in the day and
night together! I feel that it is a part of my special work, for
each grammar and dictionary that I can write opens out the language
to some other than myself. But I am now apologising rather for my
fragmentary way of writing what I do write by saying that what I find
enough, with my help given in school to enable one of my party to
learn a dialect, I am almost obliged to regard as a measure of the
time that I ought to spend on it.

'Another thing, I have no outline provided for me, which I can fill
up. My own clear impression is that to attempt to follow the analogy
of our complicated Greek and Latin grammars would not only involve
certain failure, but would mislead people altogether. I don't want
to be hunting after a Melanesian paulo-post-futurum. I had rather
say, "All men qua men think, and have a power of expressing their
thoughts. They have wants and express them. They use many different
forms of speech in making that statement, if we look superficially at
the matter, not so if we look into it," and so on. Then, discarding
the ordinary arrangement of grammars, explain the mode of thought,
the peculiar method of thinking upon matters of common interest, in
the mind of the Melanesian, as exhibited in his language. An
Englishman says, "When I get there, it will be night." But a Pacific
Islander says, "I am there, it is night." The one says, "Go on, it
will soon be dark." The other, "Go on, it has become already night."
Anyone sees that the one possesses the power of realising the future
as present, or past; the other now whatever it may have been once,
does not exercise such power. A companion calls me at 5.30 A.M.,
with the words, "Eke! me gong veto," (Hullo! it is night already).
He means, "Why, we ought to be off, we shall never reach the end of
our journey before dark." But how neatly and prettily he expresses
his thought! I assure you, civilised languages, for common
conversational purposes needed by travellers, &c., are clumsy
contrivances! Of course you know all this a hundred times better
than I do. I only illustrate my idea of a grammar as a means of
teaching others the form of the mould in which the Melanesian's mind
is cast. I think I ought to go farther, and seek for certain
categories, under which thought may be classified (so to say), and
beginning with the very simplest work on to the more complicated
powers.

'But I haven't the head to do this; and suppose that I did make such
a framework, how am I to fill it in so as to be intelligible to
outsiders? For practical purposes, I give numerals, personal,
possessive, and demonstrative pronouns, the mode of qualifying nouns,
e.g., some languages interpose a monosyllable between the substantive
and adjective, others do not. The words used (as it is called) as
prepositions and adverbs, the mode of changing a neuter verb into a
transitive or causative verb, usually by a word prefixed, which means
do or make, e.g., die, do-die, do-to-the-death, him.

'Then I teach orally how the intonation, accentuation, pause in the
utterance, gesticulation, supply the place of stops, marks of
interrogation, &c.

'Then giving certain nouns, verbs, &c., make my English pupils
construct sentences; then give them a vocabulary and genuine native
stories, not translations at all, least of all of religious books,
which contain very few native ideas, but stories of sharks, cocoa-
nuts, canoes, fights, &c. This is the apparatus. This gives but
little idea of a Melanesian dialect to you. I know it, and am
anxious to do more.

'This last season I have had some three or four months, during which
I determined that I must refuse to take so much English work, &c. I
sat and growled in my den, and of course rather vexed people, and
perhaps, for which I should be most heartily grieved, my dear friend
and leader, the Bishop of New Zealand. But I stuck to my work. I
wrote about a dozen papers of phrases in as many dialects, to show
the mode of expressing in those dialects what we express by adverbs
and prepositions, &c. This is, of course, the difficult part of a
language for a stranger to find out. I also printed three, and have
three more nearly finished in MS., vocabularies of about 600 words
with a true native sehdia on each word. The mere writing (for much
was written twice over) took a long time. And there is this gained
by these vocabularies for practical purposes: these are (with more
exceptions, it is true, than I intended) the words which crop up most
readily in a Melanesian mind. Much time I have wasted, and would
fain save others from wasting, in trying to form a Melanesian mind
into a given direction into which it ought, as I supposed, to have
travelled, but which nevertheless it refused to follow. Just ten
years' experience has, of course, taught me a good deal of the minds
of these races; and when I catch a new fellow, as wild as a hawk, and
set to work at a new language, it is a great gain to have even
partially worked out the problem, "What words shall I try to get from
this fellow?" Now I go straight to my mark, or rather I am enabling,
I hope, my young friends with me to do so, for of course, I have
learnt to do so myself, more or less, for some time past. Many words
may surprise you, and many alterations I should make in any revision.
I know a vast number of words not used in these vocabularies, in some
languages I daresay five times the number, but I had a special reason
for writing only these. The rest must come, if I live, by-and-by.

'Of course these languages are very poor in respect of words
belonging to civilised and literary and religious life, but
exceedingly rich in all that pertains to the needs and habits of men
circumstanced as they are. I draw naturally this inference, "Don't
be in any hurry to translate, and don't attempt to use words as
(assumed) equivalents of abstract ideas. Don't devise modes of
expression unknown to the language as at present in use. They can't
understand, and therefore don't use words to express definitions."

But, as everywhere, our Lord gives us the model. A certain lawyer
asked Him for a definition of his neighbour, but He gave no
definition, only He spoke a simple and touching parable. So teach,
not a technical word, but an actual thing.

'Why do I write all this to you? It is wasting your time. But I
prose on.--(A sheet follows on the structure of the languages.)

'Well, I have inflicted a volume on you. We are almost becalmed
after a weary fortnight of heavy weather, in which we have been
knocked about in every direction in our tight little 90-ton schooner.
And my head is hardly steady yet, so excuse a long letter, or rather
long chatty set of desultory remarks, from

'Your old affectionate Friend,

'J. C. PATTESON.'

A little scene from Mr. Atkin's journal shows how he had learnt to
talk to natives. He went ashore with the Bishop and some others at
Sesaki for yams:--

'It has been by far the pleasantest day of the kind that I have seen
here. The people are beginning to understand that they can do no
better than trade fairly with us, and to-day they on the whole
behaved very well. A very big fellow had been ringing all the
changes between commanding and entreating me to give him a hatchet (I
was holding the trade bag). When he found it was no use, he said, "I
was a bad man, and never gave anything." I said "Yes, I was." He
said the Bishops were very good men, they gave liberally. He had
better go and ask the Bishop for something, for he was a good man,
though I was not.'

After landing Mr. Palmer at Mota, the vessel went onto the Solomon
Isles, reaching Bauro on the 27th:--

'About 8.30 in the evening the boat was lowered, and the party pulled
towards the village, which was the home of Taroniara, in a fine clear
moonlit night, by the fires which people had lit for the people on
shore, and directed by Taroniara himself to the opening in the reef.
They landed in the midst of a group of dark figures, some standing in
a brook, some by the side under a large spreading tree, round a fire
fed by dry cocoa-nut leaves; and in the background were tall cocoa-
nuts with their gracefully drooping plumes, and the moon behind
shining through them made the shade seem darker and deeper as the
flashing crests of the surf, breaking on the reef, made the heaving
sea beyond look murkier. It was a sight worth going a long way to
see,' so says Mr. Atkin's journal.

The next sight was, however, still more curious. The Bishop relented
so far towards 'the Net,' as to write an account of it on purpose for
it. Ysabel Island is, like almost all the rest, divided among many
small communities of warlike habits. And some years previously the
people of Mahaga, the place with which he was best acquainted, had
laid an ambush for those of Hogirano, killed a good many, and,
cutting off their heads, had placed them in a row upon stones, and
danced round them in a victorious suit of white-coral lime. However,
a more powerful tribe, not long after, came down upon Mahaga and
fearfully avenged the massacre of Hogirano. All were slain who could
not escape into the bush; and when the few survivors, after days and
nights of hunger, ventured back, they found the dwellings burnt, the
fruit trees cut down, the yam and taro grounds devastated, and more
than a hundred headless bodies of their kindred lying scattered
about.

This outrage had led to the erection of places of refuge in the tops
of trees; and Bishop Patteson, who had three Mahagan scholars, went
ashore, with the hope of passing the night in one of these wonderful
places, where the people always slept, though by day they lived in
the ordinary open bamboo huts.

After landing in a mangrove swamp, and wading through deep mud, he
found that the Mahaga people had removed from their old site, and had
built a strong fortification near the sea; and close above, so as to
be reached by ladders resting on the wall, were six large tree-
houses.

It had been raining heavily for a day or two, and the paths were so
deep in mud that the bed of a water-course was found preferable to
them. The bush had been cleared for some distance before the steep
rocky mound where the village stood, surrounded by a high wall of
stones, in which one narrow entrance was left, approached by a fallen
trunk of a tree lying over a hollow. The huts were made of bamboo
canes, and the floors, raised above the ground, were nearly covered
with mats and a kind of basket work.

The tree-houses, six in number, were upon the tops of trees of great
height, 50 feet round at the base, and all branches cleared off till
near the summit, where two or three grew out at right angles,
something after the manner of an Italian stone pine:--

'From the top of the wall the ladder that led to one of these houses
was 60 feet long, but it was not quite upright, and the tree was
growing at some little distance from the bottom of the rock, and the
distance by a plumb line from the floor of the verandah to the ground
on the lower side of the tree was 94 feet. The floor of the house,
which is made first, was 23 feet long and about 11 broad; a narrow
verandah is left at each end, and the inside length of the house is
18 feet, the breadth 10 feet, the height to the ridge pole 6 feet.
The floor was of bamboo matted, the roof and sides of palm-leaf
thatch. The ladders were remarkable contrivances: a pole in the
centre, from 4 to 6 inches in diameter, to which were lashed by vines
cross pieces of wood, about two feet long. To steady these and hold
on by were double shrouds of supple-jacks. The rungs of the ladder
were at unequal distances, 42 upon the 50 feet ladder.'

The Bishop and Pasvorang, who had gone ashore together, beheld men,
women, and children running up and down these ladders, and walking
about the bare branches, trusting entirely to their feet and not
touching with their hands. The Bishop, in his wet slippery shoes,
did not think it right to run the risk of an accident: and though
Pasvorang, who was as much at home as a sailor among the ropes of the
'Southern Cross,' made the ascent, he came down saying, 'I was so
afraid, my legs shook. Don't you go, going aloft is nothing to it;'
but the people could not understand any dread; and when the Bishop
said, 'I can't go up there. I am neither bird nor bat, and I have no
wings if I fall,' they thought him joking. At the same time he saw a
woman with a load on her back, quietly walking up a ladder to another
tree, not indeed so lofty as that Pasvorang had tried, but as if it
were the most natural thing in the world, and without attempting to
catch hold with her hands.

'At night,' says the Bishop, 'as I lay ignominiously on the ground in
a hut, I heard the songs of the women aloft as voices from the
clouds, while the loud croaking of the frogs, the shrill noise of
countless cicadas, the scream of cockatoos and parrots, the cries of
birds of many kinds, and the not unreasonable fear of scorpions, all
combined to keep me awake. Solemn thoughts pass through the mind at
such times, and from time to time I spoke to the people who were
sleeping in the hut with me. It rained heavily in the night, and I
was not sorry to find myself at 7 A.M. on board the schooner.'

The next day was spent in doing the honours of the ship, a crowd on
board all day; and on July 2 the Bishop landed again with Mr. Atkin,
and mounted up to this wonderful nest, where all these measurements
were made. It proved much more agreeable to look at from below than
to inhabit 'the low steaming bamboo huts--the crowds, the dirt, the
squalling of babies--you can't sit or stand, or touch anything that
is not grimy and sooty and muddy. It is silly to let these things
really affect one, only that it now seems rather to knock me up.
After such a day and night I am very tired, come back to our little
ship as to a palace, wash, and sit down on a clean, if not a soft
stool, and am free for a little while from continual noise and the
necessity of making talk in an imperfectly known language.

'It is really curious to see how in some way our civilised mode of
life unfits one for living among these races. It is not to be denied
that the want of such occupations as we are employed in is a large
cause of their troubles. What are they to do during the long hours
of night, and on wet, pouring days? They can't read, they can't see
in their huts to do any work, making baskets, &c. They must lie
about, talking scandal and acquiring listless indolent habits. Then
comes a wild reaction. The younger people like excitement as much as
our young men like hunting, fishing, shooting, &c. How can they get
this? Why, they must quarrel and fight, and so they pass their time.
It does seem almost impossible to do much for people so
circumstanced; yet it was much the same in Mota and elsewhere, where
things are altered for the better.'

It was bad and trying weather, and it was well to have only two old
Banks Islanders on board, besides three Ysabel lads. The Bishop had
plenty of time for writing; and for the first time in his life
'pronounced himself forward with that Report which was always on his
mind.' He goes on: 'I read a good deal, but I don't say that my mind
is very active all the time, and I have some schooling. Yet it is
not easy to do very much mental work. I think that I feel the heat
more than I used to do, but that may be only my fancy.

'You meantime are, I hope, enjoying fine summer weather. Certainly
it must be a charming place that you have, close to that grand Church
and grand scenery. I think my idea of a cosy home is rather that of
a cottage in the Isle of Wight, or, better still, a house near such a
Cathedral as Wells, in one of the cottages close to the clear streams
that wind through and about the Cathedral precincts. But I can form
no real notions about such things. Only I am pretty sure that there
is little happiness without real hard work. I do long sometimes for
a glorious Cathedral service, for the old chants, anthems, not for
"functions" and "processions," &c. I have read Freeman's pamphlet on
"Ritual " with interest; he really knows what he writes about, and
has one great object and a worthy one, the restoration of the
universal practice of weekly communion as the special Sunday service.
That all our preachifying is a wide departure from the very idea of
worship is self-evident, when it is made more than a necessary part
of the religious observance of the Lord's Day, and catechising is
worth far more than preaching (in the technical sense of the word).'

A first visit was paid to Savo; where numerous canoes came out to
meet them, one a kind of state galley, with the stem and stern twelve
feet high, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and ornamented with white
shells (most likely the ovum or poached egg), and containing the
chief men of the island. The people spoke the Ysabel language, and
the place seemed promising.

Some little time was spent in beating up to Bauro; where the Bishop
again landed at Taroniara's village, and slept in his hut, which was
as disagreeable as all such places were:--'Such a night always
disturbs me for a time, throws everything out of regular working
order; but it always pays, the people like it, and it shows a
confidence in them which helps us on.