“Go Ye into All the World”
By Davis Bitton

Published in 2000, Tom Hiney’s On the Missionary Trail is a good read.  The subtitle tells more: “A Journey through Polynesia, Asia, and Africa with the London Missionary Society.”

In a survey of previous Christian missionary efforts, the author reminds us that they were only sporadically successful.  Brief flurries of activity were succeeded by many decades of just trying to hang on.  At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Napoleonic wars effectively cut off contact between England and scattered missionaries.

In 1821, representing the London Missionary Society, Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet set sail.  They had been carefully selected.  Tyerman, a clergyman, received a salary, but Bennet wished to pay his own expenses.  Their objective was to visit the different Christian missions, stay long enough to ask many questions and see things with their own eyes, write up their findings, and eventually return to England.

The scope of this journey boggles the mind.  Even under present conditions, such a journey would require complicated scheduling, arranging local transportation and lodging, and an arduous program of visiting and interviewing.  In the 1820s, travel on the high seas was by sail.  On sea or on land the dangers were innumerable.

Hiney does a good job, I think, in staying out of the way.  He lets the eyewitnesses speak for themselves.  We read extensive passages from the journal of the missionaries.  What we see, in other words, is what the missionaries saw.  We get their perspective on the flora and fauna, the life and culture, and of course the religion of many different countries.

The response to Christianity in Polynesia, Asia, and Africa varied enormously.  Thanks in large part to the receptivity of the king, Tahiti proved to be a fertile field.  On the other hand, New Zealand natives were hostile to the religion and threatened to kill meddling Europeans.  China, where the tireless Matteo Ricci had bravely introduced the Christian message in the sixteenth century, was now, many generations later, officially closed to Christian preaching.

Interestingly, among the most formidable enemies of these devout Englishmen were fellow Europeans, merchants and seamen, who docked at island ports in order to get water and food and do some trading.  In India there were soldiers.  Not surprisingly, drunken brawls and fights were common.

Such men were no paragons of culture and virtue.   Not only did they set a “bad example,” but they themselves had little use for missionaries.  Seen through their worldly eyes, the missionaries were prudes and meddlers.  Such English or European adventurers, nominally Christian, could be unfriendly and throw obstacles in the path of our travelers.

It is common in certain circles to see Europeans as evil expansionists, whose greed pushed them to charge into parts of the world that had previously been pristine, peaceful, and harmonious.   Environmentalists deplore the destruction of rain forest and the assault on native cultures.

We recognize some truth in such criticism.  But Tom Hiney provokes further reflections on the ”noble savage.”  That myth, with roots in the ancient world, grew in early modern Europe and has become a trope in many novels and movies.   Of course a nonjudgmental attitude is appropriate when studying other cultures rather than a knee-jerk condemnation of everything that differs from our own usages and mores.  And who can deny that Europeans, including their missionaries, were often crude and insensitive? 

But tribal warfare was also cruel.  The cannibalism still practiced by some Pacific peoples in the 1820s is — excuse the expression — hard to stomach.  Infanticide, the heartless killing of children, was common.   

In Hawaii, the two English missionaries attended a prayer meeting of native women.  Six of these women admitted to killing “from one to six of their progeny.”  Another had strangled babies for other women. “One of the mothers before us said that she had destroyed her infant because she was nursing one of the royal family; another, because she did not like the encumbrance; and several, because they wished to be at liberty to leave their husbands when they were tired of them … It was acknowledged, also, that women disposed to gad about, and live after their own inclinations, thought that to suckle children impaired their comeliness, and made them look old too soon.”  The Englishmen reported the meeting as they heard it.

Now Christian, these women, full of remorse, welcomed the possibility of forgiveness as taught by the missionaries.  It was people who had experienced the two systems, in Tahiti as well as Hawaii, who expressed their gratitude for the more humane ways that displaced inherited beliefs and practices.  With few exceptions, those who became Christians didn’t want to return to what they themselves now saw as degraded behavior.

Examples of American and European cruelty are numerous, and the materialism and raucous hedonism they often brought need not be praised.  But longing for the old ways can be carried too far.  It was the anthropologist Margaret Mead, as I recall, who said that the life of the savage — the traditional tag-word for those not yet affected by modern technology and institutions — was solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.   She was using the famous line from Thomas Hobbes describing the “state of nature.”

One conclusion I draw from Tom Hiney’s book is that, even with its inevitable limitations, travel literature can be highly informative.  Admittedly, we get only the point of view of the traveler, who is often poorly informed. But if the traveler is an acute observer and asks intelligent questions, we can learn much from his report.

What about Mormon missionaries?  They often live in foreign lands.  They write letters and diaries.  Are these of any value?  Did they have any experiences comparable to those of the two Anglican missionaries of the 1820s?

The answer is an emphatic yes.  Having read through many of them in the preparation of my Guide to Mormon Diaries and Autobiographies, I can say that many are fairly routine in setting forth a daily round of preparing, tracting, teaching, and meeting.  So be it.  Life for most people everywhere consists very largely of routine.  

Yet there are also diaries telling of unusual experiences and distant places.  I think of Addison Pratt in Tahiti, George Q. Cannon in Hawaii, Richard Ballantyne in India, Joseph Henry Dean in Samoa, LaMar Williams in Africa.  The monumental diary of Wilford Woodruff includes his own missions.  The lonely but courageous Mischa Markow tells of his efforts to carry the gospel to Rumania, Bulgaria, and other parts of eastern Europe.  Historians of the Southern States Mission cannot afford to ignore the extensive journals of John Morgan.  These are examples; the list could be made much, much longer.

Mormon missionary journals don't escape the built-in limitation of any first-person account.  They tell of events as seen by just one person.  But this is something.  Factual data such as moves from place to place, meeting certain people, baptisms, and the like are almost certainly recorded accurately.  Like the Anglican travelers in Tom Hiney's book, some Mormon missionaries, not satisfied with surface impressions, are perceptive.  In describing their own feelings and reactions they are, of course, authoritative.

We can be grateful for those missionary diaries that open up to later readers the fallible yet dedicated persons who wrote them, show the triumphs and the tedium and opposition that formed the warp and woof of their lives, and enable us to pay tribute to those who have moved the latter-day work steadily forward.