Another Island Cruise.

Sailing as far south as Akaroa, the mission schooner presently had company in the quiet anchorage there, of the French corvettes “Heroine” and ’Allier.” The former had called at the Bay of Islands and the commander brought a letter containing sad news. Father Chanel, one of the priests the Bishop had stationed on Futuan Island, in the tropic seas, had been killed by order of the native king of the island; the mission on Wallis Island was also in peril.

Pompallier decided to sail for the Islands, and Captain Lavaud, the Commandant in the French portion of the Akaroa settlement, placed one of the corvettes, the “Allier,” at his disposal, for any assistance that might be required. The French captain, Bouset, acted with mingled firmness and discretion at Futuna. He impressed on the natives the need for cultivating the friendship of the white people. The Bishop remained in the islands until he had established satisfactory relations, and when he departed again for New Zealand, after about five months, the whole of the inhabitants of Futuna and Wallis were Catholics, at any rate theoretically.

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page 29 Satisfied that the missionaries he left there would now be treated well, the Bishop continued his voyaging to new islands and fields of labour. He visited several of the Fiji Islands, Tonga and Vavau, and after a final look-in at Wallis Island, set a course for New Zealand again. When he anchored again in Kororareka Bay, in August, 1842, he had completed an anxious but successful voyage of fourteen months.

That summary of the pioneer Bishop's voyaging by sea and land over a period of less than four years, conveys some idea of the enormous burden of work which devolved upon him as a missionary leader in primitive lands. But it is necessary, also, in order to realise adequately the nature of his task, to remember that he had to grapple with a vast variety of problems ashore and afloat; to be not only a religious teacher but an ambassador to savage peoples, a diplomat, a linguist, a financier, an architect and builder, and a good deal also of a seaman. The discomforts were as great as the perils, the long voyages in small schooners and the anxieties of navigation in uncharted or all but uncharted seas and among labyrinths of coral reefs. No missionary in the South Seas a century ago had a soft or easy life.