"Only a representation": John Williams and the Problem of Presence
“Circumstances of peculiar interest”
Readers of the London Missionary Society’s monthly periodical would have been delighted to see news of John Williams’ travels to the Samoan islands in the January 1840 edition of Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle. Before Williams joined the society, the LMS’s efforts to establish permanent missionary stations in the South Pacific had floundered. The first missionary ship left England in 1796— the year Williams was born— and arrived in Tahiti in May of the following year.[1] At first, the missionaries received a warm welcome. With the support of local chiefs, they built mission stations on Tahiti, Tongatabu (the main island of Tonga), and in the Marquesas. However, a string of excommunications, abandonments, and deaths undermined the stability of these newly-founded outposts. Several missionaries married islanders and renounced their faith; these included George Vason on Tongatabu (excommunicated October 1797)[2] as well as Thomas Lewis (August 1798) and Benjamin Broomhall on Tahiti (July 1800).[3] William Crook managed to remain in the Marquesas for two years after a more senior missionary refused to join him, but Crook eventually returned to England in 1799 on board the Butterworth, a British whaling ship.[4] Daniel Bowell, Samuel Harper, and Samuel Gaulton were killed in their mission station at Pea on Tongatabu, caught in the middle of inter-islander warfare that was fueled by weapons obtained from European traders.[5] By 1800, only the station on Tahiti remained, sustained in part by the conversion of Pōmare II in 1815. The rest of the missionaries and their families had fled to Sydney, Australia. In an effort to support this struggling community, the LMS sent personnel and supplies in 1798, but the ship was waylaid by French pirates and never reached the South Pacific.
Williams was part of the third wave of missionaries who left England for the islands in 1816. Williams was raised in a Calvanistic Methodist household, but his interest in missionary work stemmed from a meeting on January 30, 1814 at the Moorfields Tabernacle in London, during which “[his] blind eyes were open, and [he] beheld wondrous things out of God’s law.”[6] Williams had been an apprentice for an ironmonger, honing his expertise as a craftsman and as a business manager— both skills that he would apply to his evangelistic work.[7] After this conversion experience, Williams attended classes led by Matthew Wilks, one of the founding members of the LMS. Inspired by the successes of evangelistic efforts in Africa and Tahiti, Williams expressed his intent to become a LMS missionary in July 1816; he was ordained in September and left England for the South Pacific in November.[8] During his first missionary trip, Williams established missionary stations on Rarotonga, Raiatea, Aitutaki, Mangaia, and Savaii while also visiting a host of other islands in a boat made with local materials. Upon his return to England in 1834, Williams published A narrative of missionary enterprises in the South Sea Islands; with remarks upon the natural history of the islands, origin, languages, traditions and usages of the inhabitants (1837). His charismatic personality in person and in print quickly won him powerful allies among LMS supporters, members of the Australian government, and Pacific islanders, all of whom provided financial and logistical support for his ambitious plans to evangelize the Cook and Samoan Islands. His narrative became an instant best-seller, and it not only solidified his status as a key missionary in the South Pacific but also laid the groundwork for financial contributions to sustain his continued work. Williams competed two extended stays in Sydney, one in 1821 and a second in 1838, during which time he received financial support from Governor Lachlan Macquarie and local businessmen.[9] The success of the Aitutaki mission was due in large part to two Raiatean teachers, Papeiha and Vahapata (HLMS, p. 257).[10] His encounter with Faueā, a Samoan who had been stuck on Tongatabu for lack of transport home, ultimately laid the groundwork for permanent mission stations in Samoa.[11]
Williams' account in the Chronicle describes meetings on the island of Tutulia in the Samoan island chain that took place during his second missionary voyage.[12] Upon arriving on Tutulia on 23rd November 1838, his first task was to visit Archibald Murray’s station in Pago Pago. There,
The intimacy of this small gathering of believers stood in sharp contrast to the megachurch developing on the other side of the island. Williams describes how he stood in awe of the chapel under construction in Leone, filled with 1,500 Samoans learning how to read.[13]... we spent the Sabbath, and united with the infant church of five members in commemorating the Savior’s Love. Many circumstances of peculiar interest presented themselves during our short stay at Tutuila, which, however, I must omit in my present communication (p. 40).
The “circumstances of peculiar interest” that occured during this visit to Samoa would not be detailed in print until 1843 when it would emerge that Williams had given multiple magic lantern shows, including one to the five congregants described above and possibly another in the large chapel at Leone. In a letter to his son, Williams described showing multiple audiences a series of images that depicted the life of Christ with the aid of a magic lantern. While his slides have not survived, details in his letter make it possible to reconstruct the visual sequence as a whole through extant examples of commercially manufactured slides. In this case study, I survey materials through which to study the visual content of the lantern show and its accompanying narration, including manufacturer’s catalogs, projectors, and magic lantern slides produced by Carpenter and Westley, London’s leading lantern manufacturer.
Using these materials as a guide, I describe how the projector and its accompanying slides functioned as technologies of mediation in the ways that they made Williams' theology visible through the embodied practices of performance. The apparatus which created the lantern show supported a double act of mediation; it translated Bible stories into a visual form, and it structured the accompanying narration spoken by John Williams.[14] This moment of mediation was designed to convey the main tenets of Christianity to a Samoan audience. However, Williams’ letter suggests that the lantern show did not go according to plan. Reading Williams’ account in light of the affordances of commercially available projection equipment reveals a tension between the Protestant theology driving Williams’ missionary activity and its presentation in a magic lantern show. Given the lighting conditions required to operate an oil-powered lantern, there would have been no visual cue separating the space represented on screen and the space inhabited by the audience. I argue that when projected, the image of Christ on the cross appeared as if he were physically present. Williams tried to reassert the boundary between the audience and Christ by explaining that the projected image “was only a representation.” Published accounts of Williams’ lantern show elided his insistence on the immateriality of the image of Christ crucified in order to celebrate his efforts to evangelize with the aid of technology.
The article in the Chronicle adopts an optimistic tone similar to the published descriptions of Williams’ lantern shows. While such narratives emphasized his labor, they also masked the dangers inherent in nineteenth-century moments of colonial contact. Readers would not have known—and could not have known—that the account in the January 1840 issue Chronicle would be Williams’ last, for when the edition was published, Williams was already dead. He had been killed in November on the shores of Erromango trying to evangelize the islanders there. Williams' legacy as a martyr not only paved the way for the commercial manufacture of martyrological slides, but his sudden death drove the demand for more detailed accounts of his second missionary journey. This pressure to offer a published (posthumous) account created opportunities to draw from material that would not normally be a source for a missionary biography, including the letter to his son describing the magic lantern show.
[1] Late-Victorian surveys of missionary work in the South Pacific include Richard Lovett’s The History of the London Missionary Society, 1795-1895. London: Henry Frowde, 1899. and Sarah Stock Farmer’s Tonga and the Friendly Islands; with a sketch of their mission history. Written for young people. London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1855. More recent scholarship on missionaries in the South Pacific forego a macroscopic perspective in order to focus on specific islands and island chains. For an extensive list of manuscript material, narratives of missionary work published by missionary societies (Protestant and Catholic), and contemporary scholarship, see Raeburn Lange’s detailed bibliography in Island Ministers: Indigenous Leadership in Nineteenth-Century Pacific Islands Christianity. Christchurch and Canberra: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies and Pandanus Books, 2005.
[2] Vason, whose name is often spelled “Veeson” in LMS records, eventually returned to England in 1802. Rev. S Piggot transcribed Vason’s account of his experiences in Tahiti and published his narrative as a cautionary tale. (See Four Years Residence in Tongataboo. London: Longman & Co., 1815.) Chris J. Thomas reads Vason’s description of his Tahitian tattoos as “an amalgamation of Tongan and European values.” For an more expansive discussion of Vason’s narrative, see “Clothed in tattoos: cultural fluidity in George Vason's Authentic Narrative of Four Years' Residence at Tongataboo.” Studies in Travel Writing vol. 19, no. 2, 2015. pp. 109-126. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2015.1076239 and Michelle Elleray’s “Crossing the Beach: A Victorian Tale Adrift in the Pacific.” Victorian Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, 2005, pp. 164–173. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3829847.
[3] After renouncing Christianity, Lewis moved to Ahonu, another settlement on Tahiti (History of the London Missionary Society, p. 156). He died on the island on 27 November of the following year. As for Broomhall, the Register of LMS Missionaries suggests that he died at sea in 1801 after setting sail for India (p. 1).
[4] Crook arrived on Tahuata on June 5th, 1797 and was taken under the protection of Chief Tenae (History of the LMS, p. 140). After the arrival of an American ship, the Betsy, in early 1798, Crook relocated to the island of Nukuhiva under the patronage of Keattanue. Alex Calder describes the process by which Crook attained a partial understanding of Marquesan culture, particularly the concept of tapu. See “The Temptations of William Pascoe Crook: An Experience of Cultural Difference in the Marquesas, 1797-1798.” The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 31, no. 2, 1996, pp. 144–161. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25169297. Haere Pō, a Tahitian press, published an edited volume of Crook’s manuscripts and letters as An Account of the Marquesas Islands, 1797-1799 (2007).
[5] Their deaths are described in Lovett’s History of the LMS, pp. 171-172, and in Farmer’s Tonga and the Friendly Islands: With a Sketch of Their Mission History, pp. 106-107. Farmer quotes extensively from George Vason’s account, Four Years Residence in Tongataboo (pp. 152-158), with minor editorial interventions for clarity.
[6] Excerpt from a sermon delivered by John Williams at Moorefield Tabernacle in 1838, quoted in History of the LMS, p. 239. Moorefield Tabernacle became an epicenter for evangelistic activity in the late-eighteenth century. The church had been erected by followers of George Whitefield in 1741 as part of the Evangelistic Revival. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, preached a funeral sermon for Whitefield in this chapel. When Williams joined the congregation in 1814, Matthew Wilks was leading an auxiliary to the LMS and classes for men who were preparing to become ministers.
[7] Despite being one of the central figures of the nineteenth-century missionary movement, there is no monograph-length biography of Williams. This absence is surprising given the tomes that have been written about David Livingstone. For short summaries of Williams’ childhood and working life, see History of the LMS pp. 238-239 and Niel Gunson’s entry for “Williams, John (1796–1839),” in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/williams-john-2793/text3981, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 1 May 2019.
[8] Williams was one of eight missionaries ordained by the LMS on September 30th, 1816. This cohort also included Robert Moffat, David Livingstone’s future father-in-law (History of the LMS, pp. 240-241)
[9] Gunson, Australian Dictionary of Biography.
[10] It’s unclear if Papehia was from Raiatea. There is a commemorative plaque at the Arorangi Church that suggests he was from the island, but Taira Rere, a prolific scholar on Rarotongan history, uses oral histories to suggest that Papehia was actually from Bora Bora (History of the Papehia Family, p. 4). Several histories have turned to “native” missionaries as a means to complicate the view offered by white missionary narratives. These include Raeburn Lange’s Island Ministers: Indigenous Leadership in Nineteenth-Century Pacific Islands Christianity. Christchurch and Canberra: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies and Pandanus Books, 2005. and The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the Pacific. Doug Munro and Andrew Tornley, eds. Suva: Pacific Theological College and the Institute of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific, 1996.
[11] Williams describes his fortutious meeting of Faueā in A narrative of missionary enterprises in the South Sea Islands; with remarks upon the natural history of the islands, origin, languages, traditions and usages of the inhabitants, p. 80. Richard M. Moyle offers a summary of LMS missionary activity on the Samoan islands in his introduction to The Samoan Journals of John Williams 1830 and 1832. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1984.
[12] Tutulia is now part of American Samoa.
[13] The church was completed March 6th. Alan Gavan Daws states that there were 1,800-2,000 Samoans at the church for the annual May meeting. See “The Great Samoan Awakening of 1839.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 70, no. 3, 1961, pp. 326–337. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20703912. p. 329. The July 1840 issue of the Chronicle published excerpts from a letter written by Murray earlier that year. When he penned the letter, Murray did not yet know about Williams’ death.
[14] For an extended discussion of mediation as both the representation of one medium in another and as an embodied practice, see “Media Archaeology.”
