20. Missions, Erromango, No. 725.

Sketched in a small black notebook, now at the Centre for Anthropology Library at the British Museum, is the slender outline of a club, its handle separated from the gently curved head by a slim band, with additional lozenges carved at either end. Marked above the head of the club is a measurement, two and a half inches, presumably the diameter, while the length of the club is written along its side, 2ft 10in. Next to the bottom of the club is an enlarged oval, evidently depicting a pattern carved into the base.^⁠1

As well as these sketches and the accompanying measurements are three words, written in pencil: ‘Missions’, ‘Erromango.’, and ‘No. 725’. There is also what appears to be an abbreviated inscription, possibly in shorthand. The page forms part of two sequences in the notebook which have the word ‘Missions’ written at the top of each page.^⁠2 A number of these pages feature sketches of familiar artefacts from the collections of the London Missionary Society, including an apron of iron beads (Chapter 8) and a quadrangular club from South America (Chapter 5).

Many of the sketches also have a number written alongside, which connects them to a catalogue of items displayed at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, in a section dedicated to Protestant evangelical missions. Looking up ‘No. 725’, I discovered the following description in French:

725. Massue avec laquelle fut massacré le révérend J. Williams, missionaire^⁠3

Rather than any old club, this was the weapon with which John Williams, the celebrated ‘Apostle to Polynesia’ was martyred on 20 November 1839, after he landed on the island of Erromango (Chapter 15). Why was its particular historical significance not recorded in the notebook alongside the sketch?

The notebook forms part of a series referred to as the ‘Franks Notebooks’.^⁠4 Augustus Wollaston Franks was a key figure at the British Museum during the second half of the nineteenth century, originally appointed as an assistant in the Department of Antiquities in 1851. Franks had been educated at Eton College and Trinity College in Cambridge, where he was an early member of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, established in 1840. Working with the collections of the Royal Archaeological Institute, established in 1844, Franks had curated an exhibition of medieval art at the Society of Arts in 1850.

The initial enthusiasms of Franks were predominantly Medieval, connecting him to the romantic idealisation of the period which arose in response to Britain’s rapid industrialisation during mid-nineteenth century. Key events included the publication of Contrasts by Augustus Pugin in 1836, which sought for ‘a return to the faith and social structures of the Middle Ages’, the reception into the Catholic Church of the prominent Anglican priest, John Henry Newman in 1845, as well as the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists in 1848.

Martin J. Wiener, who regarded the 1851 Great Exhibition at London as the high-water mark of British industrial values, nevertheless pointed out that:

Planted within the Great Exhibition itself was a core of cultural opposition, represented by Augustus Pugin’s Medieval Court. A sharper contrast could hardly be imagined than that between Pugin’s Gothic furnishings and their iron-and-glass enclosure; yet they too were an expression of the period.^⁠5

For Weiner, the period after 1851 saw a gradual blurring of these battle lines through a process of mutual accommodation. The story by which the name of an enthusiastic medievalist, Franks, came to be associated with a notebook of drawings of items associated with overseas missionary activity illustrates certain strands in the shifting networks that surrounded museums during this period.

In fact, the drawing of the Erromangan club seems not to have been produced by Franks, but rather by his assistant Thomas Gay. Gay had previously worked for the Quaker industrialist Henry Christy, whose family firm exhibited the first industrially produced loop pile towelling at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, inspired by towels he had encountered during his travels to the Eastern Mediterranean the previous year.

Christy visited Scandinavia in 1852 and 1853 where he met the influential Danish archaeologist and curator, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. Appointed by the Danish Royal Commission in 1816, Thomsen had pioneered a series of archaeological techniques such as seriation through his arrangements of finds from prehistoric graves, ultimately establishing archaeology’s three age system. By sequencing grave goods from a range of locations, Thomsen was able to show that stone followed bronze and bronze followed iron as the materials from which the main tools and weapons had been made, at least in Denmark’s prehistoric past.^⁠6

Thomsen’s Guideline to Nordic Antiquity was published in English in 1848, followed by his successor J.J. Worsaae’s The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark in 1849, stimulating the growing British interest in northern Europe’s prehistoric past. For some, this fed into what has been called ‘Teutomania’, an enthusiasm for all things Northern and Germanic (such as Gothic architecture), which even extended to attempting to purify English of non-Germanic words. The word ‘folklore’ was coined in 1846 as ‘a good Saxon compound’ by William Thoms, an admirer of Jacob Grimm’s (1835) Deutsche Mythologie and the translator of Worsaae’s Primeval Antiquities of Denmark into English.

By contrast, Henry Christy’s engagement with Danish archaeological work seems to have grown out of his involvement with the Aborigines Protection Society and, following its establishment in 1843, the Ethnological Society of London. Like Thomas Hodgkin, an Ethnological Society founder and fellow Quaker, Christy remained a member of both societies. A central problem faced by British Ethnology as it developed following the successful campaign to abolish slavery across the British Empire, was how to explain the obvious, observable and ongoing differences between people in different parts of the world, while retaining a commitment to underlying common origins and common humanity, a problem given sharp focus in the aftermath of slavery in the Caribbean (Chapter 18).

In 1856 Henry Christy travelled to Cuba, Mexico and America, where he met another Quaker ethnologist, E.B. Tylor, whose account of their journey, Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, was published in 1861. Christy became increasingly interested in the European Stone Age, suggesting that many ancient artefacts could be better understood through comparison with similar artefacts still made in other parts of the world. Working with the French palaeontologist Edouard Lartet from 1863 onwards, he established excavations at caves in the Dordogne region of southern France. During a visit to caves in Belgium in April 1865, Christy became ill, passing away on 4 May 1865.

It was Christy’s death which ultimately enabled an important accommodation between the ethnological enthusiasms of Quaker industrialists like Christy, with roots in the evangelical anti-slavery movement, and the medievalism that motivated members of the Anglican establishment like Franks. When The British Museum had reopened following the creation of its neo-classical portico in 1846, the “Ethnographical room” containing British and Medieval antiquities alongside material from other parts of the world was described as ‘a disgraceful jumble of things’.^⁠7 By 1850, when archaeological enthusiasms were rising among the British middle classes, partly as a result of discoveries during the construction of the railways, complaints were made that British antiquities could only be seen in a room ‘filled with clubs from the South Seas, and trifling objects from China and elsewhere’.^⁠8

Such collections, whether from Britain or other parts of the world, were resisted at the British Museum as essentially ‘uncivilised’, where the more monumental remains from what were regarded as ‘Ancient Civilizations’ were given pride of place. Even after Franks was appointed in 1851, British and Medieval Antiquities remained a fairly minor section of the Department of Antiquities, where classical works remained the major focus. In 1857, Anthony Panizzi, principal librarian (Director) of the museum between 1856 and 1866, complained to the museum’s trustees about ‘medieval antiquities, by what are called British or Irish antiquities, and by the ethnological collection’ suggesting that:

It does not seem right that such valuable space should be taken up by Esquimaix dresses, canoes and hideous feather idols, broken flints, called rude knives, and so on…^⁠9

In a letter to Lubbock in early July 1865, Franks suggested:

If we play our cards right this collection may be the means of getting the Ethnological Collns put on a more satisfactory footing at the Museum… Panizzi is about to retire & many changes may take place which may lead to an improvement in those portions of the collection in which you & I take interest.^⁠12

On 18 November 1865, the trustees accepted the offer, although the Christy collections ultimately remained at 103 Victoria Street, where Thomas Gay continued to live, for some time. Franks argued that:

Ethnography has assumed such a totally different aspect within the last few years; its scientific and historical value has been so fully recognised, that I feel sure that, whether the natural history collections shall be retained at the Museum or not, it will be thought desirable to keep here collections which, when properly arranged, will be highly attractive and popular.^⁠13

In May 1866, Franks was appointed Keeper of a new Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography, suggesting privately it might have been called the ‘Department of Miscellaneous Antiquities’.^⁠14 It was from this newly empowered position that Franks traveled to Paris for the Exposition Universelle the following summer, accompanied by Thomas Gay, the assistant he inherited from Christy along with the collection.

Presumably one reason the club from Erromanga’s status as a missionary ‘relic’ was not recorded was that it was assessed primarily in terms of its scientific value, in relation to the emerging field of Anthropology. This brought together ‘ethnography’, items from the non-European world, with archaeological discoveries from Europe in order to forge a new understanding of human history, extending back to its earliest beginnings. The fate of the missionary John Williams, less than three decades earlier, was far from a central concern to those attempting to rewrite the entire history of civilisation.^⁠15

An accompanying image of the museum’s interior shows the same interior space lit by skylights that was depicted in images from 1843, 1847 and 1853, but now without the presiding giraffe (Chapter 3). Only the ‘Gigantic Idol’ from Rarotonga (Chapter 12) still reaches up towards the light, although a number of other recognisable artefacts, including Paramasattee (Chapter 14),  are located around a table at the centre of the room where a visiting family inspects them with interest.

The majority of items on display in the museum are held within the glass-fronted cases that line the perimeter walls, although a number of items are stored above these as well as in the space below. While an image of the museum from 1853 suggests the walls above the cases had long been used for storing long weapons, these are now artfully arranged into fans, emulating the form of the classical trophy (Chapter 26), a mode of display widely used at the 1851 Great Exhibition, even for displays of industrial produce .

What is most clear from the image is that, apart from one case, all the Natural History specimens have been removed from the main room along with the giraffe. Neither the pelican or vulture which had long perched atop the projecting cases, sent from Corfu by Isaac Lowndes LMS missionary there between 1822 to 1844, nor the rhinoceros horn which stood on its own plinth for decades, since John Campbell displayed it as a ‘unicorn’s horn’ on his return from Africa, are evident anywhere in the image.

A second surviving catalogue of the Missionary Museum, although undated, appears to approximately match this arrangement of the museum.^⁠17 While the ‘Advertisement’ at the front of the catalogue describes the museum’s contents in terms that are unchanged from the 1826 catalogue (Chapter 11), as ‘natural productions of… distant countries’, ‘efforts… of natural genius, especially in countries rude and uncivilised’, and ‘horrible IDOLS’, a note inserted on the opposite page makes another, more scientific, distinction – between ‘HISTORY and NATURAL HISTORY’.^⁠18

While artefacts relating to ‘HISTORY’ had coloured labels that showed the region of the world from which they came, ‘Miscellaneous Articles and Natural History’ were given white labels and located only in case B and the lobby. The order of the catalogue reflects the reduced significance of these items, beginning with ‘IDOLS AND OBJECTS OF SUPERSTITIOUS REGARD FROM ISLANDS IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN’, and ending with ‘MISCELLANEOUS ARTICLES UNCONNECTED WITH THE MISSIONS’ and finally ‘NATURAL HISTORY’.

A series of images and descriptions of individual museum cases appeared in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine from January 1860 onwards. Beginning, like the museum catalogue, with case A, filled with ‘South Sea Idols’, the text establishes a clear contrast between the Missionary Museum and other museums:

Now this museum is altogether different from every other museum in the world. It is not a mere collection of curious, or beautiful, or valuable things, such as you will find in The British Museum, and many other museums in London and the country; nor is it intended merely to amuse, or please, or even to instruct those who visit it…

The chief purpose of the Missionary Museum is to show what men are without the Gospel. It therefore contains many objects of heathen worship, and many instruments of heathen cruelty. And these objects if they are rightly considered, will teach us many things which we ought both to know and to feel… what evidence do they give of the power which Sin and Satan have in the world! what proof of the darkness, degradation, folly, and misery of the heathen, and of the wonderful difference which the Gospel has made between our state and theirs!

And surely such a site should call forth our pity and our prayers on their behalf, and should make us very glad, not only that we were born in a Christian land, but also in a day when many servants of God are to be found amongst the heathen, and when, as the rejected gods in this museum show, multitudes of them have been turned from dumb idols to worship the blessed Jehovah.^⁠19

The museum located its visitors in a time and space – when British Christianity had been empowered to fight back against the power of Sin and Satan, as evidenced by what were described as ‘rejected idols, or “dead gods,” as some of them were called when they sent home by their former worshippers’.^⁠20 Here we may be able to detect the voice of the son of John Williams’ son, who surely remembered some of the occasions when items were handed over to mark the conversion of Pacific islands (Chapter 12).^⁠21 The accompanying woodcut image was described as showing a case ‘on the north side of the museum, at the left hand as you enter the door’, and this matches what can be seen of the case on the immediate left of the image published in the Illustrated London News just over six months earlier. ^⁠22

The article about the museum in the February issue of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine did not include an image, but continued describing figures from case A.^⁠23 When another image appeared in April 1860, it showed the third case from the left.^⁠24 At the centre of the image is a model of the missionary ship, John Williams, the operating costs of which had been funded by the collections from juvenile supporters since its launch in 1844, when the Juvenile Missionary Magazine itself was also established.

Arrayed around the ship were a series of artefacts which, according to the article, showed ‘the Polynesians… were very ignorant and very cruel before they received the Gospel. But some of the curious things in this case equally show that they were very clever.’^⁠25 As an example, tattoos were explained as a form of dressing the body regarded as ‘the very perfection of beauty’.^⁠26 Attention was then drawn to ‘a very plain-looking club… hanging down in the middle of the case’ which juvenile readers were informed was:

the club which killed John Williams at Erromanga. As you have read the sad story of his death, both in this Magazine and elsewhere, we shall not repeat it here. Neither need we say more than that the savage chief to whom this club belonged, and who felled the noble servant of Christ to the ground, gave up the deadly weapon to a Missionary who went to Erromanga in your ship, and now this wretched man sees how foolish and how wicked a thing he did.^⁠27

The emerging mythology of the mission, and particularly that of its children’s section, focused on fundraising to sustain a ship bearing John Williams’ name, made it unnecessary to repeat the story of his life and death. The image of the case, however, with the club suspended at its centre, demonstrates the way in which John Williams’ martyrdom became central to the narration of LMS efforts in the decades following his death.^⁠28

In May 1860, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine included an image of the only case retaining Natural History in the main part of the museum. Readers were told it had ‘no idols in it – no spears, nor clubs, nor curious things made by uncivilised peoples’:

But there are objects which catch the eye of every visitor, and which are sure to draw the young to the case almost as soon as they enter the Museum.^⁠29

The first item described was the ‘large serpent coiled round an alligator’ from Demerara (Chapter 18), while above that was the ‘great boa constrictor coiled round the trunk of the tree’. While the story of its capture at Kristnapore was provided, readers were also told:

Now, this is not put in the Museum as a natural curiosity merely.^⁠30

Although not explicitly stated, given the declared function of the museum to ‘show what men are without the Gospel’, the serpent wrapped around a tree at its centre was surely intended as a reminder of ‘the power which Sin and Satan have in the world!’ by evoking the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden from the Book of Genesis.

Subsequent articles described cases of accumulated ‘idols and objects of superstition from India’ as well as ‘Buddhist and other Idols’ from the South Side of the Museum. When the series ended in April 1861, readers were encouraged to visit the museum, to:

examine most carefully the cases on the east side, facing them as they enter. Most of the articles in these cases are labelled, and they clearly show how clever and yet how foolish the people are who make them.^⁠31

As an example, the case of items from China were described, including a mariner’s compass, porcelain, and ‘books printed when the inhabitants of Europe were ignorant of this important art’.^⁠32 Alongside these ‘proofs of the skill of this wonderful nation’, however, were miniature shoes worn by ‘Chinese ladies’ following foot binding, as well as opium paraphernalia associated with ‘death’ and ‘disease’ for ‘the wretched multitudes who use it’.^⁠33 Near these examples of ‘Chinese skill, and folly’ was a copy of the Bible, translated by Dr Morrison (Chapter 9), displayed as ‘the Book which can alone make men wise unto salvation, through faith in Christ Jesus’.^⁠34

​On 6 January 1867, Theodor Vernes wrote from Paris to the Joseph Mullens, recently appointed Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society (LMS) after two decades as a missionary in India. Following a visit he had personally made to London, Vernes confirmed the rationale for establishing a missionary museum at the 1867 Exposition Universelle:

to render by the most practical means what was the state of the inhabitants of the different Missionary stations, in reference to their manners and their belief, and what has become their moral and religious state since the influence of the Christian religion has been disseminated among them.^⁠39

The exhibition would include ‘idols, models, engravings, maps, specimens of objects showing the rude state of industry, costumes, arms and weapons, implements of all kinds, books and newspapers published by the natives’, as well as ‘works published in Europe and America, which are in use by the natives of the various stations’. Items should be sent to Paris by 15 January, to be received there by the 15^th February, with French railway companies offering a 50% reduction in tariffs for the transport of exhibition material.^⁠40

In March 1867, the Chronicle reported that twenty cases had arrive in Paris, where they were to be arranged the Rev. T. Powell, a missionary in Samoa, as well as the Rev. Samuel Williams (the ordained son of John Williams).  It was pointed out that the costs of participating in the exhibition would come to ££180, and that donations had only been received of £32 in support of the exhibition.^⁠41

Although Vernes noted that the space provisionally allocated for the LMS was 40 feet long and 8 feet high, he urged Mullens to ‘send as many objects as you can, in order that our museum may be as rich and complete as possible’.^⁠42 Mullens seems to have taken Vernes at his word — the catalogue of the ‘Section des Missions Protestantes Évangéliques’ lists 620 items in the section devoted to the LMS (246 from Asia, 214 from the Pacific, 155 from Africa and 5 from the Americas), as well as several pages of unnumbered print publications.^⁠43 This represents around a third of the collection at the LMS museum in London, at least when compared to the catalogue published less than a decade earlier.^⁠44

The LMS sent twice as many items as any other missionary society to Paris and were associated with over 40% of the numbered entries in the catalogue. It is perhaps significant that the next highest contributions also came from missionary societies also headquartered in England, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (which sent 263 items), and the Anglican Church Missionary Society (which sent 210 items). These were followed by the Paris Evangelical Society (with 180 items), as well as the Netherlands Missionary Society (89 items), the Free Church of Scotland Missionary Society (80 items), Unitas Fratrum (the Moravians – 30 items), the Basel Mission (17 items) and the American Episcopal Church Mission (16 items). Other, un-numbered items from Hawai’i were also described in the catalogue alongside publications sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

Other organisations which exhibited print publications included the (British) Baptist Missionary Society, the Danish Missionary Society, the Sunday School Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Bible Society of France, the Religious Tract Societies of London, New York and Paris, as well as the London Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews. With sections devoted to each of these organisations, presumably mirroring the exhibition itself, the catalogue provides a snapshot of international Protestant evangelical activity in 1867, at least as it related to organisations sufficiently connected to international networks to feel they needed to be represented at Paris.

While certainly international, the range of organisations reflects a particular network that connects Protestants from the Northeast of Europe (Paris, Denmark, the Netherlands and particularly the British Isles) to similar denominations in the United States of America. Significantly, despite roots in what is now Germany, the address listed for the Moravians in the catalogue is for their Mission House in London, rather than at Herrnhut. While the Moravians influenced the establishment of missionary societies in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, the majority of other organisations represented at Paris, with the exception of the Sunday School Society (established in 1785), were established in the three decades after 1792:

• 1792 Baptist Missionary Society (BMS)
• 1795 London Missionary Society (LMS)
• 1797 Netherlands Missionary Society (NMS)
• 1799 Church Missionary Society (CMS)
• 1799 Religious Tract Society
• 1804 British and Foreign Bible Society
• 1809 London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews
• 1810 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM)
• 1812 New York Tract Society
• 1815 Basel Mission (originally the German Missionary Society)
• 1818 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS)
• 1818 Protestant Bible Society of Paris
• 1820 Paris Tract Society
• 1821 Danish Missionary Society
• 1821 Protestant Episcopal Church Mission (American Church Mission)
• 1822 Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEM)

Although the Free Church of Scotland Missionary Society was only established following the establishment of the Free Church itself in 1843, its origins lay in the overseas missions of the Edinburgh Missionary Society and Glasgow Missionary Society, both established in 1796, with resurgences of activity during the 1820s. It was therefore only the Basel Mission, safely located in Switzerland away from the most significant consequences of the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, which represented the German-speaking world at Paris, even though there were long-standing connections between the LMS, the Paris Evangelical Society and the Rhenish and Berlin Missionary Societies.Apart from the Netherlands Missionary Society, the establishment of which was connected to the commencement of the London Missionary Society’s work in South Africa (Chapter 2), all the societies established before 1810 were British. This suggests that the revival of Protestant missionary activity at the turn of the century had quite specific originating conditions.

This is no less true of associated collecting practices, and it was the establishment of a museum by the LMS in 1814 (Chapter 3) which seems to have cemented an association between missionary activity and collecting. Despite the exhibition being held in Paris, it is striking that approximately 80% of the material on display was provided by British Missionary Societies, with only 19% from societies in continental Europe (Paris, Basel & Netherlands), and only 1% from America.

When William Ellis sent a parcel of ‘curiosities from different parts of the world’ to the new Missionary training college at Barmen in 1834 (Chapter 13), he suggested they would be useful ‘in conveying a more lively impression of the actual degradation of the heathen and the polluting character of idol worship; and also of shewing what Missionaries had been able to effect in promoting the knowledge of the True God and the Only Saviour’.^⁠45 It is striking that a similarly twinned formulation was used by Theodor Vernes when he wrote to Joseph Mullens about the Paris exhibition in January 1867.

Another parallel between these two events is that when William Ellis listed the items he sent to Wuppertal, he produced two distinct lists. The first included objects collected in Africa, Oceania and Asia, the second listed printed texts, many of which were the result of missionary translation. In the printed catalogue of the 1867 exhibition we also see printed texts frequently treated differently to other artefacts. Three-dimensional artefacts appear to have been associated with what Vernes called ‘the state of the inhabitants of the different Missionary stations, in reference to their manners and their belief’, while printed texts were emblematic of ‘what has become their moral and religious state since the influence of the Christian religion has been disseminated among them’.^⁠46

This, I hope to suggest, marks this mode of exhibition as distinctively Protestant. European Protestants, associated their own history with Reformation struggles to access religious texts in vernacular languages, and understood the arrival of the printing press as providing the necessary conditions for their production and circulation. In Britain, William Tyndale, the first person to print a translation of the New Testament in English, in 1525, became a nationally celebrated Protestant martyr after he was burned at the stake in October 1536. ^⁠47

Protestant evangelical activity remained closely connected to the production of printed texts. A large part of the Protestant missionary project involved the conversion of vernacular languages into written form, in order to translate the Bible, but another of its dimensions was the development of a body of readers for these texts through the establishment of mission schools. A consequence was that readers soon became writers, generating their own texts that were printed in missionary run newspapers and periodicals, or religious tracts, many of which were displayed at Paris in 1867.

Webb Keane has emphasised that Protestant missionary activity was often associated with a moral narrative emphasising the emancipation of converts, often from the twin holds of materiality (ie. ‘idols’) and inherited ancestral practices. Printed texts (and particularly biblical texts) appear to have regarded as unlike other material forms.^⁠48 Rather than being regarded as forms of mediation equivalent to liturgical statues or paintings, or inherited ancestral wisdom as might be found in rituals, printed texts were treated as transparent embodiments of the word (and sometimes the Word of God).

In his introduction to the published catalogue, Theodor Vernes emphasised that ‘these objects have almost no intrinsic value: the ideas they represent make their value’. Rather, he suggested that ‘We seek to extract the social and humanitarian from the material itself’, in order to ‘draw the interest of a crowd of visitors from all nations towards these great works of Christian conversion and civilisation’:

Indeed, how could we glance at these thousands of objects, monotonous in their savage variety, or at these strangely shaped idols, sometimes repulsive, without being struck by the miserable intellectual state, by the barbarity and the feeblemindedness of the nations that adored them and offered them human sacrifices nearly everywhere? By contrast, if one considers the books, the newspapers and the various publications from these same indigenous people, barbarians or savages not so long ago, how can we not admire the power of the Gospel which has wonderfully transformed them?^⁠49

Vernes suggested that the Sotho people of Southern Africa, among whom the Paris Evangelical Society had long worked, had been cannibals less than twenty years earlier, presumably basing this on accounts of starving ‘Mantatees’ during the difaqane (Chapter 8). He then noted that alongside the warrior’s costumes on display was a journal, ‘the Little Light… partly the work of natives’, which provided ‘undeniable evidence of the radical change in their mores and their religion, thanks to the efforts of our brave French missionaries’.^⁠50

Vernes paused to note the many missionaries who had paid for their lives for these societal transformations, noting that their martyrdom was made visible through some of the objects on display, in particular ‘the formidable weapon used by a native from one of the South Seas Islands to massacre the famous John Williams’. Williams was described as a ‘noble confessor of the Christian faith’ who ‘fell under the blows of those for whom he dedicated his existence’.^⁠51 One of the only items individually referenced in the introduction, the club was evidently far from the straightforward ethnological specimen it was subsequently appraised as by Thomas Gay.

While Vernes’ introduction described the various organisations represented in the Mission pavilion, including the British and Foreign Bible Society which exhibited copies of the Bible in 174 languages, it ended by shifting its focus from ‘démonstrations par les yeux’ to the ‘démonstration par la parole’.^⁠52 The Evangelical room, positioned at the centre of the pavilion, was intended as a ‘modest and calm centre of evangelisation’ where Protestants of various nationalities could worship while in Paris. There meetings of religious and philanthropic societies could be held, which would, Vernes hoped, ‘proclaim in everyone’s full view the unity of the Church of Jesus Christ’.^⁠53

While printed words could be displayed alongside ‘idols’, weapons, and other objects of non-Christian life, it was the spoken word that was presented as central to Protestant religious practice. Material things, even when they served to communicate the Word of God, remained distinctly secondary and potentially dangerous. Vernes ended his text by declaring:

The dazzled man, captivated by the wonderful riches of the Exhibition, and tempted to glorify himself, may remember here that all the splendours of the magnificence and all the grandeur of the world are only a small glimmer of the greatness of God!^⁠54

The next largest number of objects came from Africa (409), representing 27% of the total, with the largest contribution again made by the London Missionary Society (155 items), followed by the Paris Evangelical Society (119 items), reflecting the long-term engagements of both societies in southern Africa. While the Wesleyan Missionary Society displayed a further 47 items from southern Africa, they also displayed 27 items from West Africa. The Church Missionary Society displayed 38 items from West Africa, where their work on the continent concentrated.

Although there was slightly less material from the Pacific than from Africa (391 items), representing just over 25% of the total, well over half of this came from the London Missionary Society (214 items from across Polynesia), with smaller collections from the Wesleyans (98 items from New Zealand and Fiji) and the Paris Evangelical Society (61 items from Tahiti).^⁠55 A smaller group of items (18) from New Zealand were also displayed by the Church Missionary Society.

Far less numerically represented were the Americas (95 items), representing just over 6% of the total. The largest group of material was from the Church Missionary Society, relating to the work of the North West American Mission (established in 1822) in Canada, mostly at Hudson’s Bay. Other material from Canada was displayed by the Wesleyan Missionary Society (13 items), alongside material from the West Indies (5 items). Caribbean material was also displayed by the London Missionary Society (5 items) and the Moravians (5 items), who also displayed material from Greenland (8 items).

While the material on display betrays a strong connection to British territorial possessions in India, southern Africa, and Australia, much of the material was actually collected in adjacent areas, beyond formal colonial control. The majority of material came from the islands of the Pacific, the interior of Africa as well as Hudson’s Bay where engagements were largely of a commercial, rather than formally colonial kind, and indigenous leaders continued to exert considerable autonomy. This mid-nineteenth century pattern, of missionary activity operating alongside trade was also essentially true in China, where missionaries arrived alongside traders, expanding into the mainland in the wake of the opium wars (Chapter 16).

Even in British India the colonial state was effectively run by a commercial trading corporation, the East India Company, at least until 1858 when the British State assumed direct control after the Indian Rebellion the previous year (the Dutch East India Company lost its control of Indonesia earlier, in 1800). Mid-nineteenth century Protestant missionary activity remained inseparable from free trade, at least in the British imagination, and it is perhaps unsurprising that many missionary societies were organised, like the LMS, along similar principles to joint-stock corporations, with headquarters in the City of London alongside trading companies. This pattern, however, began to change as a New Imperialism took shape across Europe in the final decades of the nineteenth century, fuelled in large part by competing nationalisms. Less than three years after the Paris exhibition, the French parliament declared war on Prussia, leading, in January 1871, to the fall of Paris.

Produced in Paris in 1867, an album of twenty-six photographic albumen prints is now held at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. It includes items from the Musée des Missions Evangeliques at Exposition Universelle.^⁠56 This demonstrates a degree of experimentation with the photographic process, hawith prints on gilt, silver and variously coloured paper. The images are composites, with images of numbered items arranged to fill the frame.

A printed table makes it possible to identify the items, including many from the London Missionary Society such as the shaman’s rattle from Guiana (in Plate 23 – Chapter 5), religious images of Jagannath from India (in Plate 9 – Chapter 6), as well as that of Paramasattee (in Plate 14 – Chapter 14).

Of particular interest, however, is Plate 16, composed of six labelled images, several photographs in their own right. These were clearly intended to show people from Southern Africa before and after conversion, the change marked by the adoption of European clothing.

While a number of clubs were included in the photographic album, that associated with the death of John Williams evidently was not. Recognisable images of John Williams’ club do feature in the archive of the London Missionary Society at SOAS, long after the majority of the collection transferred to The British Museum between 1890 and 1910 (Chapters 22 & 26).

In November 1956, News From Afar, an updated version of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, included a photograph of the club alongside the pocket watch of James Harris, who was killed alongside John Williams, in an article with the headline Love, Murder, Salvation. The accompanying text recounts the arrival of Williams from the perspective of those on the shore, including Kauiaui, who seems to have presented his club to visiting missionaries in late 1853, after Samoan teachers had brought the new religion to Erromanga.^⁠57

In another series of images, also apparently from the mid-twentieth century, a modestly dressed young woman, most likely of Pacific ancestry, stands in front of a painting of John Williams holding the same club. It is not recorded in the archives  who she was, but the staging of this encounter, involving this ancestral missionary and his relics, was significant enough to be photographed.^⁠58

The club appears on a list of items still in the collection of the Council for World Mission (the successor of the LMS) in 1975, and seems to have been borrowed for an exhibition at Reading Museum in late 1982, although it disappears from the archival records shortly after that.^⁠59

Unlike many items, ‘No. 725’ from Erromanga awas able to resist the process by which the majority of items in the Missionary Museum were gradually converted into ethnographic specimens during the decades that followed.

Whether it was the 1867 Paris exhibition that first attracted the attention of Augustus Wollaston Franks at the British Museum is unclear. It would not long, however, before the British Museum began to compete with the Missionary Museum as the most appropriate place in London for the storage and display of such items.