C66, OO ee) Farge” 
II. 
THE PIONEER. 
at ame) 
HE South-Sea Islanders have no history. We found them 
in their beautiful homes a hundred years ago ; but whence they 
came or how they got there, they cannot tell us. Since then, 
however, there has grown round them a history of a singularly 
interesting though sadly chequered kind. Not a national but a 
Christian history. For while the nations of Europe and America 
have been struggling for empire, or urging on their great com- 
mercial enterprises, there has been going on throughout these 
Islands an incessant warfare in the name of the Prince of Peace, 
and a succession of conquests—not always bloodless in their 
course, but always beneficent in their consequences. 
I say not a national history ; for these Islands of the Pacific, 
although grouped together on the bosom of the sea as the stars 
are grouped together in the constellations of the skies, can not 
be expected to take any rank among the kingdoms of the world ; 
any more than the counties of England, if separated by fifty or 
a hundred miles of ocean, could be expected to coalesce and 
keep together as a nation.—But a Christian history, in which 
Christ, the Lord of Life, has made a conspicuous display of his 
power to destroy the works of the Devil, and to lift up men 
from the dunghills of heajbenism and set them in the pure and 
‘wholesome light of the kingdom of heaven. 
Among the events of that missionary history the following are 
not to be forgotten. 
1769: May 1, Captain Cook landed on Tahiti, erected an 
observatory, and, amid the solemn silence of the natives, watched 
the transit of Venus across the Sun’s disc. 
