202 NOTES CONCERNING THE MELANESIAN MISSION. 
Auckland to advise on monetary matters and to look after the Mis- 
sion’s interest in the matter of repairs to the ship and the ordering of 
stores for the islands. Doubtless much money was saved by this step. 
NORFOLK ISLAND. 
It is in the matter of Norfolk Island that the lingaz of the Mission— 
1. €., its adherence to tradition—has been most marked. Bishop G. A. 
Selwyn was forced at the outset of the work to choose a base of oper- 
ations outside Melanesia itself. His policy was to keep the work of 
the Mission under his own eye rather than to call for workers to go 
and settle in the islands and develop the mission work from within. 
It was assumed that for the development of the Mission the base of 
operations must necessarily be elsewhere than in the field to be devel- 
oped, and while the question of climate has always been supposed 
popularly to have been the main determining factor in the course which 
was pursued, yet in all probability the matter was settled by other 
considerations than those of climate. The climate of Melanesia is 
bad enough, but when Bishop Selwyn began his work in the islands 
white missionaries of the London Missionary Society and also Presby- 
terian missionaries were settled already in the New Hebrides, the 
French were in New Caledonia, and the Methodists were in New 
Britain. The climate of the New Hebrides is but little better, if at 
all, than that of the Banks Islands, where most of the early work of 
the Mission was done, and New Britain has almost the same climate 
as the Solomons, so it is evident that missionaries of the Melanesian 
Mission, or the Northern Mission as it was called at the outset, could 
have settled in their own sphere of work had the policy allowed. 
The report of 1857, written probably by Mr. Patteson, puts the 
matter very clearly from the standpoint of that time. Speaking of 
the Melanesians in the school at St. John’s, Auckland, he writes: 
“They are delicate subjects and require careful handling, morally and 
physically. The strength of passion and weakness of constitution which 
belongs to their tropical nature require careful training. But if they can be 
acclimatized mentally as well as physically, and taught to unite the energy 
and perseverance of the inhabitants of a temperate region with their own 
fervor and impetuosity of character, there can be little reason to doubt but 
that they will prove most efficient teachers and missionaries to their own 
people, when once the grace of God’s spirit shall have shined in their hearts. 
The pupil will probably, by the mere force of association, have received 
impressions and experienced a change of character which will prove very 
beneficial to him and which may induce him, on mixing once more with his 
own friends, to contrast their customs with ours. He will feel the sense of a 
want now created in him of something better than his own land supplies; 
he will desire to return again to New Zealand, and by degrees be borne along 
from one point to another till, under God’s blessing, he emerges from his old 
dark Heathen state of mind into a state of conscious apprehension and accept- 
