206 NOTES CONCERNING THE MELANESIAN MISSION. 
in New Zealand in its support of the Melanesian Mission, but of late 
years Christchurch has been a considerable rival to it. Possibly even 
a change of the headquarters of the ship to Sydney would not have 
affected New Zealand contributions over much. 
It can hardly be said that the Mission has any explicit or definite 
policy with regard to the requirements of the life of its missionaries in 
the islands, 7. ¢., in the matter of food, diet, care of the body, medicine, 
clothing, housing, learning of the local language, treatment of natives, 
method of propagation of Christianity. Inthe old days the newcomer 
did certainly get impregnated with the atmosphere of the Mission by 
living at Norfolk Island; he learned the lingai (a Mota word meaning 
“use’”’) of the Mission, but nowadays newcomers go straight to their 
work in the islands and have to learn the /Jingaz of the Mission as best 
they can. It would seem that there never has been any definite policy 
with regard to these matters; a man on being put down in the old days 
in charge of a particular plate was left there quite alone and presumably 
was expected to know how to live his life without warning or direction. 
When Bishop Wilson at the outset of his work directed attention to 
the need of a set of directions and instructions for managing a whale- 
boat the opinion which found favor among the staff was that it was best 
to let a man learn by experience. And the question of linguistics was 
treated much in the same way—every man was supposed to pick up the 
language spoken in his particular district. The learning of Mota was a 
fairly simple problem, owing to the many books that were translated 
into it (the Mota dictionary was not published till 1896), but it was 
quite a different matter when faced with an unknown tongue which one 
was supposed to learn, while at the same time no help or directions 
were provided towards enabling one to set about the study of it. 
‘The common use of Mota tended, moreover, to cause a depreciation 
in the estimate of the value of the other languages of the Mission. 
Mota was the language and the enlightenment or the importance of a 
place was measured at times by the ability or otherwise of its people to 
speak Mota. The unquestioned usefulness and the predominance of 
Mota tended to put all the other languages into the background and 
had a prejudicial effect on the study of them. Britishers as a rule are 
inclined possibly to treat sets of instructions as unnecessary and grand- 
motherly, and the non-provision of the missionaries of the Melanesian 
Mission with the best wisdom of the day with regard to the needs of 
their life was due in the first place to this dislike of being ordered about 
and of having to live according to rule and of assimilating their ideas 
to a set of formal conditions, and in the second place was the direct con- 
sequence of the old view that the life of the missionaries in the islands 
was an incidental break in the regular round of duties at Norfolk Island. 
