“YACHTING” IN MELANESIA. 
It did not need the mistake of a clerk in drawing out the letters 
patent of Bishop G. A. Selwyn’s commission to act as bishop from lat. 
50° S. to 34°N. (i. ¢., from the Auckland Islands to the Carolines) to 
direct the Bishop’s attention to the islands of Melanesia. In 1847, 
when Selwyn first went to Melanesia, Fiji had already been partially 
Christianized, Tonga and Samoa were practically Christian, the French 
were beginning to occupy New Caledonia, and the London Missionary 
Society had Rarotongan teachers in the southern New Hebrides and 
the Loyalties; John Williams had been murdered in Erromango, and 
a French Roman Catholic bishop had been killed at Ysabel, Solomon 
Islands. Selwyn wrote in 1849: 
“While I have been sleeping in my bed in New Zealand, these islands, 
the Isle of Pines, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, New Treland. New Britain, 
New Guinea, the Loyalty Islands, the Kingsmills, etc., have been riddled 
through and through by the whale-fishers and traders of the South Sea. 
That odious black slug the béche-de-mer has been dragged out of its hole 
in every coral reef to make black broth for Chinese mandarins, while I, 
like a worse black slug as I am, have left the world all its field of mischief 
to itself. The same daring men have robbed every one of these islands of 
its sandalwood to furnish incense for the idolatrous worship of the Chinese 
temples, before I have taught a single islander to offer up his sacrifice of 
prayer to the true and only God. Even a mere Sydney speculator could 
induce nearly a hundred men to sail in his ships to Sydney to keep his flocks 
and herds, before I, to whom the Chief Shepherd has given commandment 
to seek out His sheep that are scattered over a thousand isles, have sought 
out or found out so much as one of those which have strayed or are lost.” 
Selwyn first reached New Zealand in 1842 and five years later his 
great mind and his godly strength and endurance prompted him to 
join H. M. S. Dido as acting chaplain on a voyage to Tonga and Samoa 
and to the southern New Hebrides and the Isle of Pines. It was at 
this last place that he saw a sandalwood trader, Captain Paddon, 
living in perfect security among a people credited with every evil 
passion and with a name for extreme treachery and cunning. Cap- 
tain Paddon ascribed his safety to just and straight dealing, and the 
Bishop at once saw the value of this lesson and called Paddon his 
tutor. Just dealing seldom fails to commend itself to natives, but 
the Melanesian Mission had sad cause later on to know that disin- 
terested conduct and the best of motives will not avail against out- 
raged feelings or superstitious beliefs or even against the involuntary 
breaking of a tabu or a going contrary to some established practice 
of native etiquette. 
On August 1, 1849, Selwyn sailed from Auckland in his own college 
schooner, the Undine, for New Caledonia and the New Hebrides, and 
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