The Shark God Read Free

been telling myself for years, only this story wasn’t quite the shape I remembered.
    It began with the three heroes of The Light of Melanesia: George Augustus Selwyn, the stern visionary who hatched the plan to raise the Melanesians from their darkness; John Coleridge Patteson, whose love for the islanders cost him his life; and Robert Henry Codrington, whose curiosity would inadvertently revive the spirits they had all sought to destroy. Like my great-grandfather, these were men of privilege, molded by England’s public schools and altogether certain that Empire was a virtue so long as God was among its exports.
    Selwyn was their leader. A product of Eton and Cambridge, Selwyn was only thirty-two when he was named bishop of New Zealand. He was a High Church traditionalist and a firm believer in the principle of apostolic succession. He felt that the bishops of the Church of England, like those of the Roman Catholic Church, were God’s designated representatives, and therefore successors to Jesus’s own apostles. He dreamed that the “Church of England would speedily become a praise upon the whole earth.”
    This might explain his reaction to the clerical error on the letters patent that described his new diocese. Selwyn’s territory should have extended just past the tip of New Zealand’s North Island—about 34 degrees south of the equator. But someone scribbled “34 degrees north” latitude where he should have written “south.” This extended his territory thousands of miles through Melanesia, past the equator and the Tropic of Cancer to well beyond Hawaii. It wasa mistake, but Selwyn was as ambitious as he was willful. He studied navigation and Polynesian grammar on his voyage from England south to New Zealand. Within six years of arriving, he was hitching rides with the Royal Navy into the heart of Melanesia. He befriended chiefs, charming them with gifts of fishhooks, axes, and calico, then convinced them to let him carry away the most promising of their youngsters to his Christian school in New Zealand. (Most of the recruits were after more axes and fishhooks. In fact, the trade was so central to the bishop’s persona that islanders confused his title with the word fishhook. They called him “bishhooka.”) The strong boys, the ones who didn’t drop dead from the flu, dysentery, or homesickness, were molded into an army of black apostles and sent back from New Zealand to the islands, where to preach was to invite ostracism and, occasionally, assassination.
    Selwyn’s progress was slow at first, and his task was urgent. Catholic and Presbyterian missionaries were already trickling across the Pacific from Tahiti and Tonga, and they were keen to steal his recruits. He needed help. In 1855, Selwyn returned to England to drum up support for his mission. His sermons inspired a young man of impeccable credentials. John Coleridge Patteson was the son of a judge, and a former captain of Eton’s First Eleven cricket squad. He was also a village curate and a linguist. The latter skill would be useful: Selwyn’s potential converts spoke more than a hundred different languages. Patteson was not yet thirty when he accompanied Selwyn back to New Zealand and then into the unknown islands aboard the mission ship Southern Cross . In 1861, Selwyn handed the entire mission over to Patteson and consecrated him the first bishop of Melanesia.
    Patteson was even more ambitious than his mentor. Every year he ventured farther into the archipelago. At each new island he swam to shore from the ship’s whaleboat with a vocabulary notebook tucked inside his hat and presents tied around his neck. He picked up dozens of local languages, and in them tried to explain tothe islanders that they had got the nature of the cosmos all wrong. He told them that if they learned to obey his god, they could live on after death; but if they did not obey, they would go on to endless