Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2011

By Julian Harding, a London-based collector and antiques dealer with expertise in Polynesian art..

Introduction
Lancelot Threlkeld, Charles Barff, Aaron Buzacott, George Platt—today these are forgotten names but they, together with their fellow evangelists of the London Missionary Society (LMS), were to have a profound impact on the Pacific Islanders. Captain James Cook’s three great voyages of discovery (1768–1780) had opened up a new world to Europeans and the missionaries were not slow to follow. In 1796, the ship Duff set sail for the South Seas with thirty evangelists on board and reinforcements were sent out in the years that followed.
These were working-class men (bricklayers, carpenters, cobblers, etc.) of limited education and they were drastically unprepared for the realities of life in central Polynesia. How- ever, as David King makes clear in his remarkable new work, Food for the Flames, which is the basis of this short essay, they did have a job description of sorts: “to illume a dark and sinful world” in which “many ... are cannibals, feeding on the flesh of the slain enemies, with the greatest eagerness ... poor, barbarous, naked pagans.”