The Marist Fathers in the New Hebrides

New Zealand Tablet, 30 June 1910, Page 1033

The Marist Fathers in the New Hebrides

-.."'...- That very interesting and important group of islands in your waters, the New Hebrides (writes the London correspondent of the Melbourne Advocate), formed the subject of an informing "paper read at the meeting of the Royal Colonial Institute by Captain E. G. Rason, who was British Resident Commissioner there for -some years, and only recently retired from that post. Captain Rason gave a succinct historical survey of the New Hebrides from their discovery by the early Spanish navigator, De Quiros, down to the present day, and supplemented it with his own impressions and experiences gathered during his official connection with the group. His paper, he says, represents the labor and study of eight years among the reports of the missionaries, the books written by naval officers, and other travellers in the islands, official literature, and the narratives of pioneer settlers. With regard to the original discovery of the group, Captain Rason remarks: De Quiros in 1606 discovered the island of Santo, the most northerly of the group, and called it Australia del Espiritu Santo, because he thought it was part of the great southern continent which at that time every navigator was looking for. " ~ Cardinal Moran believes that De Quiros really reached Australia, and landed on the shores of Port Curtis, Queensland, which is a sacred spot if the theory of his Eminence can be f substantiated, because it must have been there that the first Mass was offered up on Australian soil. In 1768 Bougainville discovered the islands to the south of Santo, and?six years after came Captain Cook, who sailed around and surveyed the iwhole group, giving it the name that it now bears. He called the islands the New Hebrides because they were the most westerly he had. come across in the Pacific, and therefore corresponding in some measure to the old Hebrides to the west of Scotland. According to Captain Rason, most of the natives of the New Hebrides are, pretty much the -same now as they were in the time of De Quiros; and of Cook. 'Sixty years of missionary endeavor,' he says, ' and forty years of recruiting to Queensland and New Caledonia have altered the heathen native but little. There is only one new habit which all the men have adopted,, and that is the carrying of a rifle, which is generally loaded and at full cock. '"''■'■.- Captain Rason has a good deal to say about the missionaries labouring in the New Hebrides Catholic,, Anglican, and Presbyterian. The following extract from his paper shows pretty clearly which of them he admires most as possessing the true apostolic spirit of poverty and selfdenial: — The Ma'rists were the Roman Catholic missionaries, and from the point of view of a Roman Catholic they did excellent work. These were the poorest. Each missionary was allowed £SO a year to provide for everything, whereas the Presbyterian was given £2OO and was allowed the material for a house and the assistance of a skilled carpenter to erect it, together with £2O a year for each child who was born in the islands until it reached the age of sixteen. The Marists had no beautiful yacht to take them about as the Melanesian Mission had, but they taught the natives to work as well as pray, and their thirty-six hours of manual labor per week compared well with the twelve hours of the Presbyterians and the eighteen of the Melanesians.'