British Online Archives

New Zealand & Polynesian Records from Colonial Missionaries, 1838–1958 was curated in association with the Bodleian Library.

This collection contains records compiled by the United Society Partners in Gospel (USPG), a UK-based Anglican missionary organisation that operates globally. From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century the USPG went by the name of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).

Anglican missionaries first arrived in New Zealand and Polynesia in the seventeenth century. Their mission was to spread the gospel to the indigenous Māori and Polynesian people. The arrival of Europeans disrupted traditional ways of life.

This collection includes letters, journals, and supplementary material composed by the SPG’s New Zealand and Polynesian branches during the period 1838–1958. These documents contain a wealth of information, including: progress of the mission, relations with the indigenous Polynesians, the geography of the land, and insights into how monetary grants were spent.

The missionaries were not lacking in courage and resolution, but inevitably they saw the Māori from a vastly different cultural vantage point. They were not qualified by education… to recognise that the Māori had a way of life in some respects superior to the European.

Ruawai D. Rakena, 1971, Wesley Historical Society (NZ)

Insights

The first missionaries sent by the SPG to Australia arrived in New South Wales in 1739.

Correspondence from New Zealand, between 1840 and 1875, includes descriptions of missionaries' early encounters with the indigenous Māori.

This collection includes the correspondence and journals of George Selwyn, the first Anglican Bishop of New Zealand. Selwyn and 22 others left Plymouth in December 1941 and he arrived in Auckland in May 1842. On the outbound journey to Sydney, Selwyn was taught the Māori language by a Māori boy returning from England. On arrival in New Zealand, Selwyn was able to preach using the Māori language.

Documents in the volume “Melanesia Diocese, 1838–1958” consist almost entirely of the private correspondence of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson, the first Bishop of Melanesia. Patteson was not always welcomed by local communities, who treated him with suspicion due to the abuses they faced at the hands of European colonists who enslaved and kidnapped Melanesian people.

Patteson aimed to educate boys at his missionary school on Norfolk Island, before returning them to their villages for the purpose of leading the next generation. Patteson was not always successful in this mission and he experienced difficulty in trying to persuade local people to send their sons to missionary school.