A Point of Theology on Majuro

A Point of Theology on Majuro by Louis Becke

Louis Becke

The Palestine, Tom de Wolf's South Sea trading brig, of Sydney, had just dropped anchor off a native village on Majuro in the North Pacific, when Macpherson the trader came alongside in his boat and jumped on board. He was a serious faced man with a red beard, was thirty years of age, and had achieved no little distinction for having once attempted to convert Captain 'Bully' Hayes, when that irreligious mariner was suffering from a fractured skull, superinduced by a bullet, fired at him by a trader whose connubial happiness he had unwarrantably upset. The natives thought no end of Macpherson, because in his spare time he taught a class in the Mission Church, and neither drank nor smoked. This was quite enough to make him famous from one end of Polynesia to the other; but he bore his honours quietly, the only signs of superiority he showed over the rest of his fellow traders being the display on the rough table in his sitting room of a quantity of theological literature by the Reverend James MacBain, of Aberdeen. Still he was not proud, and would lend any of his books or pamphlets to any white man who visited the island. He was a fairly prosperous man, worked hard at his trading business, and, despite his assertions about the fearful future that awaited everyone who had not read the Reverend Mr MacBain's religious works, was well liked. But few white men spent an evening in his house if they could help it. One reason of this was that whenever a ship touched at Majuro, the Hawaiian native teacher, Lilo, always haunted Macpherson's house, and every trader and trading skipper

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