The Strange Career of William Ellis

The diverse career of William Ellis—gardener, printer, Pacific and Madagascan missionary, ethnographer, London Missionary Society Foreign Secretary, author of at least eight books and numerous pamphlets, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, father of four, and husband of two impressive women—spanned the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1794–1872). A working-class boy of unknown parentage, Ellis rose to a position of social influence that could only have been effected by the social mobility provided by evangelical Protestantism and the British Empire. No less impressive has been his afterlife in contemporary scholarship, a literary longevity Ellis secured by carefully documenting his encounters with other peoples and cultures in the far-flung locales opened by early nineteenth-century imperialism. In crossing between British and colonial cultures, Ellis provides a prism capable of refracting the complex effects of imperial intervention in the Pacific.

Ellis spent only nine years in the mission field (1816–25), a brief time compared to the career missionaries who lived for decades in the islands. Yet his experience across a range of Pacific cultures belied the short period of his tenure: he worked on Moorea, Huahine, and, unusually for the period, often in collaboration with American missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands. His experience as a printer trained by the London Missionary Society (LMS) allowed him to represent the workings of Pacific evangelism in ways that differed markedly from his compatriots and colleagues. Print and textuality were, in fact, key to his achievements, which included orchestrating the first printing of missionary tracts in the Pacific. Horne recounts the "most indescribable excitement and enthusiasm" that eminated from Hawaiians when, under Ellis's direction, "King Pomare set up the first types, and printed the first sheets" on the island (42). The celebratory missionary narratives Ellis produced in this way came to represent monuments of modernity and repositories of Western cultural capital. Their moral and material circulation within Pacific economies reassured evangelical Britons that the "good word" was being disseminated effectively.

A seemingly antithetical combination of scientific observation and Christian piety, of ethnographic curiosity and moral righteousness, energizes all of Ellis's writings, including his prodigious Polynesian Researches (1829). This extraordinarily detailed, two-volume tome spanning more than 1100 pages reveals the uneasy dynamic between these two modes that has provoked so much subsequent scholarship. Ellis wrote carefully and deliberately about the Polynesian cultures he encountered, yet in his works (as in most missionary texts), the specificities of otherness compete with a generalized evangelical discourse that effaces difference by way of habitual moral condemnation. Like many other missionaries, Ellis is a "beach-crosser" (Dening 170), a figure who carried the cultural and religious assumptions of lower-class British Protestantism into a vibrant and challenging Pacific culture, one that changed him as much as he changed it.

This nine-year period of cultural liminality catalyzed all of Ellis's subsequent success. He and his first wife Mary suffered the hardships of a Pacific posting, having four children and enduring Mary's long illness in the islands. Domestic life for a Pacific missionary family was not easy, characterized by "the actual and daily privations and inconveniences, which those accustomed to the ordinary comforts of civilized life would find inseparable from such a state of society" (Ellis, Memoir 42). The food was unfamiliar and unpalatable, there were no regular markets, and servants were reluctant and unbiddable. The domestic privations detailed by Ellis in his Memoir of Mrs. Mary Mercy Ellis (1835) were acute and unsettling, and they leaked from the private realm into Ellis's professional, ethnographic writing, as I will discuss shortly. The family moved relatively often within the region, and Ellis traveled extensively, resulting in an invitation to join the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in Hawai'i. In all these locations, Mary worked alongside her husband, teaching (she had been a teacher at "an institution for the feeble-minded" at home [Etherington 266]), making book covers, and working with Polynesian mothers and their children, all under the aegis of evangelization. Eventually, Mary's health required that the family leave the islands in...