John Paton / Missionary to Cannibals - Iain Murray (Christian biography) In 1606, a chain of eighty islands in the South Pacific was discovered by Fernandez de Quiros of Spain. In 1773, the Islands were explored by Captain James Cook and named the New Hebrides because of the similarities with the Hebrides Islands off the Northwest coast of Scotland. In 1980, the New Hebrides gained its independence from Britain and France and was named Vanuatu. The chain of Islands is about 450 miles long. If you draw a line straight from Honolulu to Sydney, it will cut through Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, two thirds of the way between Hawaii and Australia. The population today is about 190,000. To the best of our knowledge, the New Hebrides had no Christian influence before John Williams and James Harris from the London Missionary Society landed in 1839. Both of these missionaries were killed and eaten by cannibals on the island of Erromanga on November 20 of that year, only minutes after going ashore. Forty-eight years later John Paton wrote, "Thus were the New Hebrides baptized with the blood of martyrs; and Christ thereby told the whole Christian world that he claimed these islands as His own" (p.75).1 The London Missionary Society sent another team to the Island of Tanna in 1842, and these missionaries were driven off within seven months. But on the Island of Aneityum, John Geddie from the Presbyterian church in Nova Scotia (coming in 1848) and John Inglis from The Reformed Presbyterian Church in Scotland (coming in 1852) saw amazing fruit, so that by 1854 "about 3,500 savages [more than half the population2] threw away their idols, renouncing their heathen customs and avowing themselves to be worshippers of the true Jehovah God" (p. 77). When Geddie died in 1872, all the population of Aneityum was said to be Christians.3 This is part of a great work God was doing in the South Sea Islands in those days. In 1887 Paton recorded the wider triumphs of the gospel. When certain people argued that the Aborigines of Autstralia were subhuman and incapable of conversion or civilization Paton fought back with mission facts as well as Biblical truth. For the next four years he did extraordinarily effective mobilization work for the Presbyterian mission to the New Hebrides, travelling around Australia and Great Britain. He married again in 1864, and took his wife, Margaret, back this time to the smaller island of Aniwa ("It measures scarcely seven miles by two," p. 312). They labored together for 41years until Margaret died in 1905 when John Paton was 81. When they came to Aniwa in November, 1866, they saw the destitution of the islanders. It will help us appreciate the magnitude of their labors and the wonders of their fruitfulness if we see some of what they faced. The natives were cannibals and occasionally ate the flesh of their defeated foes. They practiced infanticide and widow sacrifice, killing the widows of deceased men so that they could serve their husbands in the next world (pp. 69, 334). So he learned the language and reduced it to writing (p. 319). He built orphanages ("We trained these young people for Jesus" p. 317). "Mrs. Paton taught a class of about fifty women and girls. They became experts at sewing, singing and plaiting hats, and reading" (p. 377). They "trained the Teachers . . . translated and printed and expounded the Scriptures . . . ministered to the sick and dying . . . dispensed medicines every day . . . taught them the use of tools . . ." etc. (p. 378). They held worship services every Lord's Day and sent native teachers to all the villages to preach the gospel. In the next fifteen years, John and Margaret Paton saw the entire island of Aniwa turn to Christ. Years later he wrote, "I claimed Aniwa for Jesus, and by the grace of God Aniwa now worships at the Savior's feet" (p. 312). When he was 73 years old and travelling around the world trumpeting the cause of missions in the South Seas, he was still ministering to his beloved Aniwan people and "published the New Testament in the Aniwan Language" in 1897.5 Even to his death he was translating hymns and catechisms6 and creating a dictionary for his people even when he couldn't be with them any more (p. 451). During his years of labor on the islands Paton kept a journal and notebooks and letters from which he wrote his Autobiography in three parts from 1887 to 1898. Almost all we know of his work comes from that book, which is available in one volume now from the Banner of Truth Trust. Paton outlived his second wife by two years and died in Australia on January 28, 1907. Today, 93 years after the death of John Paton, about 85% of the population of Vanuatu identifies itself as Christian, perhaps 21% of the population being evangelical.7 The sacrifices and the legacy of the missionaries to the New Hebrides are stunning, and John G. Paton stands out as one of the great ones.