The Missionary's Wayward Daughter. How Sarah Henry Bland Passaged Through the Pacific: 1797-1843.

Abstract

<p><b>This thesis explores the life of Sarah Henry Bland (1797-1843). Sarah was born in Tahiti, just two months after missionaries of the London Missionary Society landed at Matavai Bay, Tahiti. This was the first Pacific protestant mission. Sarah became the subject of scandal and censure in Tahiti when she was sexually intimate with a tāne. In New South Wales, where she lived between 1814 and 1822, she married Dr William Bland outside the non-conformist community, and shortly after, committed adultery. A court case publicly shamed her. She returned briefly to a changed Tahiti where her behaviour again caused gossip and she left for London in 1822, where she died in obscurity in 1843. </b></p> <p>The thesis asks: can we account for Sarah’s intimate racial-crossing and her denunciation of the mission project by the circumstance of this particular place where she grew up ––Te moana nui a kiwa –– and the time –– prior to the mass conversion of Mā‘ohi in 1819? What was it about Sarah’s childhood that influenced her sense of self, and her actions? Sarah’s challenges to contemporary European morality are explored through the lenses of gender and race, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, and evangelical missionary belief and practice during the early nineteenth century.</p> <p>Contemporaries judged Pacific mission children as different, as less than their colonial and ‘sterling’ equals. Historians have continued this discourse of ‘deviancy’, suggesting they were diminished because they were caught between cultures. I argue the mission children –– exemplified by Sarah’s story –– benefitted from two cultures in their childhoods, and developed a new way of seeing the world. As adults, their behaviour was problematized by contemporaries. </p> <p>Sarah passaged through the sea of islands and beyond to London, and we follow her through the various cultural milieux that she encountered at Matavai Bay, Huahine, the penal colony of New South Wales, and Rangihoua, Aotearoa New Zealand. The focus is mission households, particularly the women and children, a neglected field of research in the history of the Society Islands. The research complements and extends histories of Pacific cultural encounters, and mission history but through the experiences of mission children. This study turns on its head the narrative of what was done to the Mā‘ohi people by exploring the impact of Mā‘ohi culture on this first generation of Pacific mission children. Tracing the particulars of Sarah’s life through the fragments of evidence in the archives informs us of the extraordinary in a little-known life.</p>