e
Gospel had not reached. The counsels of St. Paul and his own sagacity
warned him against exposing his Church to the danger of jealous rivalry.
So long as Christ was preached in an island or group of islands, he was
content; he would leave them to the ministry of those who were first in
the field. Many of the Polynesian groups had been visited by French and
English missionaries and stations had been established in Samoa, Tahiti,
and elsewhere; but north of New Zealand there was a large tract of the
Pacific, including the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands, where the
natives had never heard the Gospel message. These groups were known
collectively as Melanesia, a name hardly justified by facts,[38] as the
inhabitants were by no means uniform in colour. If the Solomon
Islanders had almost black skins, those who lived in the Banks Islands,
which Patteson came to know so well, were of a warm brown hue such as
may be seen in India or even in the south of Europe. Writing in the very
last month of his life, Patteson tells his sisters how the colour of the
people in Mota 'is just what Titian and the Venetian painters delighted
in, the colour of their own weather-beaten boatmen'.

[Note 38: Melanesia, from Greek [Greek: melas]=black, [Greek:
nesos]=island.]

Selwyn had visited these islands intermittently since 1849, and had
thought out a plan for spreading Christianity among them. With only a
small staff of helpers and many other demands on his time, he could not
hope to get into direct contact with a large population, so widely
scattered. His work must be done through natives selected by himself,
and these must be trained while they were young and open to impressions,
while their character was still in the making. So every year he brought
back with him from his cruise a certain number of Melanesian boys to
spend the warmer months of the New Zealand year under the charge of the
missionaries, and restored them to their homes at the beginning of the
next cruise. At Auckland, with its soldiers, sailors, and merchants, the
boys became familiar with other sides of European life beyond the walls
of the Mission School; and their interest was stimulated by a close view
of the strength to be drawn from European civilization. By this system
Selwyn hoped that they on their return would spread among the islanders
a certain knowledge of European ways, and that their relatives, seeing
how the boys had been kindly treated, would feel confi