Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/182

140 elsewhere and long ago, and the result has never been satisfactory. The Mission claims to have made many thousands of converts!

The Mission was first founded in 1845, when Bishop Epal and twelve missionaries sailed from Sydney for the Solomons—most were killed and eaten. A fresh start was made here in New Britain in 1889. The Bishop has eleven other stations on the islands and mainland. Archbishop Navarre and two bishops are the heads of all the Catholic missions in this part of the world. I believe Mr. Parkinson presented them with 1000 acres here or elsewhere. A Wesley an mission was founded in 1875, and has now various stations in the Archipelago.

It is to be hoped they will not take to clothing the natives, or they will all die off of pneumonia at once. A piece of red cloth which they can drape about themselves as they please on gala days is all that they want. These natives; when taken away from their homes; frequently die of home-sickness.

Let them send out from Europe a batch of German girls, who will find eager husbands awaiting them; and so people this colony with a white race. A simple; homely bourgeois German girl would here find herself a person of importance. You cannot people a colony without women; and they ought to be white women.

A deluded band of people—men and women—set out from Germany to live here in this colony “the simple life,” that is; to discard all raiment, as the natives do; and live in the sun. Their primitive Garden of Eden soon came to an end, and such of them as survived returned to a more conventional existence.

From the Mission a path—no made road or street—wanders along the bank to Herbertshöhe,