Missionaries and Idols in POLYNESIA By David Shaw King 88 An exhibition currently at the Brunei Gallery of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London documents the early years of the London Missionary Society (LMS), from its formation in 1795 until around 1825, the time of its initial “success” in central Polynesia, a triangle in the Pacifi c encompassing the Society Islands, the Cooks, and the Australs. The fi rst half of the exhibition shows forty archival items—paintings, engravings, prints, books, imprints, and a miniature “peep show”—that together illustrate the formation of the LMS, the missionaries themselves, the voyage of the missionary ship Duff, and the society’s Missionary Museum in London. The second half of the exhibition, in the words of missionary Rev. John Williams, puts on view an “ocular demonstration” of forty idols and non-idol artifacts that the LMS missionaries collected and sent back to their headquarters. Objects have been loaned by the British Museum, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, LMS archives at SOAS, the Cuming Museum, three private collections, the National Maritime Museum, and Dr Williams’s Library. Rather than the carved fi gurative deities such as those shown in the recent Atua exhibition, these idols, largely from the Cook and Society Islands, are more abstract in conception, many being elaborate and fragile bundles of feathers and fi ber that are rarely included in public displays. Captain James Cook and the other European explorers who “discovered” these remote islands in the middle of the Pacifi c have received a great deal of attention. They came home and published lavishly illustrated narratives, all describing Tahiti in the late eighteenth century as an earthly paradise. The inhabitants lived in the “stone age” (technically correct, since there was no metal), yet they were welcoming, sophisticated, intelligent, ART on view
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