One recruit was a forty-four year old bachelor, George Bennett, a “stout and reserved Yorkshire philanthropist” who had been a founding member of the national Sunday School Union and a financial backer of the Society. He was a man in excellent health and of sound evangelical beliefs, but doubtful of his ability to rise to the task. The other man was forty-nine year old Daniel Tyerman, a pastor and widower of four years with four children at home. Both men accepted their commission and, with three other missionaries, set off on their remarkable voyage aboard the Tuscan.

In our own age, missionaries can travel to the remotest corners of the globe within several days and all the while maintain instant communication with anyone else on earth. We can hardly appreciate the agonizing travel conditions of the age of sail. What they hoped would be a two- or three-year trip consumed eight years of Bennett and Tyerman’s lives and one of them perished in the attempt. What those two men discovered in Tahiti, New Zealand, India, China, Oahu, and Madagascar trivializes any travelogue I have heretofore read. I am astounded by their bravery and fortitude and am surprised, though I ought not to be, by the extent of God’s kingdom in the earliest days of worldwide evangelical missionary enterprise.

Bennett and Tyerman visited remote mission stations around the world and were constantly surprised at what they found. They found in Tahiti, for instance, not only that many Tahitians had embraced the Christian faith and been educated in biblical truth by the missionaries, but that the natives had installed a Christian monarch. Even more astounding, the Christian Polynesians themselves had sent out missionaries to the Islands of Eimeo, Huahine, Raiatea, Tahaa, Bora-Bora, Maupiti, Tetaroa, Maiaoiti, Tubuai, Raivavae, and Rurutu, all of which now had growing Christian communities. Not only had the missionaries been blessed with new converts, they themselves had thrived as well. The deputation recorded the following about the Crook family, missionaries on Pape: “The Crooks had nine children, ‘yet the comfort of their habitation, the order of the indoors, and the behaving of every member of their family, reflect the highest credit on their prudence and economy.... But though we had perceived much admirable foresight managing affairs during the day, we still wondered where and how we were all to be lodged for the night. Without any bustle, and seemingly with little difficulty on the part of Mrs. Crook, sufficiently commodious berths were found for every one of us — thirty-two persons, young and old; and a peaceful night followed a gladsome day.’”

On the Missionary Trail wonderfully relates the great sacrifices Christian men and women were willing to suffer for the Savior, but it also reminds us that the arguments against bringing the Gospel of Christ to heathen people have not changed much in the last two centuries. LMS missionaries, for instance, were accused of “spoiling idyllic societies” since Christianity transformed those pagan cultures. In answer to those who feared that the missionaries would ruin the “happy islanders” who were “living in a state of nature ... and primitive simplicity,” Tyerman recorded the life of Hawaiian people before the triumph of the Gospel:

Among the worshipped idols in Hawaii had been the shark god, whose spirit was appeased by human sacrifice; the victims were carried on canoes by the priests to shark-infested places. Other gods were appeased in different ways. In 1804 Rihorih’s father had stopped at Oahu with 8,000 troops on his way to Kauai island. Yellow fever broke out among the king’s troops so ferociously that two-thirds of the men were wiped out in less than two weeks. The king consulted the priests at the marae of Wytiti, near Honolulu, and was told he should sacrifice three humans, 400 dogs, 400 coconuts and 400 bunches of plaintain. “Three men, who had been guilty of the enormous turpitude of eating cocoa-nuts with the old queen (the present kings mother), were accordingly seized and led to the marae. But there being yet three days before the offerings could be duly presented, the eyes of the victims were scooped out, the bones of their arms and legs were broken, and they were then deposited in a house to await the coup de grace on the day of sacrifice.... When the time for the sacrifice came, one of them was placed under the legs of the idol and other two were laid with hogs and fruit on the altar. They were beaten with clubs upon the shoulders till they died of the blows.”

The transforming power of the Gospel swept through the Hawaiian Islands and cannibalism disappeared. I suspect that some modern anthropologists who accept the view that all cultures and religions are basically the same and valuable to preserve, actually wish that the British, and later, American, missionaries had stayed home.

A disappointing tale is also borne out in the Bennett and Tyerman records. They found that the depraved behavior of British merchantmen, officials, and even occasional preachers who traded or ruled over Asian peoples had left behind a record of theft, rape, venereal disease, and death. We ought not to fall into the trap of calling all men of Western cultural heritage Christians. Many were not and brought disgrace upon themselves and their nations and further degradation to the natives. God has people among many tribes and nations and we have a faulty idea of the gospel if Christianity is assigned to one people carte blanche.

I would like to give this book an unqualified recommendation but, alas, a caution is in order. The author occasionally subjects the reader to his own commentary on the beliefs of Bennett and Tyerman and of all evangelical Christians of the nineteenth century. For example, he hopes to enlighten us with this little gem regarding archeology and geology: “Archeology would eventually destabilize the authority of Christianity in Europe as much as anything written by Darwin or the geologists, for in 1822 the world was still held to have come into being in 4004 BC.... The idea of a pre-human world was not considered, since dinosaur fossils were presumed to date back to the beginning of human existence. Subsequent discovery, in the century or so that followed, that dinosaur fossils were about eighty million years old and that the earth itself was much older would affect the credibility of the Christian Church, as each new discovery seemed to expose its former ignorance further. This would reach a pitch in 1961, with the uncovering of human fossils in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, dating to 1.7 million years earlier. Ironically, the site was discovered by an archeologist called Louis Leakey, who was the son of an English missionary in Kenya.”

We find, in this excerpt, the author revealing his own evolutionary presuppositions and imposing them on the reader. This is not the place to present all the arguments for the biblical view of the above subjects, but we must note the author’s intent to add occasional personal notes as explanations of the supposed ignorance of evangelical Christians of the centuries past. Little does he suspect that his own views are subject to demolition and that the missionaries of his narrative were absolutely correct.

On the Missionary Trail demonstrates once again that God’s ways are not our ways and His plan to redeem a people for His own has no national boundaries and is often past finding out. With this little book, though, we get a glimpse of a bit of His Kingdom in history, extended through the faithfulness of a handful of ordinary Christians who cared not for their own lives.