COLORED Glass Magic Lantern Slide DTO Thomas Baker, preacher EATEN BY CANNIBALS For Sale

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COLORED Glass Magic Lantern Slide DTO Thomas Baker, preacher EATEN BY CANNIBALS:
$102.28

Thomas Baker, a Methodist preacher from Sydney, arrived in Fiji with his wife in 1859. He had eagerly accepted the appointment, as he felt there was still much pioneering work to be done in the Cannibal Isles. Other missions, such as Tonga, were well established – there were no more heathens to convert. On the Fijian island of Viti Levu, however, there were still inland tribes secluded within the rocky, fortress-like walls of the island’s interior who had yet to see a missionary.

Upon his arrival, Baker made several trips to villages in those mountainous regions. Cakobau, chief of the small island of Bau, had recently converted to Christianity and declared himself king of Fiji, waging wars with those secluded tribes who wanted nothing to do with it. To those tribes, Baker was a threat, maybe even a spy working for Cakobau. Baker was well aware of the dangers involved, as evidenced in his journal. He wrote of an incident in which he got caught in the rain in the village of Vunibua and needed a change of clothes: “I had to change to my skin before a bure full of heathen who feasted on me with their eyes very much to my discomfort.”

Soon after their departure from the village that morning, Baker’s group was attacked on the road. The reverend, along with most of his Fijian followers, were clubbed and decapitated with an axe. Not wanting to share the full blame for the murders, they then carried the bodies eight miles up the Sigatoka valley to Nandrau, where they filled the earthen ovens with flesh and feasted with their neighbors. Two men managed to escape, and returned to the mission with the grim news.

Author Adolph Brewster wrote in his book The Hill Tribes of Fiji (published in 1922) that he met with the chief of Nandrau, who told him about the incident. The chief admitted to having eaten part of Baker as child. He said the Vatusilas, to whom his mother belonged, sent one of Baker’s thighs to his father, who wanted nothing to do with it and had it tossed out. He and several other small boys found the thigh, cut it up, and cooked it themselves in the traditional manner, wrapped in banana leaves with spinach.

When word of the missionary’s demised reached Bau, Cakobau dispatched swift justice. The resulting bloodshed, as well as the mysterious unrelated deaths of three of Chief Wawabalavu’s sons, were the first realizations by the Vatusila that they had brought a curse down upon themselves by eating Baker and upsetting the christian God. A descendant of Wawabalavu built a stone cairn memorial sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s at the location where Baker was killed, and the land was offered to the church in atonement.

Reverend Arthur J. Small, who arrived at Bau in 1879, made a pastoral visit to Vatusila at some point during his tenure as the longest-serving Australian Methodist missionary in Fiji. During his visit, he was given an arm bone that belonged to Baker, which had apparently been left in the fork of a molikana tree all those years. Upon his return home, he gave it to a man named Reverend LeLean, who held a quiet funeral ceremony and interred the bone beneath the pulpit of the Baker Memorial Hall of Davuilevu.

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