Charles Montgomery · 2004 · sea

In 1892 the Bishop of Tasmania sailed for Melanesia to rescue islanders from black magic. In 2002 his great-grandson followed the same route through Vanuatu and the Solomons looking for the spirits the mission had tried to destroy, and found them thoroughly mixed into the Christianity that replaced them.

1. 1
   Oxford

   The Bodleian, and a small packet of sand from an island in the Santa Cruz group - collected by the author's great-grandfather, the Bishop of Tasmania, who sailed to Melanesia in 1892 to end black magic.

2. 2
   Port Vila

   Vanuatu, a hundred and ten years later - and the discovery that the Anglicanism the Mission planted has been thoroughly stirred into ancestor worship, shark gods and ghosts, without anyone finding this odd.

3. 3
   Sulphur Bay

   Tanna, and the John Frum movement - villagers who raise the Stars and Stripes every morning and wait for an American who may or may not have existed, which is either a cargo cult or a religion depending who is asking.

4. 4
   Mota

   The Banks Islands, and the little island whose language the Melanesian Mission chose as its lingua franca - the centre of the whole enterprise, and now a place almost nobody goes.

5. 5
   Honiara

   Guadalcanal, and the Solomons in the middle of the tensions - militias on the roads, a government that has stopped paying anyone, and the Melanesian Brotherhood walking between the sides unarmed.

6. 6
   Langa Langa

   Malaita, the artificial islands built out of coral in the lagoon, and the Kwaio in the mountains behind - where the shark boss sits cross-legged in the shallows and something very large circles him slowly.

7. 7
   Nukapu

   The reef where Bishop Patteson was killed in 1871, five bodies in a canoe returned to his ship - the place the sand in the Bodleian came from, and the end of a journey that began with a packet of it.