The last heathen: encounters with ghosts and ancestors in Melanesia
Religious biography, Canadian non-fiction, Religion, Christianity, Travel and geography, Asian travel and geography
Human-narrated audio
Summary
In 2002 the author set out to trace the path of his great- grandfather, the Right Reverend Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, a man of the cloth who, like hundreds of others in the late 19th century, sought to bring Christianity to… the natives. He encountered cargo cults, martyred missionaries, the so-called pagan beliefs of the indigenous people, civil war, the brutal hand of British colonization, slavery, savagery, cannibalism, and conspiratorial sharks. What he found was not just on the Melanesian islands and among the people, but in the ether, in the howls of the past, and ultimately in himself. Some strong language and explicit descriptions of violence. 2004.