Seeking Safe Harbour: W. H. G. Kingston’s Pacific Adventure Novels

This chapter examines two of W. H. G. Kingston’s children’s novels set in the South Pacific—Mary Liddiard (1873) and Kidnapping in the Pacific (1879)—focusing on evangelical investments in Pacific harbours as the site of missionary expansion and consolidation. As missionaries sought to convert Pacific Islanders, and the British navy attempted to regulate the predatory violence of sandalwood and labour traders, harbours became places within which the struggle for hegemonic control over practices and behaviours was waged. These harbours are read as trans-local, whereby a specific local history accrues resonance through its interconnections with ocean-wide events such that a seemingly isolated harbour can be integrally connected to missionary, trade, and imperial networks across the Pacific.