4 August: Boreham on James Chalmers

Great Heart of Pacific
It is exactly half a century since[1] the world learned, with a shudder, that James Chalmers, whose birthday this is, had been brutally massacred in New Guinea. On the wave-lashed beach at Ardishaig in Scotland, there stands a noble monument to his gallant memory. "We erect this column," said Sir Donald Macalister, principal of Glasgow University, "as a tidal mark to show that, in the minds of this generation of Knapdale men, no honour can be too great for that noble fellow-Highlander whom we admirably commemorate today." That stately memorial is eloquent of much.

James Chalmers was, his biographer assures us, a broth of a boy. He lived chiefly on boots and boxes. Eager to know what lay beyond the ranges, he wore out more boots than his poor parents found it easy to provide. Taunted by the constant vision of the restless waters, he put to sea in broken boxes and leaky barrels that he might follow in the wake of those daring navigators whose exploits had fired his fancy. He was a born adventurer. Almost as soon as he first opened his eyes and stared around him, he felt that the world was wondrously wide, and he vowed that he would find its utmost edges. From his explorations of the hills and glens around his village home, he often returned too exhausted either to eat or sleep. From his ventures upon the ocean, he was more than once brought home on a plank, apparently drowned.

The Hero Of R. L. Stevenson
Soon after his 18th birthday, a couple of evangelists from the North of Ireland visited those coastal settlements. Chalmers at first offered violent opposition, attempting to break up their meetings. Eventually, however, he was profoundly impressed, and, as a result of the change then effected in his outlook and behaviour, he resolved to dedicate his life to mission work.

Nobody felt a greater enthusiasm for Chalmers than did Robert Louis Stevenson. "He is away up the Fly River," wrote Stevenson on Easter Sunday, 1901. "It is a desperate venture but he is quite a Livingstone card." Stevenson worshipped the ground that Chalmers trod and revelled in any opportunity of contact with him. "He is a rowdy," he declared, "but he is a hero. You will never weary me of that fellow. He is as big as a house and far bigger than any church. He fairly took me by storm. He is the most attractive, the most simple, the most brave and interesting man in the whole Pacific." Mrs. Chalmers cherished as more precious than gold leaf the letters of enthusiastic admiration that Stevenson wrote her concerning her husband. "I wonder," he says, in one of them, "I wonder if even you know what it means to a man like me, a man fairly critical, a man of the world—to meet one who represents the essential and who is so free from the formal, the grimace." On that Easter evening 50 years ago, Chalmers was, as Stevenson said, away up the Fly River. It was a desperate hazard. He knew it, and, a boy still, was boisterously happy about it.

News That Horrified The World
At sunset on that Easter Sunday evening, Chalmers and his companions anchored off a populous settlement just round the most picturesque bend of the river. The natives, coming off in their canoes, swarmed onto the vessel. Chalmers persuaded them to return to the shore and promised to visit them next morning. He kept his word. Early on the Monday morning, he took with him his young colleague, the Rev. Oliver Tomkins, just out from England, and 10 native helpers. They were shown every semblance of hospitality; were taken to a place where, they were told, a great feast was to be given in their honour, and there, immediately on arrival, the hideous massacre took place. The impression created, in all parts of the world, by the news of the death of Chalmers is indescribable. Only those who remembered the emotions with which, 30 years earlier, Europe had heard of the death of Livingstone, had experienced any comparable sensation. Chalmers had always seemed so masculine, so galvanic, so vital that it seemed impossible to think of him as dead.

The sense of incongruity of which everybody was conscious—the feeling that so palpitating a personality could not really have passed—was made lyrically articulate by John Oxenham:—

"Greatheart is dead, they say!
Greatheart is dead, they say!
Nor dead,
nor sleeping! He lives on! His name
Shall kindle many a heart to equal
flame;
The fire he kindled shall burn on and on
Till all the darkness of
the lands be gone,
And all the kingdoms of the earth be won,
And one!
A
soul so fiery sweet can never die
But lives, and loves and works through all
eternity."

During the Second World War we heard much of the "Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels" in New Guinea. The Fuzzy Wuzzies are the direct descendants of the men who massacred Chalmers; and, if there is now anything angelic in their character and behaviour, it is because of the lives that Chalmers and his comrades lived, and the deaths they died, half a century ago.

F W Boreham

Image: James Chalmers

[1]This editorial appears in the Hobart, Mercury on August 4, 1951.