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To illustrate his point, he recounted a visit to a bookshop that he had made with one of Jean-Marie’s sons, then an adolescent. The boy’s eyes were drawn to a book on his father, with his face on the front cover. He was both attracted to and troubled by what he saw, and it prompted Father Apikaoua to assure him there would come a time and a place for him to read it, but it was not yet. The third and, perhaps for me, the most important cautionary note was expressed by Gérald Cortot, who had been chef de cabinet (principal secretary) for Jean-Marie at the time of his death.

Although concerned principally to introduce “civilization,” “enlighten” the Islanders, and protect them from the ravages caused by the traders, they were as well directly or indirectly committed to promoting their respective national interests. Rivalry between Protestant and Catholic missionaries was bitter and steeped in prejudice. It was a powerful, sometimes voluntary sometimes involuntary, expression of the larger rivalry between the English and French colonial empires. In the minds of the local populations and particularly their leaders, attracting missionaries and traders was a part of the same ancestral logic of accepting and integrating Polynesian migrants into their communities and naming strangers as chiefs.

Alphonse was a Catholic from the same tribe as Djubelly, although from the nearby village of Teuta, while Djubelly was a Protestant from Goosana. Both had received religious training in Fiji, Alphonse at the Pacific Regional Seminary and Djubelly at the Pacific Theological College. 5 He assumed responsibility for the Commission des Jeunes, and he was also a member of the executive of the Union Calédonienne, both positions within the party bringing him into close contact with Jean-Marie, whom he much impressed.