ABSTRACT
This chapter re-presents a series of early encounters between Islanders and foreigners at Balade in northeastern New Caledonia. It extracts a story of one group's experiences of sickness, curing and death from enigmatic traces sedimented in several genres of contemporary texts, especially those written by Catholic missionaries. The texts' major virtues are relative contemporaneity and the expertise their authors gained from time in the field, familiarity with the vernacular, and professional interest in local beliefs and rituals. Their major drawback is their status as colonial discourse. There is nothing transparent about texted colonial images of indigenous actions and ideas, nor about the largely invisible translation processes which produced them: ethnographic abstraction and explication in French of indigenous practices and concepts; vernacular tendering of Christian concepts and values by missionaries; appropriation and reinterpretation of such translations by Islanders; translation by Islanders of Christian tropes for which missionaries were unable to find vernacular equivalents. To identify and decode the idiosyncratic and systemic distortions of such texts requires system, imagination, reflexivity and endless comparison. I build a sequential narrative from close critical reading, interspersed with ethnographic commentary bracketing contemporary anecdotes and ethnographic reflections. The period is from 1846, when a handful of Marists had maintained a toehold amongst the Puma of Balade for fewer than three years, to 1861, when New Caledonia had been nominally a French colony for close to a decade. 1
In August 1846 an epidemic reached Balade from nearby Pouebo; it struck indiscriminately, with severe head, chest and stomach pains, tormenting coughs, earache and deafness, and often killed in a few days (Rougeyron, 1846-9: 1, 6-7; Leconte, 1847: 845). By December Rougeyron, the mission head during Douarre's temporary absence in France, gauged that more than a third of the
population had already died in places known to the missionaries; no European was seriously afflicted and by February 1847 only one baptised Christian had succumbed. Rougeyron depicted local suffering in images no less terrible for a ghost of cliche:
During Douarre's initial sojourn, struggling to attain linguistic competence, he rarely mentioned Islanders' religious beliefs or rituals: "It is painful to contemplate a people without sacrifice, without altar, without worship, or at least, we have so far noticed none". He eventually acknowledged that "they do have some idea of the immortality of the soul" and remarked allegations of sorcery following deaths, and the killing of accused persons (Douarre, 1843-53: 4 Apr. 1844-25 Feb. 1846).3
