striking personality of James Chalmers, the great-hearted,
broad-minded, missionary, one of the most courageous who ever
devoted his life to extending the brotherhood of the white
man's ideals. Chafing, as a young man, under the petty
limitations of his mission in the Cook Islands, he sought New
Guinea, as being the wildest and most dangerous field in the
tropical Pacific. Here, for twenty-five years, he devoted his
mighty soul to the work of introducing the rudiments of
civilization and Christianity to the most sullen and dangerous
savages upon earth. Scores of times his life hung in the
balance of native caprice; wives and friends died by his side,
victims to the malignant climate and to native spears, while he
seemed to possess a charmed life; until, true to his
prediction, he was murdered by the cannibals of Dopina at the
mouth of the Fly River in 1901.

Hundreds of scattered tribes had learned to revere their great
leader "Tamate," as they called him, who brought peace and
prosperity to his followers. Yet a danger to Papua that he
himself foresaw and did all in his power to avert came as a
result of the introduction of the very civilization of which he
was the champion, for with peace came new wants that the most
unscrupulous of traders at once sought to supply at prices
ruinous to the social and moral welfare of the natives.

Also, the proximity of Queensland threatened to become a
menace; for Chalmers himself was well aware of the dark history
of the "blackbird trade" wherein practical slavery was forced
upon the indentured laborers, lured from their island homes to
toil as hopeless debtors upon the Australian plantations. A