Vanuatu was hit hard by Cyclone Pam in March. This tiny Pacific island has a long history with the PCC.
It began with the determined advocacy of John Geddie, a Scottish immigrant serving as a minister at Cavendish and New London in PEI. He persuaded his church, the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia to establish a mission and appoint him as its first missionary, the first to be supported and directed by a colonial church. Because of a family tradition of support for the London Missionary Society, and the fashionable nature of the South Pacific, the field settled on was Vanuatu, then called the New Hebrides. Geddiie left Halifax in November 1846 and after a long trip arrived in Aneityum, the southernmost island in the chain, in July 1848. With him were his wife and child and a man called Isaac Archibald, sent out to be a teacher. Geddie lived in Aneityum until just before his death in 1872.
A dozen or so missionaries, plus wives were sent to the New Hebridean mission. Most of them were short lived, dying of natural causes or withdrawing for medical reasons after a few years. Two, the brothers Gordon, also from PEI, were killed in the course of a civil war on Erromanga, another island in the chain. In 1871, two more Maritimers arrived, J.W Mackenzie and Hugh Robertson. They were joined in 1872 by Joseph Annand, three men who turned out to be remarkably long lived. In 1879 the Maritime Synod decided that since the New Hebrides was a more natural field for the Australasian churches, the Canadians should concentrate on the West Indies and the Canadian west They did, however undertake to support the men on the field, Annand, Mackenzie and Robertson. When Robertson died on the way home in 1914 the personal connection between the church in Canada and that in the New Hebrides came to an end. The WMS ED, did continue for some years a small grant to the college for teachers Annand had been running.
It was never a large field, but significant because it was a first. If memory serves the Vanuatuan church was invited to our centennial, but 1975 is, as historians say, beyond my period.
