Mormon Publications: 19th Century - Proclamation! To the people of the coasts and islands of the Pacific

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PRATT, Parley Parker. Proclamation! To the people of the coasts and islands of the Pacific; of every nation, kindred and tongue. By an apostle of Jesus Christ. Published for the author, by C. W. Wandell, minister of the gospel. [Sydney, William Baker, Printer, Hibernian Press, 1851]. Signed at end: P. P. Pratt, president of the Pacific mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. 16 pp. 21 cm.

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In February 1851 Brigham Young called John Murdock to preside over the Australian mission, and the following month he left Salt Lake City in company with Parley P. Pratt, who would supervise all missionary activity in the Pacific. On July 11 he and Pratt reached San Francisco. Parley departed for Chile on September 5, and six days later Murdock and Charles W. Wandell, who was already in San Francisco, embarked on a forty-nine day voyage to the southern continent where they stepped ashore at Sydney harbor on Friday, October 31, 1851. The next day they engaged William Baker to print a pamphlet, and Wandell spent Sunday, November 2, preparing the manuscript for the press, while Murdock preached his first sermon in Australia.

Parley Pratt composed Proclamation to the People of the Coasts and Islands of the Pacific in San Francisco prior to his departure for Chile and handed the manuscript to Murdock and Wandell for immediate publication. Proclamation is a signal book--the first Mormon work published outside of North America or Western Europe, the first work associated with that extraordinary effort that sent Mormon missionaries to South America, Australia, India, Africa, and China. Arranged in six chapters, it opens by declaring that a new gospel dispensation has been revealed which is to be preached to every nation and people, and it asserts that Parley Pratt is sending forth his proclamation, first in English, eventually in every language within the bounds of his mission, that all must turn from sin and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. The New Testament church fell into corruption, it continues, so a new apostolic commission has been restored and is held by the Latter-day Saints. At this point it directs an address to the pagans, to the Jews, and to the Indians of North and South America, and in the address to the Indians it summarizes the Book of Mormon narrative and states that the Book of Mormon people sailed from Arabia to the coast of Chile--a belief that may have prompted Parley to undertake his missionary journey to that country.

Proclamation was reprinted in two installments in the Millennial Star for September 18 and 25, 1852, and, translated into Danish, in five installments in the second volume of Skandinaviens Stjerne. T. B. H. Stenhouse reprinted a French translation in four installments in his Le Réflecteur, March-June 1853. Parts of it were republished by Richard Ballantyne in Madras in 1853 under the title Proclamation of the Gospel, Extracted from a Work by P. P. Pratt.

Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church. Volume Two, 1848-1852. Forthcoming.

Used by permission of the author.