When the Williamses and Pitmans arrived, the morning service at the church that Papeiha and Tiberio had built was just finishing. Soon people streamed out to greet John. The people had heard much about him from the two Raiatean missionaries, who also warmly greeted him.
After a feast with Papeiha and Tiberio and the members of the church, the missionaries’ baggage was brought ashore from the ship. John and Mary and baby Samuel were given a hut, or fale, to live in, and the Pitmans moved into the next-door fale.
A few days after they had arrived, Papeiha came to John and Mary. “The people want you to sit outside your door. They have something to show you.”
John and Mary sat and waited, and soon they heard Rarotongans singing in the distance. Slowly the singing grew louder until a large crowd of people came into view making their way along a bushy path that led from the interior of the island. The people carried with them huge carvings, some as long as fifteen feet. One by one, the carvings were placed in a pile at John’s feet. John counted fourteen of them. One of the elders in the group stepped forward and said, “These were the things we worshiped before the ‘Godmen’ taught us the right way to go. Now we do not need them anymore, and we ask you: What should we do with them?”
John looked over the pile of idols, imagining how much suffering their worship had caused—the babies sacrificed and eaten, the old men and women killed and their blood sprinkled at the base of these idols. Now the Word of God had changed the hearts of many Rarotongan people, and for that John was grateful. “Let us set the longest idols aside and use them as the upright poles for our new chapel,” he said. “That way, when you stand in church, you will remember what the true God has delivered you from.”
The people all agreed that that would be a good end for their idols. The following day John set about supervising the building of a new chapel. Now that over four thousand people were gathering for church each Sunday, the existing building Papeiha and Tiberio had built was too small.
One morning soon afterward, John was reminded just how isolated the Rarotongan people had been up until now. He was working on the foundations of the new chapel when he realized he had left his set-square in his hut. He had no paper with him, so he picked up a chip of wood and wrote on it, “Mary, please send my set-square.” He then called over one of the workmen, a Rarotongan who did not go to church. “Friend, take this to my house and give it to Mrs. Williams,” he instructed.
The man gave John a puzzled look and then blurted out, “Take that! She will call me a fool and scold me if I carry a chip of wood to her.”
“No,” John replied. “She will not scold you. Take it and run fast. I am in a hurry.”
The man took the chip from John. “But what should I say?” he asked.
“You don’t have to say anything. The chip will say all I wish,” John said.
The man held up the chip of wood and laughed. “How can this speak? Has this a mouth?”
“No, but Mrs. Williams will know what it says. Go and show it to her. You will see.”
The man went running off and returned several minutes later. John heard him yelling before he arrived. “See the wisdom of the English people. They can make chips talk, they can make chips talk!” The man held the chip high in one hand and the set-square in the other. As he handed John the set-square he said, “Can I keep this chip which talks?”
John smiled in agreement, and the man poked a hole in it and strung it around his neck. For several days after that, John often saw small groups of people standing around the man as he expounded on the wonders of the talking chip.
The man’s unfamiliarity with writing got John thinking about why Papeiha and Tiberio were not having much success in teaching the Rarotongans to read. As soon as the new church was completed, he turned his attention to education. He noticed that Rarotongan was quite different from the Tahitian dialect of the Polynesian language. John set about mastering the new dialect. As soon as he felt confident that he was using the correct Rarotongan words, he began translating into Rarotongan the Gospel of John and the letter to the Galatians, along with some simple reading books. He hoped that having these in the Rarotongan dialect would make the process of learning to read easier, especially since Papeiha and Tiberio were still using the Tahitian grammar books they had brought with them as the basis for their teaching.
The Rarotongans were very excited when John announced “Rat Extermination Day.” The rats were such a problem on the island that everyone had a tale to tell about them. For instance, Elizabeth Pitman told John that one night she had left her leather shoes beside the bed, only to be awakened by a strange noise. She peered over the edge of the bed and saw a huge rat dragging her shoes away. In the morning she found only the soles of the shoes outside in the sand.
On the appointed day, every man, woman, and child on the island was armed with a stick and told to go out and club the rats in the village. Thirty large woven baskets about six feet long were placed at collection points, and then the hunt began. In less than an hour all thirty baskets were filled to overflowing with dead rats, and still hundreds more rats were scampering away into the bush for their lives. John could see that they would have to think of another way to get rid of the vermin.
Soon after this Chief Makea, several of the island’s elders, and the missionaries got together to make new laws for Rarotonga. Until now such laws had been impossible. No one had thought that various groups on the island could or would live together in peace. Even the treatment of family members was often harsh. The Rarotongans had a custom called Ao Anga. Papeiha explained to John that Ao Anga meant that when a man died, his brothers swarmed his house and took everything he owned away—clothes, mats, and food. They left nothing for the man’s widow or his children. As a result, many times the widow and children starved to death. No one seemed to care. But now that the missionaries had come to the island, the people wanted laws that protected the weak and the young. After much talking, many of the laws put in place on Raiatea were adopted in Rarotonga.
Each Sunday more people were at church than the previous week. This encouraged John greatly, though he found out that not all of the preaching was going on within the confines of a building. He had often passed Buteve’s house and greatly admired his well-kept garden. This was no small feat for Buteve because both his arms and his legs had been withered away by disease. Still, he used the stumps of his arms to position a stick in the ground and then threw his full weight on it, loosening the soil so that he could plant seeds. One evening as John walked by, Buteve shouted, “Welcome, servant of God, who bought light into this dark island!”
John stopped to talk with Buteve, and he was astonished at how much the man knew about the Bible, especially since he had never seen Buteve in church. “Where did you obtain your knowledge?” he asked.
“From you, to be sure. Who brought us news of salvation but you and those you sent ahead?”
“That’s true,“ John replied, “but I do not recollect ever seeing you come to hear me speak of these things, so how do you understand them?”
“Why,” Buteve replied, a glint in his eye, “as the people return from services, I take my seat by the wayside and beg for a bit of the Word from them as they pass by. One gives me one piece, someone else another piece, and I collect them together in my heart. By thinking over what I have been given and praying to God to make it known to me, I understand a little about His Word.”
John was astonished and delighted to hear this, and from then on, whenever he passed Buteve’s house, he stopped in for an interesting conversation.
Things continued to go well on Rarotonga, and after eight months John was satisfied that the Pitmans had adjusted to life on the island. It was now time to think about returning to Raiatea. This proved difficult, however. Not a single ship had passed the island since John and Mary had arrived, and John began to wonder whether he might be stranded there for years. Once again his thoughts turned toward owning a ship in which to get around the islands. This time, though, there were no ships to buy. If he wanted a ship to get off Rarotonga, he would have to build one. And that is what John decided to do.
Before he started building the ship, John took stock of the tools he had to work with. He had a pickax, a hoe, an adze, several hatchets, and several hammers. As well, he had a length of heavy iron chain that had been abandoned on the beach by a whaling ship three years before. John decided that he would use this to fashion the metal fittings necessary for the ship.
Before he could mold and shape the metal chain, John had to build a forge. And before he could build a forge, he needed to make some bellows to pump air to the fire to get it hot enough. For this purpose three of the four goats on the island were killed, and their hides were to be used in place of leather for the bellows. However, before John could finish his forge, the rats had eaten the goatskins. John then made a bellows from a box with two chambers in it and a pistonlike device that sucked air into the box and then blew it out into the fire. Once the forge was built, John used charcoal instead of coal as fuel for the fire and got busy. The locals lined up to crank the bellows and watch John work. John used a large rock as an anvil and began heating and reshaping the links of the chain. The Rarotongan men were amazed at what he did with the metal. “Why didn’t we think of heating the hard stuff instead of just trying to beat it with stones to change its shape?” they exclaimed to one another.
John then set to work on the hull. With no saw, the trees were cut down with a hatchet and the logs split using wedges. The planks were then smoothed with the adze and two of the hatchets with long crooked handles tied to them. Slowly the hull began to take shape. There was not enough iron to make metal spikes to hold the ship together, so holes were bored in the roughhewn planks and wooden pegs were driven through the holes and into the frame beneath to hold the vessel together.
Of course there was no way of steaming the planks so that they could be bent and molded to the curve of the hull. When John wanted planks of a particular shape, he bent a piece of bamboo to the shape he wanted and sent some of the men out to find a tree growing in that shape. When they found such a tree they cut it down and split it, thus providing two or three planks that shape.
Once the hull, which was about sixty feet long and eighteen feet wide, was built, coconut husks, the dried stalks of bananas, and pieces of native cloth, or tapa, were used instead of oakum to caulk the seams between the planks and make the ship watertight.
After the hull was caulked and the two masts were in place, it was time to think about sails and rigging. The sails were made from local woven sleeping mats that were quilted to give them more strength against the wind. The ropes for the rigging were made from strips of bark from the hibiscus tree. John made a crude machine for twisting the strips of bark together to form rope.
The next challenge for John was to make the wheels for the blocks used to raise and furl the sails. Because the wheels had to be perfectly round, he made a lathe to turn them. Using wood from the ironwood tree, he began producing the necessary wheels. One of the local chiefs was so taken with John’s efforts on the lathe that he took the first piece produced, threaded a strip of hide through it, and proceeded to wear it around his neck. He pranced up and down through the village showing off his new adornment. The people both admired it and were astonished at how it had been made. “If we had not given up our idols, surely this would have been worshiped and given precedence over all our other idols,” said one man when he saw the piece of turning handiwork.
