“Yes, it is me, Fauea, who is the relative of Malietoa,” Fauea yelled at them. “I have come back from Tongatapu on board this praying ship to tell you about the one powerful and true God. What news do you have of my relatives?”
A volley of questions and answers flew back and forth, and then John watched as Fauea proudly called his wife and children to line up along the railing. “And where is Tamafainga?” Fauea asked in a trembling voice.
“Oh!” shouted one delighted man. “He is dead, he is dead! He was killed only ten days ago, and the people are very happy!”
Surely no happier than Fauea! John thought as he saw his Samoan friend leap up and down shouting, “Ua mate le Devolo. Ua mate le Devolo!” (The devil is dead. The devil is dead!)
But the paddlers of the canoes had even more startling news. “We knew you would be coming,” one of them yelled.
The statement puzzled John, as he had only changed plans in Tonga. There did not seem to be any way these people could have been warned of the arrival of the Messenger of Peace.
“Ask him what he means,” John told Fauea.
“Why do you say that?” Fauea asked.
“It is simple,” the Samoan man replied. “On the last full moon our chief lay dying. He gathered many men around him and said, ‘I am leaving you now, but very soon after I go a great white chief will come from beyond the distant horizon, and he will cause the worship of spirits to cease in Samoa, and you shall know the One Great Spirit.’”
The hairs on the back of John’s neck stood on end when he heard this.
The conversations continued until it was nearly dark, and that night John was so excited he could hardly sleep. He had encouraged Fauea to believe that God would perform a miracle in Samoa, and He had performed two! The ship had arrived at the perfect time. Tamafainga was dead and the chiefs had not yet appointed another “holy man,” and a dying chief had given an astonishing prophecy of their arrival in Samoa.
The following morning the Messenger of Peace proceeded westward around the island toward the largest village, Sapapalia. The ship faced a strong head wind, and progress was made slower by the crew’s exhaustion and the shredded mainsail.
In the afternoon Fauea asked to speak to John and Charles alone, and the three of them met in the ship’s main cabin.
“What is it you want?” John asked.
“I have been thinking long and hard about how to bring news of God to my islands, and I have a request to make of you. I would like you to ask the Polynesian missionaries who come ashore with me not to begin their stay in Samoa by condemning our canoe races, our dances, and other amusements. The people are very much attached to these pastimes, and I worry that at the very outset they might learn to dislike a religion that places so many restraints on them. Instead, tell the missionaries to be diligent in teaching the people, to make them wise, and then their hearts will be afraid and they themselves will put away that which is evil. Let the Word prevail and get a firm grip on them, and then we can safely suggest changes that if suggested too soon would prove to be an obstacle.”
“Of course we shall impress this message on the other missionaries,” John assured Fauea, amazed and grateful at how thoroughly this Christian man had thought through his task.
On Sunday the ship dropped anchor in a sheltered bay, where those on board held a worship service. Once again eager Samoans paddled out to the ship, this time with goods for barter and women who were willing to come on board and entertain the men. After their initial reaction at seeing Fauea again, they offered to bring the women and trading goods on board.
“No, no,” Fauea yelled at them. “This ship is a praying ship. We do not have men on board who want to be with your women. And it is our sacred day, so we will not trade goods with you until tomorrow. But you are welcome to come aboard.”
The Samoans talked among themselves for a moment and then came alongside the ship and tied up. As they reached the deck, each one greeted Fauea with a hearty nose rub. Fauea invited them all to sit on the quarterdeck. John listened intently as Fauea explained to them their mission and how a number of islands, including Tahiti, Rarotonga, and Tongatapu, had given up their old gods and become Christian. John savored the moments. Taking place before him was what he had worked so hard to achieve—Christian Polynesians from one island taking the gospel to the next island. How much simpler it was for the Polynesians to receive the gospel from a fellow islander than to hear it from someone as foreign as a white man!
This thought was underscored when Fauea finished speaking and the Samoans turned their attention to John and Charles. John stood cheerfully as they fingered his shirt and examined his belt. Then one daring man bent down and pulled off John’s shoes. As John stood there in his socks he heard the man whisper to Fauea, “What extraordinary people the palangis [white people] are. They do not have toes like we have!”
“Oh,” laughed Fauea, “did I not tell you that they wear clothes on their feet? Feel them and you will find that they have toes just like us.”
Much to John’s amusement the men came up one by one and felt his toes. Each man gave a happy exclamation as he confirmed for himself the fact that palangis had toes.
On Tuesday the Messenger of Peace dropped anchor off Sapapalia and was quickly greeted by people paddling canoes loaded with coconuts, pigs, and bananas to sell. However, Fauea’s presence on the ship created an uproar. Men swarmed onto the deck of the ship. One of the first on board was Fauea’s cousin Tamalelangi—brother of Malietoa, the head chief of Samoa.
Tamalelangi was delighted to see his long-lost relative and announced that all of the produce on his canoe was no longer for sale; it was a gift to the men who had brought Fauea and his family safely back to them. The men in the other canoes followed his example, and soon the deck was covered with fresh fruit and squealing pigs.
Everything was going so well that John and Charles thought it would be safe for eight of the Polynesian missionaries to go ashore with Fauea. Their only concern was that Malietoa and his warriors were on the nearby island of Upolu avenging the death of Tamafianga. However, Tamalelangi assured everyone that the fighting would not shift to Sapapalia.
“Look,” Tamalelangi said to John, pointing across to Upolu in the distance. “I see a plume of smoke rising from there. Surely my brother is gaining the victory. The smoke is no doubt from a village he has burned to the ground. I will send a messenger to fetch him, for he will want to greet you himself and talk with Fauea.”
Fauea and the eight other missionaries went ashore. Later that afternoon a beautiful canoe made from the tightly laced-together skins of breadfruit paddled out to the ship. On board was Malietoa himself. “Greetings to you all!” he shouted as he came near.
John liked Malietoa right away. He seemed straightforward in his speech and actions, and he had a great deal of curiosity.
As night fell, Malietoa climbed back into his canoe, promising to visit the ship again in the morning with more produce. During the night, however, the Messenger of Peace drifted with the current. By the time John got up the following morning, the ship was alone in the vast ocean with not an island in sight. John estimated that they could not be more than ten or twelve miles from land, and since the water was unusually calm, he decided to take the rowboat ashore.
Six men, four Polynesians along with John and Charles, set out at nine in the morning. By lunchtime John was getting a little worried that they had not spotted land yet. By three o’clock the boat was leaking badly and there was still no sign of their destination. Because it was too late and too risky to go back hoping they could find the Messenger of Peace, they kept rowing straight ahead.
Finally, around sunset, the mountains of Savai’i came into view over the horizon, and soon the whole island was visible. Everyone in the rowboat was relieved when a large war canoe set out from the island to meet them and escort them ashore. A huge bonfire blazed on the beach, and as soon as the boat made it to shallow water, a group of men and boys leaped into the water to drag it to shore.
“You are the first white people ever to set foot on Savai’i,” Fauea said as he greeted John and Charles on the shore.
“Well, it’s not hard to see we are an oddity!” John replied as he looked around. In an effort to catch a glimpse of the two Europeans, many of the islanders had climbed to the tops of the surrounding coconut trees.
“Malietoa wishes to see you,” Fauea said. “We will take you to him.”
On hearing this, a number of the Samoans dipped dry coconut fronds into the fire to make torches that they used to light the way as they escorted the visitors to their chief. Men with spears and clubs parted the dense crowd ahead of them. They whacked anyone on the head who got too close to the missionaries!
John soon became separated from Charles, but he was not alarmed. Everyone seemed friendly and helpful. In fact, John quickly found out just how helpful the people were when he told one of his escorts that he was tired from rowing the boat all day. The man uttered a couple of words, and suddenly John felt people grabbing his arms and legs as he was hoisted into the air. “We will carry our honored and fatigued visitor the rest of the way,” the escort announced.
Half a mile later, John was gently lowered to the ground and reunited with Charles, who’d had to walk the whole way.
The two men found themselves in the presence of Malietoa. Seated cross-legged beside him on a finely woven mat was a woman. John assumed her to be his principal wife. Malietoa greeted the missionaries and asked them to visit him again in the morning when they were rested. With that, he bid them good-night.
John and Charles were given a fale (hut) on the beach in which to stay. The red glow of a bonfire flickered through its woven walls, and the sound of waves gently breaking on the reef lulled John off to sleep.
The next morning John was up in time to watch a Samoan woman make his breakfast. First she took some very young coconuts and poured the milk into a wooden bowl. Then she crushed up the white meat of the coconut and mixed it in with the milk. After that she fetched a hot rock from a fire pit and dropped it into the bowl. A few minutes later the coconut soup was piping hot, and John enjoyed drinking it from a coconut shell cup.
John noticed that the woman had a pattern of dark spots all over her arms and legs, something he had not seen before. “How do you make dark spots like that?” he asked.
The woman looked a little startled by the question, but she soon answered. “When someone in our family dies, we take a piece of our cloth and twist it tight like this,” she said, miming the action with her hands. “Then we set fire to it and press the burning cloth against our skin. Soon water forms underneath the skin, and when it is gone, a dark spot remains. The women with the most spots have had the most losses.”
When he got back to his fale, John took out his journal and noted why the women blistered their bodies and how the coconut soup was made and heated. John was fascinated by the differing Polynesian customs and the way in which the people on the various islands made use of the materials available to them. He noted that, unlike the Tahitians, the Samoans did not make clay cooking pots. Since they had no fireproof pots to put directly over a fire, all liquids, it appeared, were heated with hot rocks.
Soon the village was bustling with activity, and John and Charles, along with Fauea and the missionaries with him, were escorted back to Chief Malietoa for a series of talks. They all met in a huge oval building, much superior in craftsmanship to anything John had seen in the islands. The rafters were made from the wood of the breadfruit tree and were so finely fitted together that he could not see the joints. This impressed John greatly because the Samoans did not have iron axes or tools to work with, only stones and sharks’ teeth.
