Gifts were exchanged, and then Malietoa and Tamalelangi officially welcomed everyone to their island and promised that they would protect the missionaries and their families. John was pleased with the way things were going. He felt confident that the Raiatean and Aitutakian missionaries he had brought with him would be safe in Samoa.
When John walked back to the beach, the Messenger of Peace was just coming into view over the horizon. By evening it was once more at anchor in the bay, and the Polynesian missionaries aboard, along with their wives and children, were all transported ashore.
A week later, just as the Messenger of Peace was preparing to set sail, a long canoe paddled into the lagoon. On board was Matetua, chief of neighboring Manono Island. He had heard that Savai’i had Christian teachers and had come to fetch some for his island. Regrettably, there were no spare missionaries to send back with him, but John promised to return with more missionaries as soon as he could. Samoa, it seemed, was ripe for the gospel.
After a long series of farewells, John and Charles boarded the Messenger of Peace. It seemed empty now that they had dropped off over thirty Polynesian missionaries on Savai’i. However, they had picked up eight passengers—tiny black bats, the only mammals native to the island.
John was anxious to get back and tell Mary all the wonderful things that had happened in Tongatapu and Samoa. However, the wind did not cooperate with them, and it took two weeks for the Messenger of Peace to cover three hundred miles. As a result they began to run low on supplies of food and water. John decided that despite his desire to get home, it would be best for the Messenger of Peace to head for Rarotonga, where they could replenish their supplies before conditions on the ship became desperate.
Chapter 13
A Time to Rebuild
After such a slow start, the Messenger of Peace finally caught a good tail wind and covered the eight hundred miles to Rarotonga in the remarkably short time of seven days. Good news awaited John Williams there. The epidemic had run its course, though Charles Pitman estimated that about eight hundred people had died from the disease. Those who had lived through the terrible time were in good spirits, and Buteve, the man with the withered arms and legs, told John, “Rarotonga is now Rarotonga again.”
While the ship was being resupplied for the next leg of the journey home to Raiatea, John and Charles Barff visited Papeiha at the village of Arorangi and the Buzacotts at Avarua. John was pleased with the progress the missionaries were making in Rarotonga. The schools were an amazing success. Aaron Buzacott’s school had about seven hundred students, while Charles Pitman’s had over nine hundred. When the schools in Avarua opened, the first few students were given slates to write on with chalk. The supply of slates soon ran out, and the teachers handed out trays of sand for the children to write in with a stick. These sand trays proved clumsy, and the children soon decided to make their own slates. After school they would go up into the hills and chisel out flat slabs of rock from huge boulders. They carried the slabs to the beach and rubbed them with sand and coral until they were perfectly smooth. Next they used the purple juice of mountain plantains to stain the rock slabs purple. This made the slabs look almost identical to the slates that came from England. The boys would make wooden frames to hold the mock slates while the girls went in search of sea eggs.
With their homemade slates under their arms, the children would walk to school with their heads held high. For pencils they used the spines of the sea eggs burned at the end to make them soft rather than scratchy. With these slates the children were able to form small, neat letters.
When it was time for John to leave, the Rarotongans pressed him to stay longer. John promised them that he would come back again soon and finish translating the New Testament into Rarotongan. He also said that he hoped to bring Mary and Samuel with him. This made the Rarotongans very happy.
As they set out once again, the winds were in their favor, and the Messenger of Peace covered the distance to Moorea in fifteen days. In Moorea John was reunited with Mary and Samuel and John Jr. After two days of John’s reporting on all of the exploits of the Messenger of Peace to the missionaries and the church, the Williams family made the final leg of the journey home to Raiatea.
In Raiatea the Williamses received an enthusiastic welcome. Because John had been away for so long, many of the Raiateans were convinced he had been shipwrecked. They were overjoyed to see that he was safe and to hear about the amazing story of the trip to Samoa.
Sadly, Chief Tamatoa lay ill, and John went to visit him. Many people, including his son who would be the next chief, were crowded around Tamatoa as he lay on a woven mat. John sat beside him, and the old chief reached out his hand to John. “My dear friend, how long we have labored together in this good cause; nothing has ever separated us. Now death is doing what nothing else has done, but ‘who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’” Then he raised his head and spoke to the gathering. “I exhort you all to be firm in your attachment to the gospel, to maintain the laws made in this land, and to be kind and generous to our missionaries. Beware, lest the gospel be driven from these islands!”
With these words spoken, Chief Tamatoa closed his eyes and drifted from consciousness. As John watched his old friend take his last breaths, he thought back to when he first met Tamatoa. The chief had come to the island of Huahine asking that missionaries come to Raiatea and present the gospel to his people. John had accepted the challenge, and he and Tamatoa had become close friends over the years.
The Smiths, whom the LMS had sent to assist John, had arrived in Raiatea while John was gone. Now that John was back he planned to train them to take over the missionary work on the island so that in a year or so he would be free to move with his family to Rarotonga.
On September 21, 1831, convinced that the Smiths were ready to take over the work on Raiatea, John, Mary, fifteen-year-old John Jr., and four-year-old Samuel boarded the Messenger of Peace bound for Rarotonga. Mary had to be helped aboard because she was expecting another baby sometime after Christmas.
As the ship sailed into the small harbor at Avarua on Rarotonga, John was impressed with how neat and tidy everything looked. A sturdy coral-block wall surrounded the new gleaming white schoolhouse and chapel, and for about a mile on each side stretched houses complete with flower gardens. Once ashore, however, John learned that things were not as orderly as they looked from the boat. Some of the Rarotongans had announced they were going back to their old ways and taunted the missionaries.
John did his best to help rectify this situation, speaking at churches and villages all over the island about the need to stay true to Christian principles. The Williams family was staying and speaking at the village of Ngatangiia on the eastern side of the island when on Wednesday, December 21, four days before Christmas, the winds began to pick up. Soon driving rain was washing over the island, and still the wind increased in intensity. Coconut palms bent until they snapped in two, and roofs began to fly off the houses. Rarotonga was in the direct path of a hurricane. John hurried across the island to secure the Messenger of Peace, which sat at anchor in Avarua. Once he had secured his ship, he hurried back to Ngatangiia. When he arrived, he found the house the family had been staying in destroyed. Thankfully, Mary and the children had escaped and were taking refuge with the village chief. The roof on his house had been roped down to hold it in place, and the chief’s house was one of the few in the village to survive the hurricane intact.
When the hurricane finally subsided two days later, John made his way back to Avarua, where he found utter devastation. Many of the trees had snapped off at ground level, crops were ruined, and not a single building in the village had survived. The new church and school lay in ruins, and worse, the Messenger of Peace was nowhere to be found. John finally located the vessel across a swamp and stuck in a hole in the middle of a glade of chestnut trees several hundred yards inland. The locals told him that the vessel had been carried on the crest of a tidal wave that swept across the area.
Recovering the ship would have to wait, however. The most important thing was to start rebuilding the more than one thousand smashed houses and other buildings on the island. John dispensed axes, adzes, and saws among the chiefs on the island, and the job of rebuilding began.
Five days after the storm had struck, Mary gave birth to a son. The child was stillborn, and the following day John stood with Mary, John Jr., and Samuel at the graveside as they buried the child. This on top of the devastating hurricane was almost more than John and Mary could bear, and more so because it was the seventh child Mary had given birth to that either was stillborn or had died soon after birth. Just before the coffin lid was closed, Samuel sobbed out loud, “Father, Mother, why do you plant my little brother in the ground? Don’t plant him! I can’t bear to have him planted.”
Tears streamed down John’s face. After the funeral John was too distraught to give his full attention to comforting the Rarotongans in their losses from the hurricane. In the end it was an old Rarotongan man whose words comforted John. At a service the following day, the man stood up and said, “True, our food is all destroyed, but our lives are spared, and our wives and children have escaped. Now our large new chapel is a heap of ruins, and for this we grieve most of all. Yet we have a God to worship. Our schoolhouse is washed away, yet our teachers are spared to us.” The man then held up the well-worn pages of the Book of Acts. “And we still have this precious book to instruct us,” he added.
John knew that the man was right. He had lost a son, but God had spared them from a worse calamity—they could all have perished in the storm. It was time to rebuild, not mourn.
During the next three months, John and Aaron Buzacott spent their mornings working on a translation of the New Testament into Rarotongan and their afternoons helping with the rebuilding of the church and school. The islanders were able to undertake much of this work themselves, since many of them had helped to build the original buildings.
Once the church and school were rebuilt, John turned his attention to retrieving the Messenger of Peace from its perch high and dry on the island. He used a series of wooden levers to lift the boat out of the hole amid the chestnut trees. Laboriously he filled in the swamp that lay between the glade of trees and the beach with rocks and laid logs on top of the rocks to slide the ship across. Slowly, bit by bit the vessel was skidded back toward the water until once again it was floating in the ocean. By May repairs had been made and the Messenger of Peace was again ready to set sail.
Once the ship was seaworthy, John and Aaron set out in it for Tahiti. Their mission was to bring back food for the people of Rarotonga. Because of the damage the hurricane had done to the trees and crops on the island, the food supply was fast running out.
The church and the missionaries in Tahiti were glad to see John. They had heard about the devastating hurricane from passing ships. And word that pieces of a medium-sized ship had been found floating near the Samoan islands had fueled speculation that the Messenger of Peace had gone down in the storm and all aboard her had perished. When the ship they had given up for lost dropped anchor off the island, the people were overjoyed.
Although John had planned to go straight back to Rarotonga after the ship had been loaded with food, rumors he heard on Tahiti convinced him to visit Raiatea. John headed for the island, leaving Aaron on Tahiti to work with fellow missionary David Darling on printing the portions of the Bible they had recently completed translating into Rarotongan.
