The following day was equally encouraging. Over one thousand people crowded into the church to hear Chief Makea of Rarotonga address them. He looked very dignified dressed in a white shirt that Sarah Buzacott had made for the occasion. Instead of trousers he wore a finely woven mat secured around his waist with a rope. The room fell silent as he stood up.
“In the time since the missionaries came to us,” the chief said in a slow, deliberate voice, “we enjoy happiness, to which our ancestors were strangers. Our ferocious wars have ceased, our houses are the abodes of comfort, we have property like the white man. We have books in our own language, our children can read, and above all we know the true God and the way of salvation by His Son, Jesus Christ. I exhort you, Chief Malietoa and your brother chiefs, to grasp with a firm hold the word of Jehovah, for this alone can make you a peaceable and happy people. I myself would have died a savage had it not been for the gospel.”
“We are one, we are one,” Malietoa replied. “We are thoroughly one in our determination to become Christians.” Then he turned to John. “Our wish is that you should fetch your family and come and live and die with us and tell us about Jehovah and teach us how to love Jesus Christ.”
For a moment John didn’t know what to say. He could not live on every island he visited. Finally he spoke. “I am only one, and there are eight islands in Samoa alone. The people are so numerous that the work is too great for any one person. Here is my proposition to you. I will return immediately to my native country and inform my brother Christians of your desire for instruction. They will come to your aid.”
Malietoa fixed his gaze firmly on John. “Then go, go with speed. Obtain all the missionaries you can, and come again as soon as possible.”
Later that night John thought about his promise. Even though he had not voiced his desire to return to England before now, he had been thinking about it for some time. The time was right for a flood of new missionaries in the Pacific islands, and the LMS was sending out only a trickle. If John went home, maybe he could stir up interest in the Pacific and bring many missionaries back with him.
John had one other reason to think about a trip to England. John Jr. had grown into a young man. He had lived his whole life on remote Pacific islands, and it was time for him to make his own choices about where he wanted to live and what he wanted to do. For him to do this, he needed to see what England was like. Such a trip would be good for Samuel as well. He was a smart young boy who loved to learn, and it would be good for him to attend English school for a while.
By the time the Messenger of Peace sailed from Samoa for Rarotonga, John knew that it was the right time for him to visit England. What he did not know was that within twenty-four hours it would be doubtful whether he would make it back to Rarotonga, much less England!
Chapter 15
Old England
Wake up! Wake up! The ship is sinking!”
John rubbed his bleary eyes and looked into the terrified face of the first mate.
“The ship is filling with water.”
John scrambled from his bunk and made his way into the hold. Sure enough, four feet of water was in the bottom of the ship. “Quick!” he ordered. “Wake everyone on board. We need to man the pumps and start bailing.”
John and three of the men worked the handles of the two bilge pumps. Back and forth they went, frantically driving the pumps as fast as they could go. Meanwhile the rest of those on board formed a bucket line and started bailing water out of the hold and over the side. On they went for two hours, and in that time the water level inside the ship dropped six inches. They kept pumping and bailing until the sun began to rise. By eight o’clock their arms throbbed, but they had managed to get most of the water out of the ship. But when they stopped bailing, water began to pour back into the vessel.
The men manned the pumps again while John frantically searched below deck for the leak, but he could not find where the water was coming in. They were in a precarious situation, and he decided to take some precautions in case he couldn’t find the leak. There were two rowboats on the ship into which he loaded several bags of crackers, some bamboo canteens filled with water, and some coconuts. If the Messenger of Peace sank, they would take to the rowboats and hope to have enough food and water to sustain them long enough to make it to an island.
John, along with everyone else on board, was tired. His arms felt like jelly, but he could not afford to stop pumping. The ship limped on for another day until some islands appeared on the horizon. They headed for the islands. At least if they sank there, they would be in shallow water and close to land. And they hoped to be able to inspect the hull from the outside while in shallow water.
They brought the ship close to one of the islands, and while the pumps were worked in shifts, three of the Polynesian men dived into the water and swam under the ship several times inspecting the hull. Still they could not find the leak.
John was unsure of what to do. Should they try to make it home to Rarotonga? Should they head for some other island group? Or should they abandon the ship, let it sink, and wait to be rescued? The next morning John still did not know what to do. Finally he decided to send the men into the water again to search for the leak. This time they were successful. In the stern of the ship, just below the rudder, they found an auger hole about two inches in diameter. The hole had apparently been drilled in the wrong place when repairs were made to the ship’s rudder after the hurricane in Rarotonga. A stone had been wedged into the opening, making it watertight, but it had somehow dislodged, allowing water to now pour into the vessel. Once the hole was plugged, the ship was pumped dry and the Messenger of Peace set out once again for Rarotonga.
They arrived back in Rarotonga in January 1833, and within two weeks Mary Williams gave birth to yet another baby. It was another boy, and this time the child survived. John and Mary were elated to have a third healthy son. They named him William Aaron Barff Williams, or Billy for short.
As it turned out, there were several obstacles to overcome before the Williams family could sail for England. In February another devastating hurricane swept through Rarotonga, tossing roofs into the air and uprooting trees. John and the other missionaries once again set about helping to rebuild. Then John made a trip to Moorea to pick up Daniel Armitage, an expert weaver whom the LMS had sent to teach the Polynesians how to weave cloth. During this trip the Messenger of Peace was driven off course by a gale, and it took three weeks to get back on course.
Finally, in October 1833, John, Mary with Billy in her arms, Samuel, and John Jr. stood on the deck of the Sir Andrew Hammond, a whaling ship that had stopped at Tahiti to take on more provisions on her way to England. The Williams family had made their way to Tahiti to await such a ship, and to pay for their passage home, John had sold the Messenger of Peace. It had not been easy letting her go, but John had a glimmer of hope that while he was away in England, he might be able to raise enough money to purchase a larger vessel. Maybe then, he told himself as he watched the island of Tahiti disappear over the horizon, he could extend his work farther westward in the Pacific to the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, and even New Guinea.
Eight months later, in early June 1834, the Williams family arrived in Gravesend, on the River Thames. John and Mary were finally back in England after having been away for nearly eighteen years.
The family was soon caught up in a flurry of activity. Uncles and aunts wanted to meet the children. The Mission Board of the London Missionary Society requested a personal report on the South Pacific. And the boys were eager to take in all the sights around London, including Windsor Castle and the Tower of London. It was such a foreign place to them after having lived in the islands and villages of Polynesia all their lives.
By August they had settled into a house in London’s Bedford Square, where they entertained many guests. John also set out to tour Great Britain. His goal was to recruit many more missionaries for the Pacific and raise the money needed to support them. At first this was an uphill battle. Few people outside of the London Missionary Society had even heard of John Williams. Eventually, though, John’s persistent personality and imagination-stirring props, including bags of discarded idols and necklaces decorated with human teeth, began to draw crowds to hear him speak. Also, people loved to hear him speak in the Rarotongan language.
John’s talks appealed to a wide range of people. When he spoke at a Sunday school, he told the children, “There are two little words in our language that I always want you to remember: try and trust. You do not know what you can do until you try, and if you trust God through your trials, mountains of imaginary difficulty will vanish as you approach them, and doors will open up that you could never have imagined.”
After one round of speaking engagements, John came back to London to meet with members of the British and Foreign Bible Society. “We have been reviewing your work on the Rarotongan New Testament,” a professor of classical languages told John, “and before we publish it, we have a few questions about your methods. To begin with, can you tell us exactly where you received your education?”
“If you are referring to where I learned to read and write, I attended school in Lower Edmondton for two years. However, I have never stopped learning since that time, although I am as apt to learn something while sitting under a tree as I am in a classroom.”
“I see,” replied the professor dryly. “So are we to believe that the LMS engaged your services without requiring that you attend seminary?”
“Yes,” John said, frustrated that they seemed to be questioning his abilities. “The need for missionaries was great, and still is, I might add. I learned to be a missionary on the field.”
“Well, that poses a problem. You see, we cannot publish a translation that is not thoroughly grounded in the original Greek text. I am sure you can understand that. Accuracy is everything.”
John looked down at his hands; his knuckles were turning white. “I quite agree,” he said as calmly as he could, “and I have taken great pains in comparing the translation to the original Greek. Some of us, such as yourselves, have received a classical education, and others of us have by dint of perseverance acquired sufficient knowledge of Greek to discover, by the use of good critical skills, the sense of the sacred writings.”
“Do you mean to tell us you taught yourself Greek?” another member of the society asked.
“I did indeed,” John replied.
“We will get back to your knowledge of Greek in a moment, but what about the orthography of Rarotongan? What text did you follow to help you decipher that language?”
John laughed. “There is no text on that. It was a process of listening to and imitating the Rarotongans until I understood what they were saying.”
The questioning continued all morning until the members of the society were satisfied that John knew Greek and that his translation methods were sound. Only then did they agree to print the New Testament in Rarotongan.
When John wasn’t touring the country, he translated other things into Rarotongan to be printed, including Pilgrim’s Progress and many hymns.
After they had heard John speak, many people encouraged him to write down his story. He began to write A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Seas. Writing the book took a lot longer than he had anticipated, but eventually, in April 1837, it was published. John dedicated the book to King William IV and had one copy of the book elaborately bound for his wife. Inside the front cover he wrote:
My Dearest Mary,—More than twenty eventful years have rolled away since we were united in the closest and dearest of earthly bonds, during which time we have circumnavigated the globe; we have experienced many trials and privations, while we have been honoured to communicate the best of blessings to multitudes of our fellow creatures. I present this faithful record of our mutual labours and successes as a testimony of my unabated affection, and I sincerely pray that if we are spared twenty years longer, the retrospect may afford equal, if not greater, cause for grateful satisfaction.
John Williams
Eventually copies of the book found their way into over thirty-eight thousand homes, and as a result of reading it, many people sent donations for the LMS work in the South Pacific. Soon enough money had come in to pay for the LMS’s pet project, a school for training Polynesian missionaries that was to be established in Rarotonga.
