Soon afterward John and Mary returned to the ship, but John could not get the image of the slaves in the market out of his mind. He had to do something. He could not be silent in the face of such injustice and suffering. So the missionary men went back to the market and found a corner on which to preach.
“Friends,” John began, “it is with great sadness that I observe a horrible blight on the beautiful land God has blessed you with. And that blight is slavery.”
“Keep your mouth shut!” yelled someone from a nearby banana stall.
“No one asked for your opinion!” ventured another vendor.
John stood his ground. “Every one of you will have to give an account to the living God for the way in which you treat other human beings.” Just then John saw something flashing to his left. He turned and saw a man holding a butcher’s knife lunging toward him.
“We don’t need the likes of you telling us how to live!” the man yelled.
John ducked and managed to slip past his attacker. He scampered into a nearby cobblestone street and ran as fast as he could. He could hear the butcher-knife-wielding assailant close behind as he turned into a narrow, twisting alley. Several minutes later John was out of breath and lost, but at least the man was no longer chasing him. Sobered by the experience, John eventually found his way through the crowded streets back to the dock where the longboat from the Harriet was tied up.
Waiting by the longboat, where he had expected to catch up to the other missionary men, who had also fled the scene, was a man John had never seen before but who somehow seemed to know who he was. “Hello, friend. Let me introduce myself,”the man said, holding out his hand for John to shake. “I’m Lancelot Threlkeld, and you must be John Williams.”
The two men shook hands and then sat down on a couple of nearby wooden crates, where John told Lancelot about his close call at the slave market. Lancelot understood completely. He and his wife, Martha, had been bound for Tahiti as LMS missionaries on an earlier ship, but Martha had become too sick to go on. As a result they disembarked and stayed on in Rio de Janeiro so that Martha could recover and await the next ship headed for the Pacific. During this time, he told John, he too had been sickened by the slave trade and would have stayed on in the city and tried to change things if he and Martha had not already pledged themselves to serve in the Tahitian islands. The Threlkelds would be sailing on the Harriet with the others when the ship left Rio de Janeiro.
Once fresh provisions and water were brought aboard, the Harriet again set sail. It headed in a southeasterly direction toward the Cape of Good Hope. This leg of the voyage proved to be much rougher than the westward trip from England to Rio de Janeiro, and longer too—a normal crossing took over three months. John spent much of his time on board studying the Bible, praying, and talking to the other missionaries about what they should do when they eventually arrived at their final destination. Of course none of them had much idea about what to expect. They had never seen a Pacific islander and had little idea about what life would be like in the islands. Lancelot told them that on his trip out to Rio de Janeiro he had gotten to know another LMS missionary, named William Ellis, who was a printer by trade. William had brought with him a simple printing press and a supply of paper and had planned to start printing Bibles in the various dialects spoken in the islands. This sounded like a wonderful idea to John, who hoped that he could be a part of distributing the Bibles around the region.
By mid-March 1817 the Harriet was lying at anchor in Hobart, Tasmania, having crossed the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Hobart was a small but thriving port that serviced whalers and merchants. John and Mary went ashore with the other missionaries, and what they saw was no more encouraging than what they had seen in Rio de Janeiro. This time, though, it was not slavery that held the people in bondage but alcohol. It seemed to the missionaries that beer and rum flowed as freely as water. When they met the governor of Tasmania, who was returning from a hunting expedition, he was drunk and singing nursery songs to a puppy that was cradled in his arms. The pastor of the only church in the settlement was no better. He could barely stagger to the pulpit to preach on Sundays, and his speech was so slurred it was hard to understand what he was saying.
After a brief stay the Harriet sailed north toward Sydney, New South Wales, where they would disembark. They hoped to connect with the Active, a ship the London Missionary Society chartered to transport missionaries from Sydney to the various Pacific islands.
On May 12, 1817, six months after leaving London, the Harriet dropped anchor in Sydney Harbor. Soon after they arrived, a brawny man of about fifty was rowed out to the ship. He introduced himself as the Reverend Samuel Marsden, the LMS representative in New South Wales and the senior chaplain of the Botany Bay penal colony. The Reverend Marsden invited the missionaries to stay with him while they waited for the Active to return from a trip to Tahiti. It took two days to offload all of the missionaries’ cargo and store it in a warehouse. Once this was done, there was little else to do but wait for the Active to appear in the harbor.
John Williams, however, was not a man to sit around drinking tea and gossiping. He wanted to learn everything he could about this new land he had arrived in. He often spent his days with Samuel Marsden, watching what he did and asking a thousand questions. It didn’t take him long to work out that Samuel was a powerhouse of activity and ideas.
Samuel explained to John that the War of Independence in America had meant Britain was no longer able to send convicts to jails in Virginia. Soon British jails were overflowing, and something had to be done. That was when someone suggested that the land surrounding Botany Bay would be a suitable location for a penal colony, and in 1788 the first ships carrying convicts arrived. The Reverend Marsden had then come out from England to be chaplain of the colony. He took John on a tour of a model farm that the convicts had developed under his supervision, and the two men visited several mission schools that educated both the convicts and their children.
Perhaps the endeavor that Samuel Marsden was the most passionate about was the New South Wales Society for Affording Protection of the Natives of the South Sea Islands. Samuel had founded the society four years earlier after hearing about the terrible treatment being meted out to natives by whalers, sealers, and traders. These men routinely cheated the natives, plundered their natural resources, abused the women, and, if they had a mind to, murdered the population of whole villages or islands. Through his society, Samuel Marsden hoped to agitate for change and a humane approach to dealing with the natives. The islanders needed to be seen and understood as people and not just as a hindrance to exploiting the natural resources of the region.
The missionaries waited anxiously in Sydney, but it was not until late August that the Active finally showed up. After a group of convicts unloaded the vessel, the missionaries’ cargo, including a number of bars of iron and a set of bellows John had brought with him so that he could set up a forge and do some ironwork, was put aboard.
Finally, on September 2, 1817, the missionaries were ready to embark on the last leg of their journey. Another missionary couple, Charles and Sarah Barff, joined them for the voyage, bringing the number of missionary men on board the Active to six, three of whom—John Williams, Lancelot Threlkeld, and Charles Barff—were married.
John hoped for Mary’s sake that it would be a fast and calm trip to the Tahitian islands. She was expecting a baby sometime around Christmas. John’s hopes were quickly dashed when the Active ran into a vicious storm. For several days the ship was lashed by gale-force winds, until one of her masts snapped. Nineteen days after setting out from Sydney, the Active limped into the Bay of Islands near the northern tip of North Island, New Zealand. Repairs were made to the ship, and a new mast of kauri, a New Zealand hardwood, was fitted.
The Bay of Islands intrigued John. By now it was October, autumn in London but spring in the southern hemisphere. The breeze that blew across the bay was warm, and the vegetation on the surrounding countryside was lush. Along the seashore a particularly gnarled variety of trees, ablaze with red flowers, seemed to thrive.
Before the missionaries made it ashore they encountered the local native population, the Maoris. For the first time, John was seeing Polynesian people. The Maoris paddled out to the ship in their canoes and scrambled aboard. They poured onto the deck of the Active and greeted the missionaries with their customary rubbing of noses. Their skin was brown, and they had wavy black hair. John was amazed at how friendly they were despite their fearsome looks, especially the men, who had swirling tattoos that covered almost every square inch of their face. The captain of the Active told John that Maori facial tattoos were unique among the people of Polynesia.
After their encounter with the Maoris, John and Mary and the other missionaries went ashore and were greeted by members of the Church Missionary Society who had set up the first mission station in New Zealand just four years before. Even now these missionaries did not dare venture far from the shoreline. The Maoris, despite their friendly greeting aboard the Active, had a reputation for being the fiercest natives in the Pacific. The various tribes were constantly making war on each other. To make matters worse, escaped convicts from New South Wales settled among them, gladly helping them plot more effective ways to annihilate each other and organizing with the whaling ships to import guns for that purpose. These white advisors also did all they could to stir up the Maoris to chase away the missionaries. They did not want missionaries interfering with the life they had carved out for themselves.
Finally, after several days at anchor in the Bay of Islands, repairs to the Active were completed and the ship got under way again, carrying John and Mary closer to their new home.
Chapter 4
A New Home
On Monday, November 17, 1817, exactly one year after setting sail from England, John stood on deck and watched his new home come into view. The island of Moorea lay just west of the main island of Tahiti. Its jagged peaks rose from the deep, blue water of the Pacific Ocean. Thick vegetation covered the island, whose glistening beaches were bordered by towering coconut palms. Around the whole island lay a coral reef, against which the waves crashed, throwing foam into the air and creating a thunderous roar. Inside the reef the water was calm and powder blue. It was an amazing sight and more beautiful than anything John had imagined.
The late morning sun was high overhead as the Active sailed along the eastern side of the island. From his perch on deck, John could see the island of Tahiti several miles off the starboard side of the ship. Though Tahiti was a bigger island, John thought Moorea was the more spectacular island of the two when seen from the water.
As the ship sailed along, a gap opened in the reef and the captain headed the ship into it. The Active slipped into a small natural harbor, where it dropped anchor.
On shore was a small village, which the missionaries later learned was called Afareaitu. Once the Active was safely at anchor, long canoes manned by muscular Polynesian men glided out from the beach to greet the visitors. The missionaries climbed over the side of the ship and down a rope ladder into the canoes bobbing alongside. Several minutes later they were all standing on the edge of the island’s gleaming white sand beach, the crystal water of the lagoon lapping at their feet.
Waiting on the beach to meet them were three LMS missionaries stationed on Moorea—William Ellis, the printer, and John and Margaret Orsmond. They invited everyone, including the Active’s captain and crew, to a meal before the unloading of the ship began. As John sat on the beach, most of the food put in front of him was foreign. Large slabs of fish, yams, coconuts, and breadfruit were all washed down with very weak tea.
