“We are hoping you have brought more tea with you,” laughed William. “As you can see, we are making the most of the little we have left.”
John smiled. “I believe we have tea packed in the hold,” he assured William.
Palm trees swayed in the breeze, and the smell of native flowers filled the air. As the missionaries and the crew of the Active ate their meal, the local people stood around watching. The women wore long, white, shapeless dresses like nightgowns, while the men had a length of cloth wrapped around their waist. Many of the men also had rings through their noses and tattoos on their arms and legs.
It took the remainder of the day to unload all the cargo from the Active. The ship’s captain was eager to be on his way again, as the trade winds were due to die down anytime now and he wanted to be well on his way back to Sydney by then.
Five sailors who had traveled on the ship to Moorea with the missionaries would also be staying on the island. These men had been sent by Samuel Marsden, who had heard that King Pomare was building his own ship and had engaged the sailors to crew the vessel.
That night John and Mary and the other newly arrived missionaries slept in a long hut made of woven coconut fronds. John hardly slept at all. His mind was alive with ideas about how he could reach the Polynesians.
The next morning, after a time of prayer and a Bible reading, John Orsmond asked the new arrivals to go with him and look at the frame of the seventy-ton boat that King Pomare and the missionaries had begun work on the year before. The task had become too difficult to complete, and the project had been abandoned. Now the half-built vessel lay on its side on a nearby beach. The idea for the boat, John Orsmond explained, had been to use it to collect pearls and mother-of-pearl from the nearby Tuamotu Islands to ship to New South Wales, where the cargo could be exchanged for items the islanders needed, such as knives and tools.
John Williams, along with the five sailors and the other new missionaries, had spent the previous two and a half months aboard the Active with little else to do but talk, pray, and read. Now that they were ashore, they were looking for some kind of physical challenge and thought they had found it in the abandoned hull of the ship. They decided that between them they could complete the project. John agreed to make all the iron fittings for the ship, but first he had to set up a forge, which he would build on the beach near the boat.
After gathering a pile of rocks, John began to stack them together in a circle to form the forge. He left a small opening near the bottom through which his bellows would blow air to get the temperature of the coals in the forge high enough to make the iron red-hot so that he could mold and shape it. As John worked, a group of local men watched his every move.
Soon John became frustrated at this, not because the locals were watching him but because he could not talk to them in their language. William Ellis told him that the Polynesian language was difficult to master. He had made slow progress learning it in the time he had been on Moorea and estimated that it would be three years before he could speak it fluently, studying each night from the Tahitian grammar and spelling book that early LMS missionaries had prepared.
The thought of waiting three years before he could speak directly to these people made no sense at all to John. Surely there had to be a faster way to learn the language. As he hammered away shaping iron into spikes, pulley wheels, and the other various pieces of hardware needed for the new boat, John thought about the problem. As a child he had learned English from those around him by listening to what they said and repeating their words, even if he made mistakes that sounded funny. Why not apply the same approach to learning Tahitian? John started right away. He pointed to the sand, a man, a baby, a tree, gesturing to whoever was nearby to tell him the native word for the thing. The locals understood right away what he was doing. John soon found that he was never alone. Some curious Polynesian was always at his elbow repeating simple words to him and laughing at his attempts to imitate them. John laughed too. He knew how funny his pronunciation must sound to them, but he did not give up.
Everyone was surprised at the progress the men made on the boat. After languishing on the beach for nearly a year, the vessel was ready to launch two weeks after the newly arrived missionaries began work on it. King Pomare was invited to come over from the island of Tahiti to see the boat launched. John was eager to finally meet this man he had heard so much about.
King Pomare II arrived in a large outrigger canoe, escorted by an entourage of warriors in smaller canoes. Henry Nott accompanied King Pomare from Tahiti. John wished he could have captured the scene and sent it to the Reverend Wilks and the young men in the Mutual Improvement Society back at Whitefield Tabernacle in London. Here in front of him were the two men they had all heard so much about.
With great pomp and ceremony, King Pomare was carried ashore from his canoe and set down on the beach. John marveled at the feat, given the size of the king. King Pomare was a huge man, tall and wide. His long hair was tied back into a ponytail, and he had a wispy moustache and small tuft of beard on his chin. He wore black trousers and a pleated white shirt.
Once safely ashore, King Pomare announced that he had decided to name the new boat the Hawies, after Dr. Thomas Hawies, the founder of the London Missionary Society and a man the king had heard a lot about. The launching ceremony began with a prayer by Henry Nott. The locals then manned ropes on both sides of the ship to keep it upright as they slid it down a makeshift slip into the water.
John watched proudly as King Pomare stood at the bow of the vessel and declared, “I name this ship the Hawies.” Then, as he had been instructed, the king swung a bottle of wine against the hull. The bottle shattered, and the ship toppled onto its side! The rope holders had been so surprised by the wine bottle breaking that they let go of the ropes and fled. It took all the men in King Pomare’s entourage helping to get the Hawies upright once again and into the water. A huge cheer went up from the crowd when the vessel finally sat floating in the lagoon.
Now that the boat was finished, John turned his attention to building a simple house for himself and Mary and the soon-to-arrive baby. When not working on building the dwelling, he spent his time listening to and imitating the language. Soon he was able to speak in simple sentences.
On January 7, 1818, John Chawner Williams was born. He was strong and healthy, and his parents were both very proud of him. A constant parade of islanders came to stare and laugh at the “pink” baby.
Soon after the birth of the baby came the birth of the Tahiti Missionary Society, the local branch of the LMS, which was to be run and funded by Tahitian Christians themselves. The goal of the society was “making the Word of God grow” in the islands. The idea of Polynesians taking an active roll in running their own missionary society was new, and everyone waited anxiously to see how it would work out.
The society had a strong beginning. King Pomare was made its president and proudly announced that he and his wife had prepared arrowroot with their own hands as an offering to the society. Other offerings of pigs and coconut oil began to pour in. Soon the Tahiti Missionary Society had five hundred pounds of goods to ship on the Hawies to Sydney, where the cargo could be sold to provide money.
Everything was going well—too well, really. In John Williams’s opinion there were too many missionaries huddled on the islands of Tahiti and Moorea when there was so much more work to be done on nearby islands. John longed to go somewhere new—somewhere that did not already have a well-established missionary base. His opportunity to go to such a place came in June when several chiefs from the nearby island of Huahine invited the missionaries to set up a station there. They had seen the mission’s work on Tahiti and Moorea and now wanted missionaries working among them.
John and Mary quickly volunteered for the new venture, along with fellow LMS missionaries John and Margaret Orsmond, William Ellis, and John Davies. The local mission leaders approved their move, and the group soon was packed and ready to go. Of course, the printing press and forge went along as well. And the group took livestock, including five goats that would produce milk for their tea.
On Huahine the missionaries were given an enthusiastic welcome, along with gifts of pigs, native cloth, and all kinds of local fruit. Mary was delighted with the reception and quite willing to live with John and the baby in a thatched hut the locals provided them. John was grateful for his wife’s happy temperament and her faith that things would work out. He knew how blessed he was to have someone such as Mary who did not complain and beg to go home.
John and the other missionaries busied themselves setting up a mission station, and John continued to work hard learning the language. All of the other missionaries were working through a laborious grammar and lexicon that Henry Nott had hastily put together for them, but John still believed it was better to listen and talk with the Polynesians themselves. The method worked for him, and by September, only ten months after setting foot in the islands, he was able to preach his first sermon in Tahitian. Now he was ready for a new challenge!
This challenge came in the form of Tamatoa, the chief of the island of Raiatea. All the missionaries in the Society Islands, the island group of which the Tahitian islands were a part, knew about Raiatea. It was the center of a large religious group who worshiped the god Oro. Polynesians came from other places to offer human sacrifices and worship at the island’s marae, the wide stone platform where religious rituals were performed. But something amazing had happened on Raiatea, even before a single missionary had set foot on the island.
Chief Tamatoa had been exposed to Christian teaching several years before while visiting Tahiti. He and many of his warriors fought alongside King Pomare as the king struggled to regain control of the island after a rebellion had broken out. The Tahitian Christians the chief met at this time impressed him, and before long Tamatoa decided to abandon the worship of Oro and the other gods and become a Christian. Many of his warriors joined him in the decision. But when they returned to Raiatea, their new faith provoked outrage from those they had left behind.
To explain why he had given up his traditional gods, Tamatoa toured the island with his family, meeting with people. During this time he invited his wife to sit and eat pork with him. This caused an outrage because pork was a sacred food that men could eat but women were forbidden to touch. Such action would only provoke the wrath of Oro, and everyone on the island waited to see what would happen to Tamatoa’s wife. To everyone’s surprise, nothing happened, and soon all of the women in Tamatoa’s party were eating pork.
The women then asked to be allowed to eat turtle. This was even more outrageous than their eating pork. Turtle was the most sacred food of all. Again, when the women ate it, nothing happened. Finally, some of the chief’s servants had taken shelter from a storm in an idol house. They had gotten cold, and recalling the way the women had broken taboos about eating pork and turtle, they had taken a length of cloth that was wrapped around an idol and used it as a blanket. This insult to their gods was too much for the people who worshiped Oro on Raiatea. They mounted a surprise attack on the chief and his Christian followers. Even though Tamatoa was greatly outnumbered, he and his men managed to win the fight. However, instead of killing and eating those who had attacked them, as was normal practice, Tamatoa and his men allowed their attackers to go free. This turn of events startled the attackers, and soon a number of them were asking about this new God who had more power than Oro.
