Just as John called out, a commotion erupted outside. “Turn out the hog! Let us cut his throat!” a man yelled from the other side of the door.
John jumped up and barred the door. Mary came rushing into the room. “What is it, John?” she asked in a trembling voice.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “You sit down and pray. I’ll take care of it.”
John crept up to the window and peeked out. Standing on his veranda were two large men. One was wearing a pair of trousers as a jacket, an arm stuffed into each leg. John’s heart skipped a beat when he saw the machete the other man was brandishing.
“Come on out, you pig!” goaded the man with the machete. “I’m going to cut your throat.”
Mary sobbed quietly as John backed away from the window. What should he do? There was no back way out of the house, and the two men were much larger than he was.
Just then John heard singing. He looked out the window again to see a group of six Christians walking up his path carrying a string of fish. When the would-be murderers saw them approach, they leaped off the veranda and ran away.
John flung the door open to welcome his friends. They had saved his family from certain death. Mary, however, took a long time to calm down after the incident. In fact, she was so upset that their baby came early. It died within hours of being born, and the Williamses buried it beside the new chapel.
Despite the loss of their baby, John and Mary were reminded in a celebration held at the school that the Christian message had saved the lives of hundreds of other babies. By 1821 three hundred children and many adults were regularly attending the missionary school. The teachers decided to have a parade and had the children make banners that expressed why they were grateful to be able to learn to read and write. Several of the children decorated a banner that read, “Had it not been for the gospel we should have been destroyed as soon as we were born.”
When an old man in the crowd saw the banner and learned what it said, he asked Tamatoa for permission to speak to the gathered crowd.
“Oh, that I had known that these blessings were in store for us!” he began. “Then I would have saved my children, and they would have been among this happy group repeating these precious truths. I shall die childless, though I have been the father of nineteen children.”
John did not doubt what the old man was saying. Before the missionaries arrived with the gospel, most of the children born on the island were killed soon after they were born. The native priests told the people that the god Oro demanded they sacrifice the thing that was the most precious to them. Since the mothers loved their babies, the babies were taken away and sacrificed at the marae.
While the parade of so many eager and happy children made John feel proud, it also made him feel strangely restless. He felt that his work on Raiatea was over, and he knew that there were other missionaries and local Christians who were more than capable of continuing the church work. It was time for him to move on.
But where should he go? John realized that he would never be content to spend his life on a single island, and the LMS board had now taken away the Hawies, the only efficient means of traveling from one island to another. As he thought about it, he decided to write to the mission board in London and request a transfer to Africa or somewhere else where there was a larger population to work among. In his letter he wrote:
I have given myself wholly to the Lord.… I have not another desire but to live and die in the work of my Saviour…but I regret that I ever came to these islands.… I request, then, a removal.
The reasons which induce me to request a removal are, first, the small population of this island, and the comparatively easy life I am now living.… Our settlements consist of from 600 to 1,000 persons, and our congregations about the same; and there are at Huahine three missionaries and three at Raiatea.
I saw in your publication that there were 34,000 inhabitants in these islands.… There were only 5,000 or 6,000…in Tahiti with 8 or 9 missionaries, I naturally expected to find about 28,000 persons in the six leeward islands.…After two years of travelling…I can find about 4,000 inhabitants. I know that one soul is of infinite value. But how does the merchant act who goes in search of goodly pearls? Supposing he knows where there is one pearl…and at the same time, another spot, where there are thousands of equal value; to which would he direct his way?
John did not intend to wait a year or two for a reply to his letter. He started making plans to leave as soon as the next boat arrived. Sure enough a boat did arrive, just not the one he was expecting.
Chapter 6
Links in a Chain
A cooling breeze blew in from the ocean as John Williams strolled along the beach one morning in March 1821. The tops of the coconut palms that lined the shore rocked gently from side to side above him, and the perfectly transparent water of the lagoon lapped at his feet while gulls dived and turned overhead. But John was oblivious to it all. His mind was on the letter he had just written requesting a transfer and wondering where he might be sent next—Africa, he hoped, where his friend Robert Moffat was serving. As he walked and thought, something on the horizon caught his attention. He stopped and looked out to sea, narrowing his eyes and putting his hand above them to shield against the glare of the morning sun. As he looked, he could see it was a large outrigger canoe. Lined up along her side a group of warriors were paddling rhythmically as they guided the vessel toward Va’oara. Quickly John turned and began heading back down the beach toward the village.
By the time he reached Va’oara, the canoe had entered the lagoon and was just a few hundred feet from shore. A large crowd had gathered to watch as the strangers came ashore. About twenty-five people were in the canoe, and one man, who appeared to be their chief, jumped out of the canoe and waded ashore. “I come in peace,” he said.
John and Chief Tamatoa stepped forward to welcome the stranger.
“My name is Auura, and I am the chief of Rurutu,” the stranger continued as the rest of his party pulled the canoe ashore. “Many days ago a terrible sickness came to our island. Many of our number died. We believed the gods were punishing us and were determined to kill us all. So my brother chief and I each built the biggest canoes we could, filled them with our people, and paddled into the deep. We were on the water for many days, and food and fresh water were no more. Then a violent storm overtook us, and my brother’s canoe was swallowed up by the waves and seen no more. After twenty days we spied an island within a coral reef. We were driven up onto the reef by the waves, and some men from the island paddled out to help us. They told us their island was called Maura, and had we not reached Maura then, we surely would have perished.”
The chief stopped to take a breath, and John noticed with pride that a mat had already been spread on the sand and the local Raiateans were piling cold taro and breadfruit on it for the weary travelers to eat.
The chief continued with his explanation. “The people of Maura were very kind to us. We were astonished when they showed us their maraes, all broken down, and their idols turned to ashes by their own hands. ‘Who are you to destroy your gods?’ I asked them. ‘And what terrible things have befallen you as a result?’
“‘Nothing bad has happened,’ they replied. ‘In fact, great good has come upon us. We now worship one God who does not have a wooden form, nor does he require the sacrifice of human flesh.’
“These things truly amazed us, and we stayed with them for some time, waiting to see when the gods would send punishment, but they never did. Soon we asked about the new God they served, and they instructed us that there were white people on other islands like this one who would tell us more and show us the way to the God who makes them happy and kind toward strangers.”
As John listened to Chief Auura, he became more and more excited. He could see that he had not given himself enough time to really understand what his role could be as a missionary in the South Pacific. There was plenty of work to do here, and for him it did not have to involve running one little mission station on one little island. No! He realized that he could teach the local Polynesians themselves to take the gospel to the other islands, from the Society Islands all the way across the Pacific to Australia, like links in a giant chain. Christianity could be spread for thousands of miles across the ocean by dedicated local missionaries, each of whom need go no farther than to his neighboring island.
Tamatoa, Chief Auura, and John continued to talk as everyone ate and drank. Then the Rurutuans were given a grand tour of Va’oara, including the schoolhouse, with which they were most impressed.
“So this is where you teach people to say aloud the things that are drawn on paper,” Auura said. “I would like to learn how to do that now.”
John laughed. There was nothing like an eager student!
Over the following weeks John found that Auura was not only eager but also very intelligent. In less than three months he had mastered the Tahitian spelling book, could repeat the basic catechism of Christian beliefs, and could read the Gospel of Matthew! And several of the other members of his party were not far behind him in their learning.
“Once I thought I would never return, but now I am very anxious to revisit my own island,” Chief Auura told John. “I wish to carry to those of my relatives who are still alive the knowledge of the true God and His Son Jesus Christ.”
Within a week of this request, a ship stopped at Raiatea. Captain Grimes, the vessel’s master, was a strong supporter of the LMS and had stopped to pick up a cargo of coconut oil that the islanders had produced under the missionaries’ direction. John asked the captain if he would be willing to divert a little on his journey to England to return the Rurutuans to their island three hundred miles to the south. On hearing the circumstances, Captain Grimes readily agreed to transport the group back to Rurutu.
When Auura heard of the captain’s kind offer, he looked downcast. “How can I go to a land of darkness without a light in my hand?” he lamented. “Will you send someone with me who has more knowledge of the one true and powerful God than I do?”
Instantly John knew what he should do. He must put the request before the Christians of Raiatea and see whether they would rise to the challenge.
That evening after dinner, the village drummers beat out the news that a special church meeting was going to begin. When a good number of the congregation had arrived, John explained to them that Auura wanted to go back to his own island but that he wanted Christian teachers to go with him. Who, John challenged them, would take the good news to their neighbors?
Two men, both well-respected deacons in the church, stood up. “Here we are,” they said. “Send us.”
So it was settled. The first official Raiatean missionaries were commissioned and sent off with Captain Grimes, Chief Auura, and the rest of those who had arrived with him. The Christians of Raiatea promised to pray for them every day.
Before long the Raiatean Christians were eager to know what was going on in Rurutu. They decided to send some of their best seafarers off in their canoe to visit the two deacons. The men arrived back jubilantly a month later. “The kingdom of God has come to the people of Rurutu,” one of the men declared as they pulled their canoe up onto the beach.
“See, they have forsaken their idols, and our brothers are teaching them how to read the Holy Book,” said another of the men, waving a wooden statue in the air.
A meeting was called immediately, and eager Christians gathered to hear news of their missionaries. The returning seafarers displayed many idols, including one of the god Aa. The statue had a small chamber carved in its back that stored twenty-four lesser gods. Letters written by the two deacons were produced and read. They filled the Christians with delight, not only because they told the story of how the local people were opening their hearts to the gospel but also because they told of events far away. Before they had learned to read and write, the Raiateans had no way to communicate with each other except by beating certain drum patterns or through talking. Now, with writing, words could be put on paper in one location and read in another location three hundred miles away!
