The Book of Missionary Heroes Part 11

[Footnote 25: Hah-wye-ee.]

[Footnote 26: Discovered by Captain Cook in 1778. The first Christian missionaries landed in 1819. Now the island is ruled by the United States of America.]

[Footnote 27: Pa-h[=o]-e-h[=o]-e.]

[Footnote 28: Kah-pee-[=o]-l[)a]-nee. She was high female chief, in her own right, of a large district.]

[Footnote 29: Kil-a-wee-[)a]. The greatest active volcano in the world.]

[Footnote 30: Chay-lo.]

CHAPTER IX

THE CANOE OF ADVENTURE

_Elikana_

(Date of Incident, 1861)

"I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care."

I

Manihiki Island looked like a tiny anch.o.r.ed canoe far away across the Pacific, as Elikana glanced back from his place at the tiller. He sang, meantime, quietly to himself an air that still rang in his ears, the tune that he and his brother islanders had sung in praise of the Power and Providence of G.o.d at the services on Manihiki. For the Christian people of the Penrhyn group of South Sea Islands had come together in April, 1861, for their yearly meeting, paddling from the different quarters in their canoes through the white surge of the breakers that thunder day and night round the island.

Elikana looked ahead to where his own island of Rakahanga grew clearer every moment on the sky-line ahead of them, though each time his craft dropped into the trough of the sea between the green curves of the league-long ocean rollers the island was lost from sight.

He and his six companions were sailing back over the thirty miles between Manihiki and Rakahanga, two of the many little lonely ocean islands that stud the Pacific like stars.

They sailed a strange craft, for it cannot be called raft or canoe or hut. It was all these and yet was neither. Two canoes, forty-eight feet long, sailed side by side. Between the canoes were spars, stretching across from one to the other, lashed to each boat and making a platform between them six feet wide. On this was built a hut, roofed with the beautiful braided leaves of the cocoa-nut palm.

Overhead stretched the infinite sky. Underneath lay thousands of fathoms of blue-green ocean, whose cold, hidden deeps among the mountains and valleys of the awful ocean under-world held strange goblin fish-shapes. And on the surface this hut of leaves and bamboo swung dizzily between sky and ocean on the frail canoes. And in the canoes and the hut were six brown Rakahangan men, two women, and a chubby, dark-eyed child, who sat contented and tired, being lapped to sleep by the swaying waters.

Above them the great sail made of matting of fibre, strained in the breeze that drove them nearer to the haven where they would be.

Already they could see the gleam of the Rakahanga beach with the rim of silver where the waves broke into foam. Then the breeze dropped.

The fibre-sail flapped uneasily against the mast, while the two little canvas sails hung loosely, as the wind, with little warning, swung round, and smiting them in the face began to drive them back into the ocean again.

Elikana and his friends knew the sea almost like fish, from the time they were babies. And they were little troubled by the turn of the breeze, save that it would delay their homecoming. They tried in vain to make headway. Slowly, but surely they were driven back from land, till they could see that there was no other thing but just to turn about and let her run back to Manihiki. In the canoes were enough cocoa-nuts to feed them for days if need be, and two large calabashes of water.

The swift night fell, but the wind held strong, and one man sat at the tiller while two others baled out the water that leaked into the canoes. They kept a keen watch, expecting to sight Manihiki; but when the dawn flashed out of the sky in the East, where the island should have been, there was neither Manihiki nor any other land at all. They had no chart nor compa.s.s; north and south and east and west stretched the wastes of the Pacific for hundreds of leagues. Only here and there in the ocean, and all unseen to them, like little groups of mushrooms on a limitless prairie, lay groups of islets.

They might, indeed, sail for a year without ever sighting any land; and one storm-driven wave of the great ocean could smite their little egg-sh.e.l.l craft to the bottom of the sea.

They gathered together in the hut and with anxious faces talked of what they might do. They knew that far off to the southwest lay the islands of Samoa, and Rarotonga. So they set the bows of their craft southward. Morning grew to blazing noon and fell to evening and night, and nothing did they see save the glittering sparkling waters of the uncharted ocean, cut here and there by the cruel fin of a waiting shark. It was Sat.u.r.day when they started; and night fell seven times while their wonderful hut-boat crept southward along the water, till the following Friday. Then the wind changed, and, springing up from the south, drove them wearily back once more in their tracks, and then bore them eastward.

For another week they drove before the breeze, feeding on the cocoa-nuts. But the water in the calabashes was gone. Then on the morning of the second Friday, the fourteenth day of their sea-wanderings, just when the sun in mid heaven was blazing its noon-heat upon them and most of the little crew were lying under the shade of the hut and the sail to doze away the hours of tedious hunger, they heard the cry of "Land!" and leaping to their feet gazed ahead at the welcome sight. With sail and paddle they urged the craft on toward the island.

Then night fell, and with it squalls of wind and rain came and buffeted them till they had to forsake the paddles for the bailing-vessels to keep the boat afloat. Taking down the sails they spread them flat to catch the pouring rain, and then poured this precious fresh water--true water of life to them--into their calabashes. But when morning came no land could be seen anywhere. It was as though the island had been a land of enchantment and mirage, and now had faded away. Yet hope sprang in them erect and glad next day when land was sighted again; but the sea and the wind, as though driven by the spirits of contrariness, smote them back.

For two more days they guided the canoe with the tiller and tried to set her in one steady direction. Then, tired and out of heart, after sixteen days of ceaseless and useless effort, they gave it up and let her drift, for the winds and currents to take her where they would.

At night each man stood in his canoe almost starving and parched with thirst, with aching back, stooping to dip the water from the canoe and rising to pour it over the side. For hour after hour, while the calm moon slowly climbed the sky, each slaved at his dull task. Lulled by the heave and fall of the long-backed rollers as they slid under the keels of the canoes, the men nearly dropped asleep where they stood. The quiet waters crooned to them like a mother singing an old lullaby--crooned and called, till a voice deep within them said, "It is better to lie down and sleep and die than to live and fight and starve."

Then a moan from the sleeping child, or a sight of a streaming ray of moonlight on the face of its mother would send that nameless Voice shivering back to its deep hiding-place--and the man would stoop and bail again.

Each evening as it fell saw their anxious eyes looking west and north and south for land, and always there was only the weary waste of waters. And as the sun rose, they hardly dared open their eyes to the unbroken rim of blue-grey that circled them like a steel prison. They saw the thin edge of the moon grow to full blaze and then fade to a corn sickle again as days and nights grew to weeks and a whole month had pa.s.sed.

Every morning, as the pearl-grey sea turned to pink and then to gleaming blue, they knelt on the raft between the canoes and turned their faces up to their Father in prayer, and never did the sun sink behind the rim of waters without the sound of their voices rising into the limitless sky with thanks for safe-keeping.

Slowly the pile of cocoa-nuts lessened. Each one of them with its sweet milk and flesh was more precious to them than a golden chalice set with rubies. The drops of milk that dripped from them were more than ropes of pearls.

At last eight Sundays had followed one upon another; and now at the end of the day there was only the half of one cocoa-nut remaining.

When that was gone--all would be over. So they knelt down under the cloudless sky on an evening calm and beautiful. They were on that invisible line in the Great Pacific where the day ends and begins.

Those seven on the tiny craft were, indeed, we cannot but believe, the last worshippers in all the great world-house of G.o.d as Sunday drew to its end just where they were. Was it to be the last time that they would pray to G.o.d in this life?

Prayer ended; night was falling. Elikana the leader, who had kept their spirits from utterly failing, stood up and gazed out with great anxious eyes before the last light should fail.

"Look, there upon the edge of the sea where the sun sets. Is it--" He could hardly dare to believe that it was not the mirage of his weary brain. But one and another and then all peered out through the swiftly waning light and saw that indeed it was land.

Then a squall of wind sprang up, blowing them away from the land. Was this last hope, by a fine ecstasy of torture, to be dangled before them and then s.n.a.t.c.hed away? But with the danger came the help; with the wind came the rain; cool, sweet, refreshing, life-giving water.

Then the squall of wind dropped and changed. They hoisted the one sail that had not blown to tatters, and drove for land.

Yet their most awful danger still lay before them. The roar of the breakers on the cruel coral reef caught their ears. But there was nothing for it but to risk the peril. They were among the breakers which caught and tossed them on like eggsh.e.l.ls. The scourge of the surf swept them; a woman, a man--even the child, were torn from them and ground on the ghastly teeth of the coral. Five were swept over with the craft into the still, blue lagoon, and landing they fell p.r.o.ne upon the sh.o.r.e, just breathing and no more, after the giant buffeting of the thundering rollers, following the long, slow starvation of their wonderful journey in the hut on the canoes among "the waters of the wondrous isles."

"Wake: the silver dusk returning Up the beach of darkness brims, And the ship of sunrise burning Strands upon the eastern rims."

II

Thrown up by the ocean in the darkness like driftwood, Elikana and his companions lay on the grey sh.o.r.e. Against the dim light of the stars and beyond the beach of darkness they could see the fronds of the palms waving. The five survivors were starving, and the green cocoa-nuts hung above them, filled with food and drink. But their bodies, broken and tormented as they were by hunger and the battering breakers, refused even to rise and climb for the food that meant life.

So they lay there, as though dead.

Over the ridge of the beach came a man. His pale copper skin shone in the fresh sunlight of the morning. His quick black eyes were caught by the sight of torn clothing hanging on a bush. Moving swiftly down the beach of pounded coral, he saw a man lying with arms thrown out, face downward. Turning the body over Faivaatala[31] found that the man was dead. Taking the body in his arms he staggered with it up the beach, and placed it under the shade of the trees. Returning he found the living five. Their gaunt bodies and the broken craft on the sh.o.r.e told him without words the story of their long drifting over the wilderness of the waters.

Without stopping to waste words in empty sympathy with starving men, Faivaatala ran to the nearest cocoa-nut tree and, climbing it, threw down luscious nuts. Those below quickly knocked off the tops, drank deep draughts of the cool milk and then ate. Coming down again, Faivaatala kindled a fire and soon had some fish grilling for these strange wanderers thrown up on the tiny islet.

They had no time to thank him before he ran off and swiftly paddled to Motutala, the island where he lived, to tell the story of these strange castaways. He came back with other helpers in canoes, and the five getting aboard were swiftly paddled to Motutala.

As the canoes skimmed over the surface of the great lagoon Elikana and his friends could see, spread out in a great semi-circle that stretched to the horizon, the long low coral islets crowned with palms which form part of the Ellice Islands.

The islanders, men, women, and children, ran down the beach to see the newcomers and soon had set apart huts for them and made them welcome.

Elikana gathered them round him, and began to tell them about the love of Jesus and the protecting care of G.o.d the Father. It all seemed strange to them, but quickly they learned from him, and he began to teach them and their children. This went on for four months, till one day Elikana said: "I must go away and learn more so that I can teach you more."