The Book of Missionary Heroes Part 9

"Let us take him to Makea."

So Papeiha was led to the chief. As he walked he heard them shouting to one another, "I'll have his hat," "I'll have his jacket," "I'll have his shirt."

At length he reached the chief, who looked and said, "Speak to us, O man, that we may know why you persist in coming."

"I come," he answered, looking round on all the people, "so that you may all learn of the true G.o.d, and that you, like all the people in the far-off islands of the sea, may take your G.o.ds made of wood, of birds' feathers and of cloth, and burn them."

A roar of anger and horror burst from the people. "What!" they cried, "burn the G.o.ds! What G.o.ds shall we then have? What shall we do without the G.o.ds?"

They were angry, but there was something in the bold face of Papeiha that kept them from slaying him. They allowed him to stay, and did not kill him.

Soon after this, Papeiha one day heard shrieking and shouting and wild roars as of men in a frenzy. He saw crowds of people round the G.o.ds offering food to them; the priests with faces blackened with charcoal and with bodies painted with stripes of red and yellow, the warriors with great waving head-dresses of birds' feathers and white sea-sh.e.l.ls. Papeiha, without taking any thought of the peril that he rushed into, went into the midst of the people and said:

"Why do you act so foolishly? Why do you take a log of wood and carve it, and then offer it food? It is only fit to be burned. Some day soon you shall make these very G.o.ds fuel for fire." So with the companion who came to help him, brown Papeiha went in and out of the island just as brave Paul went in and out in the island of Cyprus and Wilfrid in Britain. He would take his stand, now under a grove of bananas on a great stone, and now in a village, where the people from the huts gathered round, and again on the beach, where he would lift up his voice above the boom of the ocean breakers to tell the story of Jesus.

And some of those degraded savages became Christians.

One day he was surprised to see one of the priests come to him leading his ten-year-old boy.

"Take care of my boy," said the priest. "I am going to burn my G.o.d, and I do not want my G.o.d's anger to hurt the boy. Ask your G.o.d to protect him." So the priest went home.

Next morning quite early, before the heat of the sun was great, Papeiha looked out and saw the priest tottering along with bent and aching shoulders. On his back was his c.u.mbrous wooden G.o.d. Behind the priest came a furious crowd, waving their arms and crying out:

"Madman, madman, the G.o.d will kill you."

"You may shout," answered the priest, "but you will not change me.

I am going to worship Jehovah, the G.o.d of Papeiha." And with that he threw down the G.o.d at the feet of the teachers. One of them ran and brought a saw, and first cut off its head and then sawed it into logs.

Some of the Rarotongans rushed away in dread. Others--even some of the newly converted Christians--hid in the bush and peered through the leaves to see what would happen. Papeiha lit a fire; the logs were thrown on; the first Rarotongan idol was burned.

"You will die," cried the priests of the fallen G.o.d. But to show that the G.o.d was just a log of wood, the teachers took a bunch of bananas, placed them on the ashes where the fire had died down, and roasted them. Then they sat down and ate the bananas.

The watching, awe-struck people looked to see the teachers fall dead, but nothing happened. The islanders then began to wonder whether, after all, the G.o.d of Papeiha was not the true G.o.d. Within a year they had got together hundreds of their wooden idols, and had burned them in enormous bonfires which flamed on the beach and lighted up the dark background of trees. Those bonfires could be seen far out across the Pacific Ocean, like a beacon light.

To-day the flames of love which Papeiha bravely lighted, through perils by water and club and cannibal feast, have shone right across the ocean, and some of the grandchildren of those very Rarotongans who were cannibals when Papeiha went there, have sailed away, as we shall see later on, to preach Papeiha's gospel of the love of G.o.d to the far-off cannibal Papuans on the steaming sh.o.r.es of New Guinea.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: P[)a]-pay-ee-h[)a].]

[Footnote 17: Tay-ee-ay: ta-oo-a: fay-noo-[)a]: nay-ee.]

[Footnote 18: Va-hee-nay-ee-n[=o].]

[Footnote 19: M[)a]-kay-[)a].]

[Footnote 20: T[)a]-p[=a]-ee-roo.]

CHAPTER VII

THE DAYBREAK CALL

_John Williams_ (Date of Incident, 1839)

Two men leaned on the rail of the brig _Camden_ as she swept slowly along the southern side of the Island of Erromanga in the Western Pacific. A steady breeze filled her sails. The sea heaved in long, silky billows. The red glow of the rising sun was changing to the full, clear light of morning.

The men, as they talked, scanned the coast-line closely. There was the grey, stone-covered beach, and, behind the beach, the dense bush and the waving fronds of palms. Behind the palms rose the volcanic hills of the island. The elder man straightened himself and looked keenly to the bay from which a canoe was swiftly gliding.

He was a broad, st.u.r.dy man, with thick brown hair over keen watchful eyes. His open look was fearless and winning. His hands, which grasped the rail, had both the strength and the skill of the trained mechanic and the writer. For John Williams could build a ship, make a boat and sail them both against any man in all the Pacific. He could work with his hammer at the forge in the morning, make a table at his joiner's bench in the afternoon, preach a powerful sermon in the evening, and write a chapter of the most thrilling of books on missionary travel through the night. Yet next morning would see him in his ship, with her sails spread, moving out into the open Pacific, bound for a distant island.

"It is strange," Williams was saying to his friend Mr. Cunningham, "but I have not slept all through the night."

How came it that this man, who for over twenty years had faced tempests by sea, who had never flinched before perils from savage men and from fever, on the sh.o.r.es of a hundred islands in the South Seas, should stay awake all night as his ship skirted the strange island of Erromanga?

It was because, having lived for all those years among the coral islands of the brown Polynesians of the Eastern Pacific, he was now sailing to the New Hebrides, where the fierce black cannibal islanders of the Western Pacific slew one another. As he thought of the fierce men of Erromanga he thought of the waving forests of brown hands he had seen, the shouts of "Come back again to us!" that he had heard as he left his own islands. He knew how those people loved him in the Samoan Islands, but he could not rest while others lay far off who had never heard the story of Jesus. "I cannot be content," he said, "within the narrow limits of a single reef."

But the black islanders were wild men who covered their dark faces with soot and painted their lips with flaming red, yet their cruel hearts were blacker than their faces, and their anger more fiery than their scarlet lips. They were treacherous and violent savages who would smash a skull by one blow with a great club; or leaping on a man from behind, would cut through his spine with a single stroke of their tomahawks, and then drag him off to their cannibal oven.

John Williams cared so much for his work of telling the islanders about G.o.d their Father, that he lay awake wondering how he could carry it on among these wild people. It never crossed his mind that he should hold back to save himself from danger. It was for this work that he had crossed the world.

"Let down the whale-boat." His voice rang out without a tremor of fear. His eyes were on the canoe in which three black Erromangans were paddling across the bay. As the boat touched the water, he and the crew of four dropped into her, with Captain Morgan and two friends, Harris and Cunningham. The oars dipped and flashed in the morning sun as the whale-boat flew along towards the canoe. When they reached it, Williams spoke in the dialects of his other islands, but none could the three savages in the canoe understand. So he gave them some beads and fish-hooks as a present to show that he was a friend and again his boat shot away toward the beach.

They pulled to a creek where a brook ran down in a lovely valley between two mountains. On the beach stood some Erromangan natives, with their eyes (half fierce, half frightened) looking out under their matted jungle of hair.

Picking up a bucket from the boat, Williams held it out to the chief and made signs to show that he wished for water from the brook. The chief took the bucket, and, turning, ran up the beach and disappeared.

For a quarter of an hour they waited; and for half an hour. At last, when the sun was now high in the sky, the chief returned with the water.

Williams drank from the water to show his friendliness. Then his friend, Harris, swinging himself over the side of the boat, waded ash.o.r.e through the cool, sparkling, shallow water and sat down. The natives ran away, but soon came back with cocoa-nuts and opened them for him to drink.

"See," said Williams, "there are boys playing on the beach; that is a good sign."

"Yes," answered Captain Morgan, "but there are no women, and when the savages mean mischief they send their women away."

Williams now waded ash.o.r.e and Cunningham followed him. Captain Morgan stopped to throw out the anchor of his little boat and then stepped out and went ash.o.r.e, leaving his crew of four brown islanders resting on their oars.

Williams and his two companions scrambled up the stony beach over the grey stones and boulders alongside the tumbling brook for over a hundred yards. Turning to the right they were lost to sight from the water-edge. Captain Morgan was just following them when he heard a terrified yell from the crew in the boat.

Williams and his friends had gone into the bush, Harris in front, Cunningham next, and Williams last. Suddenly Harris, who had disappeared in the bush, rushed out followed by yelling savages with clubs. Harris rushed down the bank of the brook, stumbled, and fell in. The water dashed over him, and the Erromangans, with the red fury of slaughter in their eyes, leapt in and beat in his skull with clubs.

Cunningham, with a native at his heels with lifted club, stooped, picked up a great pebble and hurled it full at the savage who was pursuing him. The man was stunned. Turning again, Cunningham leapt safely into the boat.

Williams, leaving the brook, had rushed down the beach to leap into the sea. Reaching the edge of the water, where the beach falls steeply into the sea, he slipped on a pebble and fell into the water.

Cunningham, from the boat, hurled stones at the natives rushing at Williams, who lay prostrate in the water with a savage over him with uplifted club. The club fell, and other Erromangans, rushing in, beat him with their clubs and shot their arrows into him until the ripples of the beach ran red with his blood.