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 shores 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.
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