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, sturdy 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 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.  “I cannot be content,” he said, “within the narrow limits of a single reef.”