We can understand how curious it would sound to him when we remember that (although Wilfrid and Augustine and Columba had gone to Britain as missionaries over a thousand years before The Duff started down the Thames) no cargo of missionaries had ever before sailed from those North Sea Islands of Britain to the savages of other lands like the South Sea Islands.
There was a hurried order and a scurry on board the Government ship. A boat was let down into the Thames, and half a dozen sailors tumbled into her and rowed to The Duff. What did the officer find?
He was met at the rail by a man who had been through scores of adventures, Captain Wilson. The son of the captain of a Newcastle collier, Wilson had grown up a dare-devil sailor boy. He enlisted as a soldier in the American war, became captain of a vessel trading with India, and was then captured and imprisoned by the French in India. He escaped from prison by climbing a great wall, and dropping down forty feet on the other side. He plunged into a river full of alligators, and swam across, escaping the jaws of alligators only to be captured on the other bank by Indians, chained and made to march barefoot for 500 miles. Then he was thrust into Hyder Ali's loathsome prison, starved and loaded with irons, and at last at the end of two years was set free.
This was the daring hero who had now undertaken to captain the little Duff across the oceans of the world to the South Seas. With Captain Wilson, the man-o'-war officer found also six carpenters, two shoemakers, two bricklayers, two sailors, two smiths, two weavers, a surgeon, a hatter, a shopkeeper, a cotton factor, a cabinet-maker, a draper, a harness maker, a tin worker, a butcher and four ministers. But they were all of them missionaries. With them were six children.
All up and down the English Channel French frigates sailed like hawks waiting to pounce upon their prey; for England was at war with France in those days. So for five weary weeks The Duff anchored in the roadstead of Spithead till, as one of a fleet of fifty-seven vessels, she could sail down the channel and across the Bay of Biscay protected by British men-o'-war. Safely clear of the French cruisers, The Duff held on alone till the cloud-capped mountain-heights of Madeira hove in sight.
Across the Atlantic she stood, for the intention was to sail round South America into the Pacific. But on trying to round the Cape Horn The Duff met such violent gales that Captain Wilson turned her in her tracks and headed back across the Atlantic for the Cape of Good Hope.
Week after week for thousands and thousands of miles she sailed. She had travelled from Rio de Janiero over 10,000 miles and had only sighted a single sail—a longer journey than any ship had ever sailed without seeing land.
"Shall we see the island to-day?" the boys on board would ask Captain Wilson. Day after day he shook his head. But one night he said:
"If the wind holds good to-night we shall see an island in the morning, but not the island where we shall stop."
"Land ho!" shouted a sailor from the masthead in the morning, and, sure enough, they saw away on the horizon, like a cloud on the edge of the sea, the island of Toobonai.[12]