“Nunksi nari enu?”
They smiled and spoke to each other. I understood them to be saying, “He has got hold of our language now.” Then they told me their name for the thing which I had pointed to. I found that they understood my question, What is this? or, What is that? and that I could now get from them the name of every visible or tangible thing around us! We carefully noted down every name they gave us, spelling all phonetically, and also every strange sound we heard from them; thereafter, by painstaking comparison of different circumstances, we tried to ascertain their meanings, testing our own guess by again cross-questioning the Natives. One day I saw two males approaching, when one, who was a stranger, pointed to me with his finger, and said,—
“Se nangin?”
Concluding that he was asking my name, I pointed to one of them with my finger, and looking at the other, inquired,—
“Se nangin?”
They smiled, and gave me their names. We were now able to get the names of persons and things, and so our ears got familiarized with the distinctive sounds of their language; and being always keenly on the alert, we made extraordinary progress in attempting bits of conversation and in reducing their speech for the first time to a written form—for the New Hebrideans had no literature, and not even the rudiments of an alphabet. I used to hire some of the more intelligent lads and men to sit and talk with us, and answer our questions about names and sounds; but they so often deceived us, and we, doubtless, misunderstood them so often, that this course was not satisfactory, till after we had gained some knowledge of their language and its construction, and they themselves had become interested in helping us. Amongst our most interested helpers, and most trustworthy, were two aged chiefs—Nowar and Nouka—in many respects two of Nature’s noblest gentlemen, kind at heart to all, and distinguished by a certain native dignity of bearing. But they were both under the leadership of the war-chief Miaki, a kind of devil-king over many villages and tribes. He and his brother were the recognised leaders in all deeds of darkness; they gloried in bloodshedding, and in war, and in cannibalism; and they could always command a following of desperate men, who lived in or about their own village, and who were prepared to go anywhere and do anything at Miaki’s will.
The Tannese had hosts of stone idols, charms, and sacred objects, which they abjectly feared, and in which they devoutly believed. They were given up to countless superstitions, and firmly glued to their dark heathen practices. Their worship was entirely a service of fear, its aim being to propitiate this or that Evil Spirit, to prevent calamity or to secure revenge. They deified their chiefs, like the Romans of old, so that almost every village or tribe had its own sacred man, and some of them had many. They exercised an extraordinary influence for evil, these village or tribal priests, and were believed to have the disposal of life and death through their sacred ceremonies, not only in their own tribe, but over all the Islands. Sacred men and women, wizards and witches, received presents regularly to influence the gods, and to remove sickness, or to cause it by the Nahak, i.e., incantation over remains of food, or the skin of fruit, such as banana, which the person has eaten, on whom they wish to operate. They also worshipped the spirits of departed ancestors and heroes, through their material idols of wood and stone, but chiefly of stone. They feared these spirits and sought their aid; especially seeking to propitiate those who presided over war and peace, famine and plenty, health and sickness, destruction and prosperity, life and death. Their whole worship was one of slavish fear; and, so far as ever I could learn, they had no idea of a God of mercy or grace.
Let me here give my testimony on a matter of some importance—that among these Islands, if anywhere, men might be found destitute of the faculty of worship, men absolutely without idols, if such men exist under the face of the sky. Everything seemed to favour such a discovery; but the New Hebrides, on the contrary, are full of gods. The Natives, destitute of the knowledge of the true God, are ceaselessly groping after Him, if perchance they may find Him. Not finding Him, and not being able to live without some sort of god, they have made idols of almost everything; trees and groves, rocks and stones, springs and streams, insects and other beasts, men and departed spirits, relics such as hair and finger nails, the heavenly bodies and the volcanoes; in fact, every being and everything within the range of vision or of knowledge has been appealed to by them as God,—clearly proving that the instincts of Humanity, however degraded, prompt man to worship and lean upon some Being or Power outside himself, and greater than himself, in whom he lives and moves and has his being, and without the knowledge of whom his soul cannot find its true rest or its eternal life. Imperfect acquaintance with the language and customs of certain tribes may easily lead early discoverers to proclaim that they have no sense of worship and no idols, because nothing of the kind is visible on the surface; but there is a sort of freemasonry in Heathen Religions; they have mysterious customs and symbols, which none, even amongst themselves, understand, except the priests and sacred men. It pays these men to keep their devotees in the dark—and how much more to deceive a passing inquirer! Nor need we hold up our hands in surprise at this; it pays also nearer home, to pretend and to perpetuate a mystery about beads and crucifixes, holy water and relics—a state of mind not so very far removed from that of the South Sea islander, not disproving but rather strongly proving that, whether savage or civilized, man must either know the true God, or must find an idol to put in His place.
Further, these very facts—that they did worship, that they believed in spirits of ancestors and heroes, and that they cherished many legends regarding those whom they had never seen, and handed these down to their children—and the fact that they had ideas about the invisible world and its inhabitants, made it not so hard as some might suppose to convey to their minds, once their language and modes of thought were understood, some clear idea of Jehovah God as the great uncreated Spirit Father, who Himself created and sustains all that is. But it could not be done off-hand, or by a few airy lessons. The whole heart and soul and life had to be put into the enterprise. The idea that man disobeyed God, and was a fallen and sinful creature,—the idea that God, as a Father, so loved man that He sent His only Son Jesus to this earth to seek and to save him,—the idea that this Jesus so lived and died and rose from the dead as to take away man’s sin, and make it possible for men to return to God, and to be made into the very likeness of His Son Jesus,—and the idea that this Jesus will at death receive to the mansions of Glory every creature under heaven that loves and tries to follow Him,—these ideas had to be woven into their spiritual consciousness, had to become the very warp and woof of their religion. But it could be done—that we believed because they were men, not beasts; it had been done—that we saw in the converts on Aneityum; and our hearts rose to the task with a quenchless hope!
The Tannese called Heaven by the name Aneai; and we afterwards discovered that this was the name of the highest and most beautifully situated village on the island. Their best bit of Earth was to them the symbol and type of Heaven; their Canaan, too, was a kind of prophecy of another country, even a heavenly Canaan. The fact that they had an Aneai, a promised land, opened their minds naturally to our idea of the promised land of the future, the Aneai of the Gospel hope and faith. The universal craving to know the greater and more powerful gods, and to have them on their side, led them, whenever we could speak their language, to listen eagerly to all our stories about the Jehovah God and His Son Jesus, and all the mighty works recorded in the Bible. But when we began to teach them that, in order to serve this Almighty and living Jehovah God, they must cast aside all their idols and leave off every heathen custom and vice, they rose in anger and cruelty against us, they persecuted every one that was friendly to the Mission, and passed us through the dreadful experiences to be hereafter recorded. It was the old battle of History; light had attacked darkness in its very stronghold, and it almost seemed for a season that the light would be finally eclipsed, and that God’s Day would never dawn on Tanna!