Too much, perhaps, had I hoped for from the closely succeeding visits of the good Bishop Selwyn, the gallant Captain Vernon, and the Mission ship John Williams. The impressions were undoubtedly good, but evanescent; and things soon went on as they had done before among our benighted Tannese, led by Satan at his will, and impelled to the grossest deeds of heathen darkness. The change by Divine grace, however, we knew to be possible; and for this we laboured and prayed incessantly, fainting not, or if fainting, only to rise again and tackle every duty in the name of the Lord who had placed us there.
Fever and ague had attacked me fourteen times severely with slighter recurring attacks almost continuously after my first three months on the island, and I now felt the necessity of taking the hint of the Tannese Chief before referred to,—“Sleep on the higher ground.” Having also received medical counsel to the same effect, though indeed experience was painfully sufficient testimony, I resolved to remove my house, and began to look about for a suitable site. There rose behind my present site, a hill about three hundred feet high or rather more, surrounded on all sides by a valley, and swept by the breezes of the trade winds, being only separated from the Ocean by a narrow neck of land. On this I had set my heart; there was room for a Mission House and a Church, for which indeed Nature seemed to have adapted it. I proceeded to buy up every claim by the Natives to any portion of the hill, paying each publicly and in turn, so that there might be no trouble afterwards. I then purchased from a Trader the deck planks of a shipwrecked vessel, with which to construct a house of two apartments, a bedroom and a small store-room adjoining it, to which I purposed to transfer and add the old house as soon as I was able.
Just at this juncture, the fever smote me again more severely than ever; my weakness after this attack was so great, that I felt as if I never could rally again. With the help of my faithful Aneityumese Teacher, Abraham, and his wife, however, I made what appeared my last effort to creep, I could not climb, up the hill to get a breath of wholesome air. When about two-thirds up the hill, I became so faint that I concluded I was dying. Lying down on the ground, sloped against the root of a tree to keep me from rolling to the bottom, I took farewell of old Abraham, of my Mission work, and of everything around! In this weak state I lay, watched over by my faithful companion, and fell into a quiet sleep. When consciousness returned, I felt a little stronger, and a faint gleam of hope and life came back to my soul.
Abraham and his devoted wife, Nafatu, lifted me and carried me to the top of the hill. There they laid me on cocoa-nut leaves on the ground, and erected over me a shade or screen of the same; and there the two faithful souls, inspired surely by something diviner even than mere human pity, gave me the cocoa-nut juice to drink and fed me with native food and kept me living—I know not for how long. Consciousness did, however, fully return. The trade wind refreshed me day by day. The Tannese seemed to have given me up for dead; and providentially none of them looked near us for many days. Amazingly my strength returned, and I began planning about my new house on the hill. Afraid again to sleep at the old site, I slept under the tree, and sheltered by the cocoa-nut leaf screen, while preparing my new bedroom.
“THERE THEY LAID ME ON COCOA-NUT LEAVES ON THE GROUND.”
Here again, but for these faithful souls, the Aneityumese Teacher and his wife, I must have been baffled, and would have died in the effort. The planks of the wreck, and all other articles required they fetched and carried, and it taxed my utmost strength to get them in some way planted together. But life depended on it. It was at length accomplished; and after that time I suffered comparatively little from anything like continuous attacks of fever and ague. That noble old soul, Abraham, stood by me as an angel of God in sickness and in danger; he went at my side wherever I had to go; he helped me willingly to the last inch of strength in all that I had to do; and it was perfectly manifest that he was doing all this not from mere human love, but for the sake of Jesus. That man had been a Cannibal in his heathen days, but by the grace of God there he stood verily a new creature in Christ Jesus. Any trust, however sacred or valuable, could be absolutely reposed in him; and in trial or danger, I was often refreshed by that old Teacher’s prayers, as I used to be by the prayers of my saintly father in my childhood’s home. No white man could have been a more valuable helper to me in my perilous circumstances, and no person, white or black, could have shown more fearless and chivalrous devotion.
When I have read or heard the shallow objections of irreligious scribblers and talkers, hinting that there was no reality in conversions, and that Mission effort was but waste, oh, how my heart has yearned to plant them just one week on Tanna, with the “natural” man all around in the person of Cannibal and Heathen, and only the one “spiritual” man in the person of the converted Abraham, nursing them, feeding them, saving them “for the love of Jesus,”—that I might just learn how many hours it took to convince them that Christ in man was a reality after all! All the scepticism of Europe would hide its head in foolish shame; and all its doubts would dissolve under one glance of the new light that Jesus, and Jesus alone, pours from the converted Cannibal’s eye.
Perhaps it may surprise some unsophisticated reader to learn, though others who know more will be quite prepared for it, that this removal of our house, as also Mr. Mathieson’s for a similar reason, was severely criticised by the people who try to evangelize the world while sitting in easy chairs at home. Precious nonsense appeared, for instance, in the Nova Scotian Church Magazine, about my house being planted on the fighting ground of the Natives, and thereby courting and provoking hostilities. As matter of fact, the hill-top was too narrow to accommodate both the Church and my house, and had to be levelled out for that purpose, and it was besides surrounded by a deep valley on three sides; but the arm-chair critics, unwilling to believe in the heathen hatred of the Gospel, had to invent some reason out of their own brains to account for my being so persecuted and plundered. In truth, we were learning by suffering for the benefit of those who should follow us to these Islands,—that health could be found only on the higher levels, swept by the breath of the trade winds, and that fever and ague lay in wait near the shore, and especially on the leeward side. Even Mr. Inglis had his house on Aneityum removed also to the higher ground; and no Missionary since has been located in the fever-beds by the swamp or shore. Life is God’s great gift, to be preserved for Him, not thrown away.