One day, about this time, I heard an unusual bleating amongst my few remaining goats, as if they were being killed or tortured. I rushed to the goathouse, and found myself instantly surrounded by a band of armed men. The snare had caught me, their weapons were raised, and I expected next instant to die. But God moved me to talk to them firmly and kindly; I warned them of their sin and its punishment; I showed them that only my love and pity led me to remain there seeking their good, and that if they killed me they killed their best friend. I further assured them that I was not afraid to die, for at death my Saviour would take me to be with Himself in Heaven, and to be far happier than I had ever been on Earth; and that my only desire to live was to make them all as happy, by teaching them to love and serve my Lord Jesus. I then lifted up my hands and eyes to the Heavens, and prayed aloud for Jesus to bless all my dear Tannese, and either to protect me or to take me home to Glory as He saw to be for the best. One after another they slipped away from me, and Jesus restrained them once again. Did ever mother run more quickly to protect her crying child in danger’s hour, than the Lord Jesus hastens to answer believing prayer, and send help to His servants in His own good time and way, so far as it shall be for His glory and their good? A woman may forget her child, yet will not I forget thee, saith the Lord. Oh, that all my readers knew and felt this, as in those days and ever since I have felt that His promise is a reality, and that He is with His servants to support and bless them even unto the end of the world!
May, 1861, brought with it a sorrowful and tragic event, which fell as the very shadow of doom across our path; I mean the martyrdom of the Gordons on Erromanga. Rev. G. N. Gordon was a native of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and was born in 1822. He was educated at the Free Church College, Halifax, and placed as Missionary on Erromanga, in June, 1857. Much troubled and opposed by the Sandal-wooders, he had yet acquired the language and was making progress by inroads on Heathenism. A considerable number of young men and women embraced the Christian Faith, lived at the Mission House, and devotedly helped him and his excellent wife in all their work. But the hurricanes and the measles, already referred to, caused great mortality in Erromanga also; and the degraded Traders, who had introduced the plague, in order to save themselves from revenge, stimulated the superstitions of the Heathen, and charged the Missionaries with causing sickness and all other calamities. The Sandal-wooders hated him for fearlessly denouncing and exposing their hideous atrocities.
When Mr. Copeland and I placed the Native Teachers at Black Beach, Tanna, we ran across to Erromanga in the John Knox, taking a harmonium to Mrs. Gordon, just come to their order from Sydney. When it was opened out at the Mission House, and Mrs. Gordon began playing on it and singing sweet hymns, the native women were in ecstasies. They at once proposed to go off to the bush and cut each a burden of long grass, to thatch the printing-office which Mr. Gordon was building in order to print the Scriptures in their own tongue, if only Mrs. Gordon would play to them at night and teach them to sing God’s praises. They joyfully did so, and then spent a happy evening singing those hymns. Next day being Sabbath, we had a delightful season there, about thirty attending Church and listening eagerly. The young men and women, living at the Mission House, were being trained to become Teachers. They were reading a small book in their own language, telling them the story of Joseph; and the work every way seemed most hopeful. The Mission House had been removed a mile or so up a hill, partly for Mrs. Gordon’s health, and partly to escape the annoying and contaminating influence of the Sandal-wooders on his Christian Natives.
On 20th May, 1861, he was still working at the roofing of the printing-office, and had sent his lads to bring each a load of the long grass to finish the thatching. Meantime, a party of Erromangans from a district called Bunk-Hill, under a Chief named Lovu, had been watching him. They had been to the Mission House inquiring, and they had seen him send away his Christian lads. They then hid in the bush, and sent two of their men to the Missionary to ask for calico. On a piece of wood he wrote a note to Mrs. Gordon to give them two yards each. They asked him to go with them to the Mission House, as they needed medicine for a sick boy, and Lovu their Chief wanted to see him. He tied up in a napkin a meal of food, which had been brought to him but not eaten, and started to go with them. He requested the native Narubulet to go on before, with his companion; but they insisted upon his going in front. In crossing a streamlet, which I visited shortly afterwards, his foot slipped. A blow was aimed at him with a tomahawk which he caught; the other man struck, but his weapon was also caught. One of the tomahawks was then wrenched out of his grasp. Next moment, a blow on the spine laid the dear Missionary low, and a second on the neck almost severed the head from the body. The other Natives then rushed from their ambush, and slashed him to pieces, and began dancing round him with frantic shoutings. Mrs. Gordon, hearing the noise, came out and stood in front of the Mission House, looking in the direction of her husband’s working place and wondering what had happened. Ouben, one of the party, who had run towards the Station the moment that Mr. Gordon fell, now approached her. A merciful clump of trees had hid from her eyes all that had occurred, and she said to Ouben,—
“What’s the cause of that noise?”
He replied, “Oh, nothing! only the boys amusing themselves!”
Saying, “Where are the boys?” she turned round.
Ouben slipped stealthily behind her, sank his tomahawk into her back, and with another blow almost severed her head!
Such was the fate of those two devoted servants of the Lord; loving in their lives, and in their deaths scarcely divided—their spirits, in the crown of martyrdom, entered Glory together, to be welcomed by Williams and Harris, whose blood was shed on the same dark isle for the name and cause of Jesus. They had laboured four years on Erromanga, amidst trials and dangers manifold, and had not been without tokens of blessing in the Lord’s work. Never more earnest and devoted Missionaries lived or died in the Heathen field. Other accounts, indeed, have been published, and another was reported to me by Mr. Gordon’s Christian lads; but the above combines faithfully the principal facts in the story. One young Christian lad from a distance saw Mr. Gordon murdered; and a woman saw Mrs. Gordon fall. The above facts are vouched for by a Mr. Milne, one of the few respectable Sandal-wooders, who was there at the time, and helped the Christian Natives to bury the remains, which he says were painfully mutilated.
Some severe criticisms, of course, were written and published by those angelic creatures who judge all things from their own safe and easy distance. Mr. Gordon’s lack of prudence was sorely blamed, forsooth! One would so like to see these people just for one week in such trying circumstances. As my near fellow-labourer and dearest friend, I know what was the whole spirit of the man’s life, his watchful care, his ceaseless anxiety to do everything that in his judgment was for God’s glory and the prosperity of the Mission, and my estimate of him and of his action to the last fills me with supreme regard to his memory. The Rev. Dr. Inglis of Aneityum, best qualified of all men living to form an opinion, wrote:—