me nearer,
they saw a lovely island. Mountains, towering peak on peak, with deep
green valleys between brown rocky heights hung with vines, and the
great ocean breakers booming in one white line of foaming surf on the
reef of living coral, made it look like a vision of fairyland.

They had discovered Rarotonga.

But what of the people of the island?

They were said to be cannibals.

Would they receive the missionaries with clubs and spears? Who would
go ashore?

On board the ship were brown South Sea men from the island where John
Williams lived. They had burned their idols, and now they too were
missionaries of Jesus Christ. Their leader was a fearless young man,
Papeiha. He was so daring that once, when everybody else was afraid to
go from the ship to a cannibal island, he bound his Bible in his loin
cloth, tied them to the top of his head, and swam ashore, defying the
sharks, and unafraid of the still more cruel islanders.

So at Rarotonga, when the call came, "Who will go ashore?" and a canoe
was let down from the ship's side, two men, Papeiha and his friend
Vahineino,[18] leapt into it. Those two fearlessly paddled towards the
shore, which was now one brown stretch of Rarotongans crowded together
to see this strange ship with wings that had sailed from over the
sea's edge.

The Rarotongans seemed friendly; so Papeiha and Vahineino, who knew
the ways of the water from babyhood and could swim before they could
walk, waited for a great Pacific breaker, and then swept in on her
foaming crest. The canoe grated on the shore. They walked up the beach
under the shade of a grove of trees and said to the Rarotongan king,
Makea,[19] and his people:

"We have come to tell you that many of the islands of the sea have
burned their idols. Once we in those islands pierced each other with
spears and beat each other to death with clubs; we brutally treated
our women, and the children taken in war were strung together by their
ears like fish on a line. To-day we come--before you have destroyed
each other altogether in your wars--to tell you of the great God, our
Father, who through His Son Jesus Christ has taught us how to live as
brothers."

King Makea said he was pleased to hear these things, and came in his
canoe to the ship to take the other native teachers on shore with him.
The ship stood off for the night, for the ocean there is too deep for
anchorage.

Papeiha and his brown friends, with their wives, went ashore