The Book of Missionary Heroes by Basil Mathews (young adult books to read .txt) 📕
"Then as I was journeying[6] to Damascus, with the authority of thechief priests themselves, at mid-day I saw on the way a light from thesky, brighter than the blaze of the sun, shining round about me and mycompanions. And, as we were all fallen on to the road, I heard a voicesaying to me:
"'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kickagainst the goad.'
"And I said, 'Who are you, Lord?'
"The answer came: 'I am Jesus, whom you persecute.'"
Then Paul went on:
"I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision; but I told those inDamascus and in Jerusalem and in all Judæa, aye! and the foreignnations also, that they should repent and turn to God.
"Later on," said Paul, "I fell into a trance, and Jesus came againto me and said, 'Go, I will send you afar to the Nations.' That (Paulwould say to Luke) is why I walk among perils in the
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Swift to your places, swift to the head of the army,
Pioneers, O Pioneers!"[23]
[21] A-oo-ay.
[22] Mă-lee-ay-to-ă.
[23] Walt Whitman.
CHAPTER VIII KAPIOLANI, THE HEROINE OF HAWAIIKapiolani
(Date of Incident, 1824)
"Pélé[24] the all-terrible, the fire goddess, will hurl her thunder and her stones, and will slay you," cried the angry priests of Hawaii.[25] "You no longer pay your sacrifices to her. Once you gave her hundreds of hogs, but now you give nothing. You worship the new God Jehovah. She, the great Pélé, will come upon you, she and the Husband of Thunder, with the Fire-Thruster, and the Red-Fire Cloud-Queen, they will destroy you altogether."
The listening Hawaiians shuddered as they saw the shaggy priests calling down the anger of Pélé. One of the priests was a gigantic man over six feet five inches high, whose strength was so terrible that he could leap at his victims and break their bones by his embrace.
Away there in the volcanic island[26] in the centre of the greatest ocean in the world—the Pacific Ocean—they had always as children been taught to fear the great goddess.
They were Christians; but they had only been Christians for a short time, and they still trembled at the name of the goddess Pélé, who lived up in the mountains in the boiling crater of the fiery volcano, and ruled their island.
Their fathers had told them how she would get angry, and would pour out red-hot rivers of molten stone that would eat up all the trees and people and run hissing into the Pacific Ocean. There to that day was that river of stone—a long tongue of cold, hard lava—stretching down to the shore of the island, and here across the trees on the mountain-top could be seen, even now, the smoke of her anger. Perhaps, after all, Pélé was greater than Jehovah—she was certainly terrible—and she was very near!
"If you do not offer fire to her, as you used to do," the priests went on, "she will pour down her fire into the sea and kill all your fish. She will fill up your fishing grounds with the pahoehoe[27] (lava), and you will starve. Great is Pélé and greatly to be feared."
The priests were angry because the preaching of the missionaries had led many away from the worship of Pélé which, of course, meant fewer hogs for themselves; and now the whole nation on Hawaii, that volcanic island of the seas, seemed to be deserting her.
The people began to waver under the threats, but a brown-faced woman, with strong, fearless eyes that looked out with scorn on Pélé priests, was not to be terrified.
"It is Kapiolani,[28] the chieftainess," murmured the people to one another. "She is Christian; will she forsake Jehovah and return to Pélé?"
Only four years before this, Kapiolani had—according to the custom of the Hawaiian chieftainesses, married many husbands, and she had given way to drinking habits. Then she had become a Christian, giving up her drinking and sending away all her husbands save one. She had thrown away her idols and now taught the people in their huts the story of Christ.
"Pélé is nought," she declared, "I will go to Kilawea,[29] the mountain of the fires where the smoke and stones go up, and Pélé shall not touch me. My God, Jehovah, made the mountain and the fires within it too, as He made us all."
So it was noised through the island that Kapiolani, the queenly, would defy Pélé the goddess. The priests threatened her with awful torments of fire from the goddess; her people pleaded with her not to dare the fires of Kilawea. But Kapiolani pressed on, and eighty of her people made up their minds to go with her. She climbed the mountain paths, through lovely valleys hung with trees, up and up to where the hard rocky lava-river cut the feet of those who walked upon it.
Day by day they asked her to go back, and always she answered, "If I am destroyed you may believe in Pélé; if I live you must all believe in the true God, Jehovah."
As she drew nearer to the crater she saw the great cloud of smoke that came up from the volcano and felt the heat of its awful fires. But she did not draw back.
As she climbed upward she saw by the side of the path low bushes, and on them beautiful red and yellow berries, growing in clusters. The berries were like large currants.
"It is chelo,"[30] said the priests, "it is Pélé's berry. You must not touch them unless we ask her. She will breathe fire on you."
Kapiolani broke off a branch from one of the bushes regardless of the horrified faces of the priests. And she ate the berries, without stopping to ask the goddess for her permission.
She carried a branch of the berries in her hand. If she had told them what she was going to do they would have been frenzied with fear and horror.
Up she climbed until the full terrors of the boiling crater of Kilawea burst on her sight. Before her an immense gulf yawned in the shape of the crescent moon, eight miles in circumference and over a thousand feet deep. Down in the smoking hollow, hundreds of feet beneath her, a lake of fiery lava rolled in flaming waves against precipices of rock. This ever-moving lake of molten fire is called: "The House of Everlasting Burning." This surging lake was dotted with tiny mountain islets, and, from the tops of their little peaks, pyramids of flame blazed and columns of grey smoke went up. From some of these little islands streams of blazing lava rolled down into the lake of fire. The air was filled with the roar of the furnaces of flame.
Even the fearless Kapiolani stood in awe as she looked. But she did not flinch, though here and there, as she walked, the crust of the lava cracked under her feet and the ground was hot with hidden fire.
She came to the very edge of the crater. To come so far without offering hogs and fish to the fiery goddess was in itself enough to bring a fiery river of molten lava upon her. Kapiolani offered nothing save defiance. Audacity, they thought, could go no further.
Here, a priestess of Pélé came, and raising her hands in threat denounced death on the head of Kapiolani if she came further. Kapiolani pulled from her robe a book. In it—for it was her New Testament—she read to the priestess of the one true, loving Father-God.
Then Kapiolani did a thing at which the very limbs of those who watched trembled and shivered. She went to the edge of the crater and stepped over onto a jutting rock and let herself down and down toward the sulphurous burning lake. The ground cracked under her feet and sulphurous steam hissed through crevices in the rock, as though the demons of Pélé fumed in their frenzy. Hundreds of staring, wondering eyes followed her, fascinated and yet horrified.
Then she stood on a ledge of rock, and, offering up prayer and praise to the God of all, Who made the volcano and Who made her, she cast the Pélé berries into the lake, and sent stone after stone down into the flaming lava. It was the most awful insult that could be offered to Pélé! Now surely she would leap up in fiery anger, and, with a hail of burning stones, consume Kapiolani. But nothing happened; and Kapiolani, turning, climbed the steep ascent of the crater edge and at last stood again unharmed among her people. She spoke to her people, telling them again that Jehovah made the fires. She called on them all to sing to His praise and, for the first time, there rang across the crater of Kilawea the song of Christians. The power of the priests was gone, and from that hour the people all over that island who had trembled and hesitated between Pélé and Christ turned to the worship of our Lord Jesus, the Son of God the Father Almighty.
[24] Pay-lay.
[25] Hah-wye-ee.
[26] Discovered by Captain Cook in 1778. The first Christian missionaries landed in 1819. Now the island is ruled by the United States of America.
[27] Pa-hō-è-hŏ-è.
[28] Kah-pèe-ō-lă-nèe. She was high female chief, in her own right, of a large district.
[29] Kil-a-wee-ă. The greatest active volcano in the world.
[30] Chay-lo.
CHAPTER IX THE CANOE OF ADVENTUREElikana
(Date of Incident, 1861)
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care."
I
Manihiki Island looked like a tiny anchored canoe far away across the Pacific, as Elikana glanced back from his place at the tiller. He sang, meantime, quietly to himself an air that still rang in his ears, the tune that he and his brother islanders had sung in praise of the Power and Providence of God at the services on Manihiki. For the Christian people of the Penrhyn group of South Sea Islands had come together in April, 1861, for their yearly meeting, paddling from the different quarters in their canoes through the white surge of the breakers that thunder day and night round the island.
Elikana looked ahead to where his own island of Rakahanga grew clearer every moment on the sky-line ahead of them, though each time his craft dropped into the trough of the sea between the green curves of the league-long ocean rollers the island was lost from sight.
He and his six companions were sailing back over the thirty miles between Manihiki and Rakahanga, two of the many little lonely ocean islands that stud the Pacific like stars.
They sailed a strange craft, for it cannot be called raft or canoe or hut. It was all these and yet was neither. Two canoes, forty-eight feet long, sailed side by side. Between the canoes were spars, stretching across from one to the other, lashed to each boat and making a platform between them six feet wide. On this was built a hut, roofed with the beautiful braided leaves of the cocoa-nut palm.
Overhead stretched the infinite sky. Underneath lay thousands of fathoms of blue-green ocean, whose cold, hidden deeps among the mountains and valleys of the awful ocean under-world held strange goblin fish-shapes. And on the surface this hut of leaves and bamboo swung dizzily between sky and ocean on the frail canoes. And in the canoes and the hut were six brown Rakahangan men, two women, and a chubby, dark-eyed child, who sat contented and tired, being lapped to sleep by the swaying waters.
Above them the great sail made of matting of fibre, strained in the breeze that drove them nearer to the haven where they would be. Already they could see the gleam of the Rakahanga beach with the rim of silver where the waves broke into foam. Then the breeze dropped. The fibre-sail flapped uneasily against the mast, while the two little canvas sails hung loosely, as the wind, with little warning, swung round, and smiting them in the face began to drive them back into the ocean again.
Elikana and his friends knew the sea almost like fish, from the time they were babies.
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