27 June: Boreham on John Williams

Gipsy of the South Seas
Many people have been intrigued by the occasional visits to our Australian ports of a vessel known as the John Williams the Sixth. Who is this John Williams, whose birthday we celebrate today and after whom no fewer than six ships have successively been named? The answer is that John Williams was the natural successor of Captain Cook. Sailing in the wake of the great navigator, he caught so perfectly the spirit of his illustrious predecessor, that he was able to continue and complete his work. Williams discovered Raratonga, an island that had eluded the sharp eyes and tireless search of Captain Cook and his companions, although they made a note of the general group to which it belonged.

As a youngster, John Williams developed an extraordinary flair for poking his fingers into other peoples' pies. He knew how to mind his own business; but he liked to see how his neighbours were getting on with theirs. He was apprenticed to Mr. Tonkin, a furnishing ironmonger, in City Road, London. His indentures stipulated that he was to be taught, not the industrial, but merely the commercial side of the transactions of the establishment. But this arrangement was by no means to the taste of the hungry-minded youth. He liked to get down to the workshops, among the mechanics, and, when they were absent, to test his own skill with their tools. When sent on an errand, to solicit an order or collect an account, he lost no opportunity of poking about the carpenter's benches and factory sheds of his master's clients. He loved to discover how things were made, how they were mended, and how the work of the world was done.

Taunted By Distant Horizons
Two people had to do with the shaping of Williams' destiny. Captain Cook, by publishing his famous "Voyages," fired his fancy; and Mrs. Tonkin, the wife of his employer, by inviting him to accompany her to church, gave him a new vision and a new objective. Passing through a profound religious experience, he became a young man in a desperate hurry. He came of age on June 27, 1817. He spent that notable day with his young wife in Sydney. They talked of only two things. How could they get to the Society Islands? And had they any hope of settling down there before their first baby was born? They managed to reach Tahiti on November 17; their son considerately delayed his arrival until early January. But, even before the birth of the child, Mr. Williams was making his plans and gathering his materials for the building of a ship that would enable him to visit the atolls and islets beyond the skyline. When the authorities in England questioned his wisdom in roving like a viking round the Pacific, he told them bluntly that no other programme would appease his conscience.

Just as, in Africa, Livingstone built homes and left them as soon as they were built because of the resistless lure of the undiscovered and unknown, so John Williams found it impossible to settle anywhere. Rebuked for his incorrigible restlessness, he had but one reply. "A missionary," he wrote, "was never designed to gather a congregation of a hundred or two natives and sit down at his ease while thousands around him, and but a few miles off, are eating each other's flesh and drinking each other's blood. For my own part, I cannot content myself within the narrow limits of a single reef." The cunning that he had acquired as a result of his curiosity in his London days coming to his assistance, he built five ships of his own in the course of his brief career, and was never so happy as when pushing their keels into uncharted seas. As soon as he had established a footing on one archipelago, he pushed on to another. In boats that he was proud to have built, he sailed "from island unto island at the gateways of the day." He was pre-eminently the gipsy of the Pacific.

The Transformation Of A Hemisphere
Death came to him at 43. After an absence of 17 years, he visited England; thrilled enormous audiences with the story of his adventures, arranged for the publication of the Scriptures in the island languages; and wrote a book that appealed to a new generation of English schoolboys almost as profoundly as "Cook's Voyages" had appealed to his own. And then, returning to the vast Pacific wastes in 1838, he steeled his nerves and braced his sinews for a still more splendid adventure. He would turn from the copper-coloured Polynesians to men of ebony. The coal-black cannibals of the Western Pacific should see his snow-white sails.

He was as excited as a schoolboy in prospect of this new enterprise. On the evening of November 19, 1839, the "Camden" anchored off Erromanga. The last entry in his journal reads: "This is a memorable day, a day whose doings will be transmitted to posterity. The events of this day will exert an influence on men long after those who have taken an active part in them have withdrawn into the shades of oblivion. The results of this day will be—." The sentence was never finished. Almost as soon as the ink was dry he was beaten to death with native clubs. Four monuments perpetuate his fame. The first is the transfigured life of the Polynesian peoples. Nobody can compare the savages of that barbaric age with the islanders as we today know them without admiring the sensational change. His second monument is the immense banana industry of the South Seas; it was John Williams who introduced the plant to these latitudes. His third monument is his tomb at Samoa, where, like Robert Louis Stevenson, he sleeps in picturesque and honoured solitude. But his most notable and most enduring monument is the reputation that he has established as an explorer-evangelist, a reputation that, in the one hemisphere, is comparable only to that of David Livingstone in the other.

F W Boreham

Image: John Williams