THE earliest Polynesian Scriptures date from 1818. While “the word of Luke” was printing at Eimeo, canoes came from the neighboring islands bringing plantain-leaf letters begging for copies of the Gospel, and bamboo canes filled with cocoa-nut oil to pay for them. Thirty and forty at a time, the boats were drawn up on the beach, and the islanders waited patiently for days, for weeks, till the sheets had passed through the press. The other Gospels followed, the Acts, and portions of the Old Testament. In the shadow of the cocoa palms or the hibiscus trees, the Tahitians dighted to sit in circles listening to the Word of life. They lingered till midnight teaching each other; they read in their leaf-thatched huts by the light of a lamp of cocoa-nut shell; in some of the islands where no missionary had ever resided they had become familiar with the use of book and pen. Wherever they were met they had their books with them, carefully wrapped in native cloth or concealed in a little basket made to contain them.
Had these poor souls any real care or reverence for the Scriptures which had been prepared for them with so much labor and at so great a cost? Let William Ellis, the missionary, tell his own experience: On a day of howling tempest and raging surf, we saw a canoe in distress two miles off the shore, and sent out help to it. The canoe was found swamped and the men were in the sea supporting themselves on their pales. When they landed, I met them and asked them if they had been in danger. They said, ‘Yes': they were afraid of the sharks and fearful lest their canoe should sink. I asked them what they thought when the sea began to fill their canoe. They said they thought of their books, and were only concerned to keep them dry, pointing at the same time to their canoe, where the Gospels, carefully wrapped in native cloth, were tied to the top of the mast, in order to secure them from the spray of the sea.
In 1839 the faithful Evangelist, Henry Nott, who had labored unweariedly for forty years in those rote islands, had the honor of presenting to the young Queen Victoria a Tahitian Bible, the first complete version of the Scriptures in any of the tongues of Polynesia. The edition was quickly bought up. Many of the people had paid for their books long before they arrived; others came flocking with the money in their hands, and would not leave till they had been satisfied. Still others who were penniless ran about borrowing from their friends, or put out to sea, caught fish and sold them in the market in order that they might obtain the price of $2.00.
During the struggle which followed the French seizure of Tahiti, the natives took their Bibles with them into the mountains, and there, though they were deprived of the guidance of their white teachers, they carried on their services regularly as when they were at home in their peaceful villages. These were the people in whose language the missionaries could find no words for our words, “faith” and “conscience.”
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Rom. 10:13.
“And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven: but the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness.” Matt. 8:11, 12.
ML-05/15/1966