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,