"It is strange," Williams was saying to his friend Mr. Cunningham,
"but I have not slept all through the night."

How came it that this man, who for over twenty years had faced
tempests by sea, who had never flinched before perils from savage men
and from fever, on the shores of a hundred islands in the South Seas,
should stay awake all night as his ship skirted the strange island of
Erromanga?

It was because, having lived for all those years among the coral
islands of the brown Polynesians of the Eastern Pacific, he was now
sailing to the New Hebrides, where the fierce black cannibal islanders
of the Western Pacific slew one another. As he thought of the fierce
men of Erromanga he thought of the waving forests of brown hands he
had seen, the shouts of "Come back again to us!" that he had heard
as he left his own islands. He knew how those people loved him in the
Samoan Islands, but he could not rest while others lay far off who
had never heard the story of Jesus. "I cannot be content," he said,
"within the narrow limits of a single reef."

But the black islanders were wild men who covered their dark faces
with soot and painted their lips with flaming red, yet their cruel
hearts were blacker than their faces, and their anger more fiery than
their scarlet lips. They were treacherous and violent savages who
would smash a skull by one blow with a great club; or leaping on a man
from behind, would cut through his spine with a single stroke of their
tomahawks, and then drag him off to their cannibal oven.

John Williams cared so much for his work of telling the islanders
about God their Father, that he lay awake wondering how he could