United States or North Korea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Both islands are low not more than fifteen feet above sea-level and are distant from one another about thirty-eight miles. The following night the reflection of the answering fire on Nanomea was seen, and Atupa prepared to send away his people in seven canoes.

Atupa, dreading a disturbing element in his little community, had, at first, declined; but the ship had come again, and the chief having consented to try the new religion, a teacher landed.

Yet the Tia Kati is well known to many a Yankee whaler and trading schooner, and is a favourite fishing-ground of the people of Nanomaga when the sharks give them a chance. One night Atupa, Chief of Nanomaga, caused a huge fire to be lit on the beach as a signal to the people of Nanomea that a MALAGA, or party of voyagers, was coming over.

About seventy people were to go, and all that day the little village busied itself in preparing for the Nanomeans gifts of foods cooked PURAKA, fowls, pigs, and flying-fish. Atupa, the heathen chief, was troubled in his mind in those days of August 1872. The JOHN WILLIAMS had touched at the island and landed a Samoan missionary, who had pressed him to accept Christianity.

Had not Atupa been filled with vain fears, he had killed the man who caused him to lose so many of our people." "So," said the white man, "and wouldst thou have killed the man who brought thee the new faith? Fie!" Yet had Atupa killed and buried the stranger, we could have lied and said he died of a sickness when they of his people came to seek him.

And for this was Atupa sending off some of his people to Nanomea with gifts of goodwill to the chiefs to beseech them to consult their oracles also, so that the two islands might take concerted action against this new foreign god, whose priests said that all men were equal, that all were bad, and He and His Son alone good. The night was calm when the seven canoes set out.