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Updated: June 14, 2025
For a time, Aniwa was left without any witness for Jesus, the London Missionary Society Teachers, having suffered dreadfully for lack of food and from fever and ague, being also removed.
It would be an easy and a blessed thing to lead such a Congregation into the presence of the Lord! They were there already. On that day every person on Aniwa seemed to be at Church, except the bedridden and the sick.
She was about twenty-five, and the Elders objected because her marriage had not been according to the Christian usage on Aniwa. She left us weeping deeply. I was writing late at night in the cool evening air, as was my wont in that oppressive tropical clime, and a knock was heard at my door. I called out, "Akai era?" A voice softly answered, "Missi, it is Lamu. Oh, do speak with me!"
He told me to declare to the men of Aniwa that if the Missi be injured or slain, he and his warriors will come from Tanna and take the full revenge in blood." This turned the scale. The meeting closed in our favor. Close on the heels of this, another and a rather perplexing incident befell us.
Let us burn and bury and destroy these things of wood and stone, and let us be taught by the Missi how to serve God who can hear, the Jehovah who gave us the well, and who will give us every other blessing, for He sent His Son Jesus to die for us and bring us to Heaven. This is what the Missi has been telling us every day since he landed on Aniwa. We laughed at him, but now we believe him.
It was somewhat comical, yet far more pathetic, to stand by and watch their faces, as man after man peered down into the mystery, and then looked up at me in blank bewilderment! When all had seen it with their own very eyes, and were "weak with wonder," the old Chief exclaimed "Missi, wonderful, wonderful is the work of your Jehovah God! No god of Aniwa ever helped us in this way.
They knew we would not betray them; and they considered themselves the guardians of our lives. WHAT a suggestive tradition of the Fall came to me in one of those early days on Aniwa! Upon our leaving the hut and removing to our new house, it was seized upon by Tupa for his sleeping-place, though still continuing to be used by the Natives as club-house, court of law, etc.
Once the war on Tanna drove about one hundred of them to seek refuge on Aniwa. Not so many years before, their lives would never have been thus intrusted to the inhabitants of another Cannibal Island. But the Christ-Spirit was abroad upon Aniwa. The refugees were kindly cared for, and in process of time were restored to their own lands, by our Missionary ship the Dayspring.
When, in the course of years, everything had been completed to our taste, we lived practically in the midst of a beautiful village, the Church, the School, the Orphanage, the Smithy and Joiner's Shop, the Printing Office, the Banana and Yam House, the Cook House, etc.; all very humble indeed, but all standing sturdily up there among the orange-trees, and preaching the Gospel of a higher civilization and of a better life for Aniwa.
The Island of Aniwa is one of the smaller isles of the New Hebrides. It measures scarcely seven miles by two, and is everywhere girt round with a belt of coral reef. The sea breaks thereon heavily, with thundering roar, and the white surf rolls in furious and far. But there are days of calm, when all the sea is glass, and the spray on the reef is only a fringe of silver.
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