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The former took up his abode at Raiatea, one of the Society islands, and afterwards going alone to the island of Rarotonga, though not bred a shipwright, built there, with his own hands, aided only by the natives, a vessel of about seventy tons burden.
The Star's Daughter, however, returned to the sky because she was homesick. Nor is she the only heroine of these tales who did so; but homesick heroines are not very interesting, and I pass to one who had a nobler reason for quitting her love. The saga is told at Rarotonga of a girl of dazzling white complexion who came up out of a fountain and was caught. She became the wife of a chief.
The finding of their stone axes or implements in such desolate spots enables their courses to be traced. Canoe-men who could voyage to solitary little Easter Island in the wide void towards America, or to Cape York in the distant west, were not likely to find insuperable difficulties in running before the north-east winds to New Zealand from Rarotonga, Savaii or Tahiti.
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, 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.
He was living on the island of Raiatea: but as he himself said, "I cannot be confined within the limits of a single reef." He wanted to pass on the torch to other islands. So he was now on this voyage of discovery. It was seven o'clock when the captain told John Williams that they must give up the search. "In an hour's time," said Williams, "we will turn back if we have not sighted Rarotonga."
After these things, the London Missionary Society again and again placed Samoan Native Teachers on one or other island of the New Hebrides; but their unhealthiness, compared with the more wholesome Samoa or Rarotonga, so afflicted them with the dreaded ague and fever, besides what they endured from the inhospitable savages themselves, that no effective Mission work had been accomplished there till at last the Presbyterian Missionaries were led to enter upon the scene.
"I smiled just now when I remembered the fate of the first cat that was taken to Rarotonga. This is one of the stations of the London Missionary Society. It, like our own, is infested with rats, and a cat was brought at last to the island. It was a large black one.
Turning to the instances where ancestry is claimed, we find that the chiefs of the Ati clan are descended from "the peerless one" of Rarotonga. The Araw
After his death, native evangelists from Samoa and Rarotonga landed on its shores, but died, or were compelled to leave, from the effects of the climate. In 1857 the Rev. G.N. Gordon, and his wife, took up their residence on the island. They laboured on with considerable success, Oviladon, the chief of the district, being among the first-fruits of their toils.
After spending another five years on Anaa, during which time he had heard nothing of the missing men, he determined to settle on Rarotonga, where there was an excellent opportunity of making money.
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