“People come to this island for many reasons, Sister Whittaker. My wife used to say they wash up upon our shores, these jostled strangers, and most of the time they do not know where they have landed! Some of them seem like perfect gentlemen, yet later we discover they were convicts in their countries of origin. On the other hand, you see, some of them were perfect gentlemen in their European lives, but they come here to behave like convicts! One can never know the state of another man’s heart.”
He had not answered her question.
What of Ambrose? she wanted to ask. What was the state of his heart?
She held her tongue.
Then the Reverend Welles said, in his usual bright voice, “You will see the graves of my daughters here, on the other side of that low wall.”
The statement knocked Alma into silence. She had not known that Reverend Welles had daughters, much less that they had died here.
“They are just wee graves, you see,” he said, “for the girls did not live long. None of them saw their first year. They are Helen, Eleanor, and Laura on the left. Penelope and Theodosia rest beside them, on the right.”
The five gravestones were tiny, smaller than bricks. Alma could find no words to offer as comfort. It was the saddest thing she had ever seen.
The Reverend Welles, regarding her stricken face, smiled kindly. “But there is comfort. Their youngest sister, Christina, lives, you see. The Lord gave us one daughter whom we were able to usher into life, and she lives still. She resides in Cornwall, where she is the mother now of three little sons herself. Mrs. Welles stays with her. My wife resides with our living child, you see, while I reside here, to keep company with the departed.”
He glanced over Alma’s shoulder. “Ah, look!” he said. “The frangipani is in bloom! We shall pick some, and take it back to Sister Manu. She can dress her hat freshly for tonight’s service. Won’t she enjoy that?”
The Reverend Welles would always bewilder Alma. Never had she met a man so cheerful, so uncomplaining, who had lost so much, and who lived upon—and with—so little. Over time, she discovered that he did not even have a home. There was no fare that belonged to him. The man slept in the mission church, on one of the pews. Often he did not even have an ahu taoto to sleep under. Like a cat, he was able to doze off anywhere. He had no belongings aside from his Bible—and even that sometimes vanished for weeks on end before somebody would eventually return it. He kept no livestock of his own, nor did he tend a garden. The small canoe that he liked to take out to the coral reef belonged to a fourteen-year-old boy who was generous enough to lend it. There was not a prisoner or a monk or a beggar in the world, Alma thought, who had less than this man.
But it had not always been this way, Alma learned. Francis Welles had been raised in Cornwall, in Falmouth, right on the sea, in a large family of prosperous fishermen. While he did not vouchsafe to Alma the precise details of his youth (“I would not wish you to think less of me, if you knew the acts I committed!”), he indicated that he had been a rough lad. A knock on the head brought him to the Lord—or at least that was how the Reverend Welles reported his conversion experience: a tavern, a brawl, “a bottle to my loaf,” and then . . . revelation!
From there, he turned to learning and a life of piety. Soon he married a girl named Edith, the educated and virtuous daughter of a local Methodist minister. Through Edith, he learned to speak, think, and behave in a more dutiful and honorable way. He became fond of books and had “all sorts of high thoughts,” as he put it. He undertook ordination. Young and vulnerable to fanciful ideals, the newly Reverend Francis Welles and his wife Edith applied to the London Missionary Society, pleading to be dispatched to the most distant of heathen lands, to introduce the word of the Redeemer abroad. The London Missionary Society welcomed Francis, for it was unusual to find a man of God who was also a rugged and able sailor. For this line of work, one does not want a soft-handed Cambridge gentleman.
The Reverend Francis and Mrs. Welles arrived in Tahiti in 1797, on the first mission ship ever to reach the island, along with fifteen other English evangelicals. At that time, the god of the Tahitians was embodied by a six-foot length of wood, wrapped in tapa cloth and red feathers.
“When first we landed,” he told Alma, “the natives showed the greatest wonderment at our clothing. One of them pulled off my shoe, and, taking glimpse of my sock, jumped back in fear. He thought I had no toes, you see! Well, soon enough, I had no shoes, for he took them!”
Francis Welles liked the Tahitians immediately. He liked their wit, he said. They were gifted mimics, who loved to tease. It reminded him of the humor and play of the Falmouth docks. He liked how, whenever he wore a straw hat, the children would follow him around shouting, “Your head is thatched! Your head is thatched!”
He liked the Tahitians, yes, but he had no luck converting them.
As he told Alma, “The Bible instructs us, ‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto me.’ Well, Sister Whittaker, perhaps two thousand years ago it was thus! But it was not thus when first we landed in Tahiti! The mildness of these people notwithstanding, you see, they resisted all our efforts at conversion—and most heartily! We could not even sway the children! Mrs. Welles arranged a school for the young ones, but their parents complained, ‘Why do you detain my son? What riches will he gain through your God?’ The lovely thing about our Tahitian students, you see, was that they were so good and kind and polite. The troublesome thing was that they were not interested in our Lord! They would only laugh at poor Mrs. Welles, when she tried to teach them the catechism.”
Life was arduous for the pioneering missionaries. Misery and perplexity dogged their ambitions. Their gospel was met with indifference or mirth. Two of their members died in the first year. The missionaries were blamed for every calamity that struck Tahiti, and credited for none of the godsends. Their belongings either rotted away, or were eaten by rats, or were looted from beneath their noses. Mrs. Welles had brought along only one family treasure from England: a beautiful cuckoo clock that chimed on the hour. The first time the Tahitians heard the clock strike, they fled in terror. The second time, they brought fruit to the clock and bowed before it in awed supplication. The third time, they stole it.
“It is difficult to convert anyone,” he said, “who is less intrigued about your god than he is about your scissors! Ha-ha-ha! But how can you fault a body for wanting scissors, when he has never before seen them? Would not a pair of scissors seem a miracle, by comparison to a blade fashioned of shark’s teeth?”
For nearly twenty years, Alma learned, neither the Reverend Welles nor anyone else on this island was able to convince a single Tahitian to embrace Christianity. While so many other Polynesian islands came willingly toward the True God, Tahiti remained stubborn. Friendly, but stubborn. The Sandwich Islands, the Navigators, the Gambier Islands, the Hawaiian Islands—even the fearsome Marquesas!—they all embraced Christ, but Tahiti did not. So lovely and gay were the Tahitians, and yet so obdurate. They smiled and laughed and danced, and simply would not let go their hedonism. “Their souls are cast from brass and iron,” complained the English.
Weary and frustrated, some of the original group of missionaries returned home to London, where they soon found themselves able to make a handsome living by relating their South Seas adventures in speeches and books. One missionary was driven off Tahiti at spear-point for having attempted to dismantle one of the island’s most sacred temples, in order to build a church from the stones. As for those men of God who remained in Tahiti, some drifted into other, simpler pursuits. One became a trader in muskets and gunpowder. One opened a hotel in Papeete, taking up not one but two young native wives to warm his bed. One fellow—Edith Welles’s tender young cousin James—simply lost his faith, fell into despair, set off to sea as a common sailor, and was never heard from again.