John Williams, Missionary to the South Sea Islands by James J Ellis and published by Classics.
John Williams was born in Tottenham in 1796. He was apprenticed to an ironmonger at the age of fourteen but by 1816 he set sail with his wife Mary for Tahiti in the South Pacific. He built his own boat which he named the “Messenger of Peace" and discovered the island of Raratonga in the Cook Islands in 1823. It was here on this island that he began translating the Bible.
During the great part of this lifetime, John Williams served God in comparative obscurity among the South Sea Islands. While in the New Hebrides, which were inhabited by cannibals, he visited the Island of Erromango, landing at Dillon’s Bay and was clubbed to death on the Island in November 1839. As the news of Williams’s death which was carried by a ship called “Camden” from island to island, the population burst into wailing and abandoned themselves to hopeless grief, even the heathen joining in the lamentation, such was the deep respect the islanders had for this man of God.
