Hawaii (32 page)

"I'm going to be sickl" she whispered.

"No," he said insistently. "This is our first meal together. This is the Sabbath." And she fought her rising illness, with the smell of food and two dozen people crowding in upon her nostrils.

She was pale when the meal ended, and staggered toward her berth, but Abner refused to let her go, and with his strong hold on her arm, marched her up the stairs and onto the gently sloping deck, where a canvas had been hung to form a rude chapel. "Our first worship as a family," he announced proudly, but the entire family was not to participate, because one of the older ministers took one look at the slanting deck, rushed to the railing, relieved himself of his breakfast, and staggered white and gasping back to his berth. Abner stared at him as he left, interpreting the poor man's involuntary actions as a personal rejection of God. He was especially irritated because several of the sailors, who were idling the Sunday

morning away by hanging on ropes to catch their first glimpse of the mission family, laughed openly as the distraught minister threw up his breakfast.

"There'll be more," one of the sailors predicted ominously, and his mates laughed.

Services were conducted by Abner, as the only one who was likely to be able to finish them, and the family, resting comfortably under canvas strung from the mainmast, sang as cheerfully as circumstances permitted, the fine old Sunday hymn of New England:

"Another six days' work is done, Another Sabbath is begun; Return, my soul, enjoy thy rest� Improve the day thy God has blessed."

Abner then spoke at some length on various passages from Ephesians, chapter 3. " 'For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, . . . That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye . . . might be filled with all the fullness of God.'" He pointed out that the family of love within which they lived was open to all who were willing to confess their sins and work toward a state of grace. He was obviously preaching to two audiences: his brother missionaries, to remind them of the family within which they operated; and the eavesdropping sailors, tempting them to join this family of Christ; but his message to the latter was somewhat destroyed when Jerusha, experiencing a dreadful wave of nausea, tried to stagger to the railing, failed, fell on her knees and vomited over the deck.

"Watch out, lady!" a sailor called derisively, but Cridland and Mason, the two young men who were to get Bibles that day, quickly jumped forward, caught Jerusha by the arms and carried her below. Abner, infuriated at the disruption of his charge to the sailors, concluded his sermon in rather a jumble, and turned the prayer over to an associate. He was confused and angry, because he had arranged the entire service so that it would end dramatically with his presenta-tation of the Bibles to Cridland and his friend, thus symbolically welcoming them into the Lord's family, but when the time had come to do this, those two were below decks, and Abner was painfully aware that his first major effort had ended like that of so many ministers: looking for a logical place to stop. Finally he had just quit.

When service ended, members of the family made a pretense of commending Abner for his sermon, but both the extenders of congratulations and the recipient knew that they were hollow. In an unruly fit of temper and disappointment, Abner started to go below, but he was met at the top of the hatchway by Cridland and Mason, who reported, "Your wife is very sick, sir."

"Thank you," he replied curtly.

"The minister who got sick first is helping her," Cridland said.

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Abner started down but Mason stopped him and asked, "Have you our Bibles, sir?"

"Next week," Abner snapped, and was gone. But when he saw his wife, and how ashen white she was, he forgot his own problems and fetched water to wash her perspiring face.

"I'm sorry, my cherished partner," she said wanly. "I'll never make a sailor."

"We'll get you above decks just a few minutes each day," he said reassuringly, but even the thought of facing that slanting deck again brought back her nausea, and she said, "I'm going to weigh even less than Captain Janders predicted."

At noon, when the day's big meal was served, Janders saw with pleasure that seventeen of his passengers were at last able to eat. "On each trip," he observed, "as we approach Cape Verde, our sick ones get better."

"Shall we be stopping at the islands?" John Whipple asked.

"Yes, if weather permits." The news was so good that Abner rose from his pork-and-suet pudding and called into any staterooms where sick missionaries lay, "We'll soon be touching at Cape Verde. Then you can walk about on land and get fresh fruit."

"By the way, Reverend Hale," the captain added, "that was a good sermon you preached today. There is indeed a heritage that the Lord provides those who serve Him, and may we all come into it." The missionaries nodded their approval of this sentiment, whereupon Janders launched his harpoon: "Seems to me your message got a little tangled up at the end."

Since all knew this to be true, they looked at their plates and thought: "Our captain is a clever man." But Abner looked at him boldly and said, "I count a sermon a success if it contains one good Christian thought in it."

"I do too," Janders said heartily. "Yours had several."

"I hope we can all take them to mind," Abner said piously, but secretly he wished that services could have ended as planned. Then the ship would have heard a sermon.

After lunch Captain Janders invited the missionaries to tour the ship with him, and John Whipple asked, "I don't understand why, if we're bound west for Hawaii, we sail east almost to the coast of Africa."

"Mister Collins, break us out a chart!" And Janders showed the surprised missionaries how it was that ships wanting to double Cape Horn sailed from Boston on a heading which took them not south for the Horn but far to the east, almost to the coast of Africa. "It's so that when we finally turn south for the Horn, we can run in one straight line, down past Brazil and Argentina, straight on to Tierra del^Fuego," Janders explained, and the chart made this clear.

^'Are the Cape Verde islands pleasant?" Whipple asked.

"You watch! Some of our boys jump ship there on every trip. We'll be leaving Verde with a couple of Brava boys as replacements."

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HAWAII

While the captain was explaining these things, Abner was on another part of the deck talking seriously with Cridland and Mason, "I did not give you your Bibles today because you did not earn them," he chided.

"But we had to take Mrs. Hale below decks," Cridland protested.

"The work of the Lord required you to be present topside," Abner said stubbornly.

"But she . . ."

"Others could have cared for her, Cridland. Next Sunday I shall give you your Bibles. I am going to preach from Psalms 26, verse 5: 'I have hated the congregation of evil doers; and will not sit with the wicked.' When I have finished my sermon, I shall hand each of you his Bible." Then he recalled what he had said earlier and, star-: ing at Mason, asked, "But have you earned your Bible? I thought you were to have brought another soul to God."

"I am about to do so," Mason reported happily. "I have been reading the tracts you gave us to one of the older men. He had led an evil life, but last trip on a whaler he was swept overboard and was saved only by a miracle. Of late, he has been weeping very much and I shall keep talking with him. Perhaps by next Sabbath . . ."

"Good work, Mason," Abner replied, and although another might have thought it strange that the religious ardors of the two sailors were not dampened by their disappointment over the Bibles, particularly when their dereliction arose from their humane treatment of a woman, and she the wife of the minister himself, Abner Hale was not surprised. As he pointed out to the young men: "The Lord is a jealous master. You cannot approach Him at your determination, He tells you when you may come into His presence. And if you have been faithless in even small things, the Lord will wait until you have proved yourself worthy." For Abner knew that easy salvation was never appreciated; Cridland and Mason already treasured their forthcoming Bibles doubly because they had once failed to attain them.

If Abner's first Sunday sermon was something of a failure, his second was a stunning success, marred only by the fact that his wife Jerusha was unable to witness it. He had got her to breakfast, had forced a little cold pork and rice into her racked body, and had even carried her limply onto the deck, but one look at the wallowing waves put her stomach into gyrations, and she was hurriedly taken below by Amanda Whipple and Mrs. Quigley. The intellectual highlight of Abner's sermon came when he spent fifteen minutes on the congregation of evildoers that the devil had thrown together aboard the "hamferdite" brig Thetis. Like all the missionaries, he called it a hamferdite, not knowing exactly how to pronounce, spell or define the longer and more accurate word, since it was in none of the mission dictionaries. But according to Abner, few ships that had ever sailed the Atlantic knew such a congregation of evil, and his catalogue of what these sailors lounging idly on deck had perpetrated in their short and unspectacular lives was terrifying. The dramatic cli—

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161

max, of course, came when he announced to his startled missionaries and surprised ship's crew that God had been at work even in this den of vice and that three souls had already been saved, whereupon he produced Cridland, Mason and a beat-up old whaler with bad legs whose catalogue of sin actually surpassed Abner's conjectures. Some of the old man's friends, who had spent time ashore with him in Valparaiso, Canton and Honolulu, expected lightning to play upon the waves when he touched the Bible that Abner extended him. Captain Janders shuddered and said to his first mate, "Mark my words, Mister Collins, you'll be up there next week."

That Sunday the noonday meal was an unalloyed triumph. Captain Janders said it was one of the best sermons he had ever heard afloat, although he was satisfied that Reverend Hale must have been talking about some other ship, and Mister Collins confessed, "It's a strange phenomenon, but no matter what the ship, the closer it gets to Cape Horn, the more religious everyone becomes. It's as if all aboard sensed at last the futility of man in the face of God's awful power. I'm not sure that I would be even a moderately Christian man, which I hold myself to be, if I had never rounded Cape Horn." Captain Janders added, "I agree. No man by his own power could accomplish the transit we shall soon face."

No comment could have pleased Abner more, for like all the missionaries he had been contemplating with some dread the trial they would encounter as Cape Horn approached, and although it still lay eight weeks in the future, he felt that he would make no mistake in undertaking reasonable preparations. He therefore said, "I have observed, Captain Janders, that you spend your Sundays reading .. ." He found it difficult to say the word, and hesitated.

"Novels?" Janders asked.

"Yes. Profane books. I was wondering, Captain Janders, if you would entertain it kindly if I were to give you, from the mission stores, several books of a more appropriate and edifying nature?"

"Richardson and Smollett are edifying enough for me," Janders laughed.

"But when you have in your care some four dozen souls . . ."

"In those circumstances I rely on Bowditch and the Bible . . . in that order."

"Do I understand that you would not take it kindly . . ."

"I would not," Janders said stiffly.

"The mission family has decided," Abner said abruptly, having talked with no one of this project, "that starting with today we shall hold both morning and afternoon services on deck, weather permitting."

"Fine," Janders said. Then, always eager to keep the young minister off balance, he asked, "By the way, how's Mrs. Hale?"

"Poorly," Abner said.

"I should think you would spend some time with her," Janders suggested.

"I do," Abner snapped. "I pray with her morning and night."

"I meant, play games with her, or read her an interesting novel. Would you entertain it kindly if I were to offer you, from my own library, several novels of an entertaining nature?"

"We do not read novels," Abner retaliated. "Especially not on Sundays."

"In that case, when you do get around to seeing your wife, you can tell her that on Tuesday we'll land at Brava, and she can walk ashore. It'll do us all wonders."

Jerusha was elated by this news, and on Monday, when the calmer waters in the lee of Cape Verde were reached, she ventured on deck for an hour and the sun diminished her pallor. On Tuesday, when the islands were clearly in sight, she clung to the railing, praying for the moment when she could step ashore, but she was to be sorely disappointed, for a stiff breeze came up offshore, followed by heavy low clouds, and even before the Thetis began to roll in deep troughs, it became apparent that to beat into Brava would be too difficult a task, whereas to run before the mounting storm would carry the little brig so far on its westward heading that any attempt to recover Brava would be wasteful. Nevertheless, Jerusha stood in the rain, praying that some miracle would enable the ship to make knd, and it was not until Captain Janders himself passed and said, "We're going to run before the wind, ma'am. There'll be no Brava," that she admitted sorry defeat. Then she discovered that she was very seasick, and began retching at the rail so that Janders shouted, "You, therel Take this poor woman below!"

It was a gloomy family that met that night in the swaying cabin for a supper of gruel and hard cheese. Half the missionaries were unable to leave their staterooms. The others wore bleak faces in recognition of the fact that a chance to step ashore had been missed, and that no other would present itself for many days. How lonely and mean the cabin seemed as the whale-oil lamp swung in the creaking night, as the latrine smelled up the fetid atmosphere, and as friends retched in new despair. Keoki, corning in with the food, said, "I would like to offer the evening prayer," and in rich Hawaiian he praised the open ocean as compared to land, for on the former one was required to know God, whereas on land there were many diversions. Therefore, reasoned Keoki, it was better this night to be on the Thetis than to be in Brava.