The Signature of All Things (57 page)

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.

Dead, banished, lapsed, or exhausted—so it came to pass that all the original missionaries were weeded out, except Francis and Edith Welles, who remained at Matavai Bay. They learned Tahitian and lived without comforts. In their early years, Edith bore the first of their girls—Eleanor, Helen, and Laura—who each died, one after another, in infancy. Still, the Welleses would not relent. They built their little church, largely by themselves. The Reverend Welles figured out how to make whitewash out of bleached coral, by baking it in a rudimentary kiln until it powdered. This made the church look more inviting. He made bellows out of goatskin and bamboo. He attempted to plant a garden with sad, damp, English seeds. (“After three years of effort, we finally managed to produce one strawberry,” he told Alma, “and we divided it between ourselves, Mrs. Welles and I. The taste of it was enough to make my good wife weep. I have never managed to grow another one since. Though I have been fairly lucky, at times, with cabbage!”) He acquired, and subsequently lost to theft, a herd of four cows. He attempted to grow coffee and tobacco, and failed. Likewise potatoes, wheat, and grapes. The pigs of the mission did well, but no other livestock took to the climate.

Mrs. Welles taught English to the natives of Matavai Bay, whom she found to be quick and clever with language. She taught dozens of local children to read and write. Some of the children moved in with the Welleses. There was a little boy who progressed—in the space of eighteen months—from absolute illiteracy to the ability to read the New Testament without stumbling over a single word, but the boy did not become a Christian. None of them did.

The Reverend Welles told Alma, “They often asked me, the Tahitians, What is the proof of your god?
They wanted me to speak of miracles, Sister Whittaker. They wanted evidence of boons for the deserving, you see, or punishments administered to the guilty. I had a man with a missing leg ask me to please instruct my god to grow him a new leg. I told him, ‘Where can I find you a new leg, in this country or any other?’ Ha-ha-ha! I could not make miracles, you see, so they were not much impressed. I watched a young Tahitian boy stand at the grave of his infant sister and ask, ‘Why did God Jesus plant my sister in the ground?’ He wanted me to instruct God Jesus to raise that child up from death—but I could not even raise up my own children from death, you see, so how could I perform such a marvel? I could offer no evidence of my savior, Sister Whittaker, but that which my good wife Mrs. Welles calls my ‘internal evidence.’ I knew then and I know now only what my heart feels to be true, you see—that without the love of our Lord, I am a wretch. This is the only miracle I can evidence, and sufficient miracle it remains for me. For others, perhaps it is not sufficient. I can scarcely fault them, for they cannot see into my heart. They cannot see the darkness that was once there, nor can they see what has replaced it. But to this day, it is the only miracle I have to offer, you see, and it is a humble one.”

Also, Alma learned, there was much confusion amid the natives as to what sort of god this was—the god of the Englishman—and where did that god live? For a long while, the natives at Matavai Bay believed that the Bible Reverend Welles carried was, in fact, his god. “They found it most disturbing that I carried my god so casually tucked under my arm, or that I left my god sitting unattended on the table, or that sometimes I lent my god to others! I tried to explain to them that my god was everywhere, you see. They wanted to know, ‘Then why can we not see him?’ I said, ‘Because my god is invisible,’ and they said, ‘Then how do you not trip over your god?’ and I said, ‘Verily, my friends, sometimes I do!’”

The London Missionary Society sent nothing in the way of assistance. For nearly ten years, the Reverend Welles did not hear from London at all—no instructions, no aid, no encouragement. He took his religion into his own hands. For one thing, he commenced with baptizing anyone who wanted to be baptized. This was much at odds with the guidelines of the London Missionary Society, which insisted that nobody receive baptism until it was
quite certain
they had renounced their old idols and embraced the True Redeemer. But the Tahitians
wanted
to be baptized, because it was so entertaining—while at the same time wishing to maintain their old beliefs. The Reverend Welles relented. He baptized hundreds of nonbelievers, and half-believers, too.

“Who am I to stop a man from receiving baptism?” he asked, to Alma’s amazement. “Mrs. Welles did not approve, I must say. She believed that potential Christians should be put to the strictest test of sincerity before baptism, you see. But to me, this felt like an Inquisition! She often reminded me that our colleagues in London wished us to enforce a uniformity of faith. But there does not even exist a uniformity of faith between me and Mrs. Welles! As I frequently said to my good wife, ‘Dear Edith, did we come all this great distance only to become Spaniards?’ If a man wants a dunking in the river, I shall give him a dunking in the river! If a man is ever to come to the Lord, you see, it shall be through the will of the Lord—not through anything that I do or do not do. So what is the harm of a baptism? The man comes out of the river a bit cleaner than he went in, and perhaps a bit closer to heaven, too.”

In some cases, the Reverend Welles confessed, he baptized people several times a year, or dozens of times in a row. He simply could not see the harm in it.

Over the next few years, the Welleses had two more daughters: Penelope and Theodosia. They, too, died in infancy, and were laid to rest on the hill, beside their sisters.

New missionaries arrived in Tahiti. They tended to stay away from Matavai Bay, and from the Reverend Welles’s dangerously liberal notions. These new missionaries were firmer with the natives. They established codes of law against adultery and polygamy, against trespass, Sabbath-breaking, theft, infanticide, and Roman Catholicism. Meanwhile, Francis Welles drifted even further from orthodox missionary practices. In 1810, he translated his Bible into Tahitian without first securing approval from London. “I did not translate the entire Bible, you see, but only the bits I thought the Tahitians might enjoy. My version is far briefer than the Bible with which you are familiar, Sister Whittaker. I left out any mention of Satan, for instance. I’ve come to feel it is best not to discuss Satan overtly, you see, for the more the Tahitians hear about the Prince of Darkness, the more respect
and intrigue they feel toward him. I have seen a young married woman kneeling in my own church, praying most earnestly for Satan to please send her a boy as her firstborn. When I tried to correct her from this sad direction, she said, ‘But I wish to earn the favor of the one god whom all the Christians fear!’ So I desist from discussing Satan anymore. One must be adaptive, Miss Whittaker. One must be adaptive!”

The London Missionary Society eventually heard about these adaptations and, much displeased, sent word that the Welleses were to stop preaching and return home to England immediately. But the London Missionary Society was quite on the other side of the world, so how could they enforce anything? Meanwhile, the Reverend Welles already
had
stopped preaching, and was allowing the woman named Sister Manu to deliver sermons, despite the fact that she had not yet
quite
renounced all her other gods. But she liked Jesus Christ, and she spoke of him most eloquently. News of this angered London further.

“But I simply cannot answer to the London Missionary Society,” he told Alma, almost apologetically. “Their law is left behind in England, you see. They have no idea how things are. Here, I can answer only to the Author of all our mercies, and I have always believed that the Author of all our mercies is fond of Sister Manu.”

Still, not a single Tahitian had embraced Christianity fully until 1815, when the king of Tahiti—King Pōmare—sent all his holy idols to a British missionary in Papeete, along with a letter, in English, saying that he wished for his old gods to be committed to flames: he wanted to become a Christian at last. Pōmare hoped his decision would save his people, as Tahiti was in much distress. With every new ship came new plagues. Whole families were dying—from measles, from smallpox, from the dreadful diseases of prostitution. Where Captain Cook had estimated the Tahitian population at two hundred thousand souls in 1772, it had plunged to some eight thousand by 1815. Nobody was exempt from illness—not the high chiefs or the landowners or the lowborn. The king’s own son died of consumption.

The Tahitians, as a result, began to doubt their gods. When death visits so many homes, all certainties are questioned. As maladies spread, so spread the rumors that the God of the Englishmen was punishing the Tahitians for having rejected His son Jesus Christ. This fear readied the Tahitians for the Lord, and King Pōmare was the first to convert. His initial act
as a Christian was to prepare a feast and to eat the food in front of everyone without first making an offering to the old gods. Crowds gathered around their king in panic, certain he would be struck dead by the angry deities before their eyes. He was not struck dead.

After that, they all converted. Tahiti, weakened, humiliated, and decimated, became Christian at last.

“Weren’t we fortunate?” Reverend Welles said to Alma. “Weren’t we fortunate, indeed?”

He said this in the same sunny tone with which he always spoke. This was the puzzling thing about the Reverend Welles. Alma found it impossible to comprehend what, if anything, lay behind that eternal good cheer. Was he a cynic? Was he a heretic? Was he a simpleton? Was his innocence practiced or natural? One could never tell from his face, which was perpetually bathed in the clear light of ingenuousness. He had a face so open it would shame the suspicious, the greedy, the cruel. It was a face that would shame a liar. It was a face that sometimes shamed Alma, for she had never been candid with him about her own history or motives. Sometimes she wanted to reach down and take his small hand in her giant one, and—forgoing their respectable titles of Brother Welles and Sister Whittaker—to say to him simply, “I have not been forthright with you, Francis. Let me tell you my entire story. Let me tell you about my husband and our unnatural marriage. Please help me to understand who Ambrose was. Please tell me what you knew about him, and please tell me what you know about The Boy.”

But she did not. He was a minister of the Lord and an honorable, married Christian. How could she speak to him of such things?

The Reverend Welles told Alma his entire story, though, and held little back. He told her that, only a few years after King Pōmare’s conversion, he and Mrs. Welles, quite unexpectedly, had another baby girl. This time, the infant lived. Mrs. Welles saw it as a sign of the Lord’s approval—that the Welleses had helped to Christianize Tahiti. As such, they named the child Christina. During this time, the family was living in the nicest cottage in the settlement, right next to the church, in the very cottage where Sister Manu now lived, and happy they were indeed. Mrs. Welles and her daughter grew snapdragons and larkspurs, and they made a right little English garden of the place. The girl learned to swim before she could walk, like any other island child.