John Williams

Life and Ministry

John Williams was born in Tottenham, England, in 1796, apprenticed as an ironmonger, and converted at eighteen under the preaching of a London chapel. He sailed for the Pacific in 1817 under the London Missionary Society, age twenty-one, with his young wife Mary. Settling first at Raiatea in the Society Islands, he proved an unusually capable mission strategist: he learned the language quickly, trained native preachers (knowing that European missionaries were too few to reach the scattered islands), built his own seventy-foot mission ship, the Messenger of Peace, with bellows made from goatskin and cordage from coconut fiber, and from it carried the gospel across thousands of miles of the southern Pacific — to the Cook Islands, Samoa, and beyond. By the 1830s, churches founded by Williams and his Polynesian colleagues were spreading through islands no European had charted.

Circumstances of Death

In 1839 Williams set out on the Camden to bring the gospel to the western Melanesian islands, which had not yet been entered. On November 20 he landed at Dillon's Bay on Erromango with a younger missionary, James Harris. The islanders had recently suffered violent abuse at the hands of European sandalwood traders, and the distinction between traders and missionaries was not one they had reason to make. Williams and Harris were attacked on the beach within minutes of landing and killed with clubs. Their bodies were carried inland; according to later accounts collected by Williams's biographer and confirmed by the islanders themselves a generation later, they were eaten in accordance with local custom for slain enemies.

Legacy

Williams's death galvanized the British missionary movement at a moment when its momentum had begun to flag. Memorial services were held across England; subscriptions for new mission ships poured in; the London Missionary Society named successive vessels John Williams I through John Williams VII, the last serving until 1971. The gospel did come to Erromango — within twenty years, through Polynesian and Melanesian Christians whom the islanders themselves trained — and on the stretch of shore at Dillon's Bay where Williams had been clubbed down, the descendants of those who killed him raised a church.