Читать книгу In the Wake of the War Canoe - W. H. Collison - Страница 4
ОглавлениеBY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF DERRY AND RAPHOE
This is the record of a wonderful triumph of the Cross. Foremost and throughout it is this. But even for a reader quite indifferent to religion it ought to have an absorbing interest. In the simplest and least pretentious language it records a career of the most romantic adventure. Captain Marryat never recorded such experiences for the delight of schoolboys.
To be landed with one's wife in northern regions from the last ship of the season, among savages, and to be told as the farewell word of civilisation, "You will all be murdered"; to be chased in an open canoe by sea lions and narwhals, into whose dense masses a disobedient sailor had fired; to be chased again by a shark so huge that his dorsal fin overtopped the stern of the canoe, and so menacing that in despair they struck at his head with a pole, and he dived down and left them; to be prostrated with fever, and to have the pagan medicine men whooping and dancing around your bed, conscious that if you die they will be rid of you, and if you live they will claim the cure, these and storms at sea, and the wars of Indian tribes, and conflagrations, and earthquakes make up a fine catalogue of adventures.
Then there is the most interesting story of the natives, absolutely barbarous in many respects and ready for murder and piracy on the slightest provocation, but with a sort of very real civilisation as well, with a remarkable ceremonial for the ratifying of treaties, with a language of fine inflexions, and, as their friend assures us, the finest boat-builders in the world.
We read admirable specimens of native shrewdness, as when a tribe refuses a native catechist because another tribe no better has got a white man. "Listen," said the authority. "Would you refuse a good dinner because I sent it by a native?" "No," said the chief, "I would eat it, and I know that the native teacher would bring us the same feast, but the white man would cook it better." All this should make of the book the most popular Sunday School premium of the season.
But all this is only a by-product. We read of his first overtures to these heathens, and their answer, "Why did you not tell us all this before? Long ago the white man brought us the smallpox; now we have grown old we like our own ways; it is too late."
And says the admirable Archdeacon, "I felt as if I were upon my trial." We are told how there came to him first the sick and those who loved them, and then the old and unhappy, until the battle is won and the chief medicine man renounces his art, and the tribe is Christianised.
It is a wonderful story of devotion and faith triumphant over every conceivable hindrance and difficulty. There are people who talk as if missionaries have a very easy time; there are people who profess to think that religion makes milksops; and there are people who declare that the Cross has lost its power.
Henceforward it will be an excellent answer to all these to refer them to the work of God by His servants in the Queen Charlotte Islands.
GEO. A. DERRY.
