Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [10]
Such an invention of labour and importance I shall not miss. Though I have little doubt that both the good and bad habits of the white man will accompany his travels.
13 October 1834
Reading the final sentence of my last entry, I am moved to offer a few words to our Saviour:
Dear Lord, I pray that my apprehension for the future of my people, my fears for the earnest work of the missionaries, and the calamities of my imagination be wronged by your divine intentions. The passengers of this ship would not be the first of your harbingers to meet their maker on the end of a Fijian war club. Nor grace the feast of a chief with their very own cooked flesh. May your love and care keep us safe from harm. Amen.
14 October 1834
The further we sail from the shores of the British Isles, and the closer we get to my sunlit home, the more I am engaged in reflecting upon my adopted kingdom.
Beyond those cities of smoke and industry, a land scarred by factories and foundries, a people with so many hands busied producing more and more things whether useful or useless, it is the inner effect of this life that begins to trouble my soul.
Many times, be it in the court of a Lord or tavern of drinkers, I was asked whether I was homesick for my distant shore. Not wishing to offend, for a man does not visit the hut of his neighbour and talk of his own roof, I would answer their polite questions with compliments for the English soil I stood upon. Yet my heart was no diplomat. For the first time in my life, maybe in that of any Fijian, I understood the word lonely.
But I do not mean to be by oneself, without companions, for any Fijian knows that whether in the depths of the darkest forest, walking at dawn on an empty beach, or even diving the reef among silent fish, we are held by the hand of the Great Spirit, joined to the beat of breaking waves and wind in the leaves, all things singing life, together.
With or without God, lonely is a word carried by a man in a room full of strangers, along a busy street where he does not know the names of those he passes, and offers neither greeting nor his hand in acknowledgement. This lonely is a state of being unshared, of private thoughts imprisoned and starved, wasting away without light or company. Even the closest families can live in loneliness, sitting at the same table each night for dinner, but wasting breath on triviality rather than sharing matters of the heart.
I am warmed at the thought of embracing my brothers, of clasping my mother and father tight to my chest. They are my very own blood, yet they may not recognise their own son, surely the first Fijian to be clothed in a suit from Savile Row.
22 October 1834
Nothing remarkable has occurred since my last entry over a week ago, and as the Caroline makes good progress on a favourable SE wind, we have little to do but tend to our duties assigned by the committee.
25 October 1834
The warmer climes and lightened breeze have given the missionaries and their families some aspect of what to expect beneath the southern sun – and how inappropriate to be clothed in a heavy cassock of black.
One would have thought that a lesson from the midday rays would educate the missionaries of the need to shed layers. Yet the zealous piety of Rev. Lilywhite has caused much grumbling among the seamen. On observing his wife taking her circuitous stroll among the sweating, half-naked sailors, the rev., a greying and