Williams, JOHN

Williams, JOHN, missionary martyr, was born at Tottenham, near London, 29th June 1796. At fourteen he was apprenticed to an ironmonger, but having offered himself to the London Missionary Society, was sent in 1816 to Eimeo, one of the Society Islands. Later he settled in Raiatea, the largest of the group, and laboured here with marvellous success, his powers of organisation being as conspicuous as his zeal. In 1823 he went to Raratonga, the chief of the Hervey Islands, and ere long the whole group was Christianised. He next built a boat 60 feet long, and 18 wide, the sails of native matting, the cordage of the bark of the libiscus, the oakum of cocoa-nut husks and banana stumps, and in this vessel during the next four years he visited many of the South Sea Islands, extending his missionary labours to the Samoa Islands. In 1834 he returned to England, and remained nearly four years, superintending the printing by the Bible Society of his Raratongan New Testament, and raising £4000 to equip a missionary-ship for Polynesia. In 1838 he went out again, visited many of the stations he had already established, and sailed as far west as the New Hebrides, where he hoped to plant a mission, but was killed and eaten by the savage natives of Erromango, November 20, 1839. He published his Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in 1837. See the Memoir by Rev. Ebenezer Prout (1843).