But this was only the beginning of the trials of that journey. Another storm met them in the Bay of Biscay, and a third one off the Cape of Good Hope, but they reached Adelaide eventually, and were there able to rest.
On the 21st of August the missionary ship which was to carry them to the islands left Sydney, and was in less than a fortnight high and dry on a reef, but she did not become a total wreck. She was taken back to Sydney for repair, leaving there again on the 15th of November, to become a total wreck on the 8th of January; her passengers were landed, minus all their belongings, on an almost unknown { 201} and uninhabited island. The notorious _Bully Hayes_, however, rescued them from this spot and took them to Samoa. Eventually James Chalmers and his wife reached Raratonga safely after a voyage extending over seventeen months—the passage now takes about six weeks.
“Tamate’s” life in the South Seas was a life of sheer hard work, but he always felt, and properly so, that he was making headway. At the beginning of his career at Raratonga he set to work on the young men, as he thought in them lay the future hopes of the civilisation of the islands. When one knows the risks he ran in going back into the bush, where white men were so dreaded that they were often shot on sight, one cannot help feeling that a special providence was looking after him. He took no half measures and made few concessions, but went boldly to work at the start as he intended to go on to the end.
Many of the natives had been in the habit of fancying that the missionaries were weak men, but in “Tamate” they met one who was their equal in most things and could beat them at many.
As a sportsman and a man of pluck he immediately won their hearts, in fact every one who { 202} came in contact with him speaks of him as a Man before all else.
One missionary said at the court in Sydney that, in his dealings with the natives, he remembered before all else that he was an Englishman, then a man, and lastly a missionary; but in “Tamate” every one recognised the Man.
From Raratonga Chalmers worked diligently amongst all the adjacent islands, and when later he had his yacht he was able to extend his operations and win many of the worst savages to better ways, and by joining in with the other missionaries some splendid work was accomplished. Throughout he saw the need of native teachers, and it was this branch of the work he set himself to push on, with the result that now there are native teachers and preachers in every island in the Pacific.
