The Book of Missionary Heroes - Basil Mathews (reading a book txt) 📗

[41] Poo-o-tă.

Ruatoka
(Date of Incident, about 1878)

It was a dark night and silent. The swish and lapping of the waters on the Port Moresby beach on the southern shore of the immense island of New Guinea, filled the air with a quiet hush of expectation.

In a little white house sat a tall, dark man with his wife. The man was Ruatoka. If you had asked "Who is Ruatoka?" of all the Papuans for miles around Port Moresby, they would have wondered at your ignorance. "Ruatoka," they would have told you, was a "Jesus man." He walked among their villages, and did not fear them when they threatened him with spears and clubs. He gave them medicines when they were ill, and nursed them. He spoke strong words to them which made their hearts turn to water within them when he showed that they did wrong. He often stopped them from fighting.

Ruatoka, with his wife, had sailed from the South Sea Islands with Tamate,[42] who was to them their great hero.

"My fathers of old were heathen, savage men on the island of Mangaia," he would say. "The white men came to them and brought the story of Jesus. Now we are happy. But we, too, must go to the men of New Guinea, just as the white men came to us. To-day the New Guinea Papuans are savage cannibals and heathen. To-morrow they will know Jesus and be as happy as we are."

So Ruatoka had been trained as a teacher and preacher as well as a house-builder and carpenter; and his wife was taught how to teach children as well as good housekeeping.

This was the brown man, Ruatoka, who sat that night in his little house at Port Moresby on the shore behind the great reef of Papua. Suddenly there came a knock at his door. The door opened, and the black, frightened faces of Papuans, with staring eyes, looked at him.

"What is the matter?" he asked.

And they told him that, as they came at sunset along the path from the people of Larogi to Port Moresby, they found by the side of the path a white man. "He was dying," they said. "We were afraid to touch him. If we touched him and he died, his ghost would haunt us for evermore."

Ruatoka stood up at once and reached for his lantern, and turning to the men said:

"Come and guide me to the place."

They said, "No, we are afraid of the demon spirit. It is night. The man will die. We are afraid of the spirits. We will not go."

Ruatoka's father had told him when he was a boy how his own people in the years before had dreaded the spirit-demons of Mangaia, but that he must learn that there were no spirits to be dreaded; that one great Father-Spirit ruled above all, and would take care of His children, and that all those children must love one another.

So Rua, as they called him, knowing that the white man who lay sick by the roadside in the night, though of another colour, was yet a brother, and knowing that no demon spirit could harm him in the dark, lighted his lantern, poured water into a bottle, took a long piece of cloth, folded it up, and started out under the stars.

He walked for mile after mile up steep hills and down into valleys along the path; but nothing did he hear save the cry of a night bird. At last he had gone five miles, and was wondering whether he could ever find the sick man (for the long grass towered up on either side and all was still), when he heard a low moaning. Listening intently he found the direction of the sound, and then moved towards it. He found there, at the side of the path, a white man named Neville, nearly dead. He was moaning with the pain of the fever, yet unconscious.

Taking his bottle, Ruatoka poured a little water down the throat of the man. He then took the long piece of cloth, wound it round Neville, took the two ends in his hands, and stooping, he pulled and strained with all his great strength, until at last Neville lay like a sack upon his shoulders. Staggering along, Ruatoka climbed the hills that rose 300 feet high. Again and again he was bound to rest, for the man on his shoulders was as heavy as Ruatoka himself. He tottered down the hill path, and at last, just as the first light of dawn was breaking over the eastern hills, Ruatoka staggered into his home, laid the sick man upon the only bed he had, and then himself laid down upon the floor, wearied almost to death. There he slept while his wife nursed and tended the fever-stricken Neville back to life.

Over a thousand years before that day Wilfrid[43] had brought life and joy to the starving Saxons of the South coast of England. A hundred years before that day white men, the great-great-grandchildren of those Saxons, had started out in The Duff and, sailing across the world, had taken life and joy in the place of the terror of demons and the death by the club to the men of the Islands of the Seas.

Now Ruatoka, the South Sea islander, having in his heart the same brave spirit of the Good Shepherd—that spirit of the Good Samaritan, of help and preparedness, of courage and of chivalry, had carried life and joy back to the North Sea islander, the Briton who had fallen by the roadside in Papua.

Ruatoka was a brown Greatheart. It was with him as it must be with all brave sons who serve that great Captain, Jesus Christ: he wanted to be in the front of the battle. When the great Tamate was killed and eaten by the cannibals of Goaribari, Ruatoka wrote a letter to a missionary who lived and still lives in Papua. This is the end of the letter:

"Hear my wish. It is a great wish. The remainder of my strength I would spend in the place where Tamate was killed. In that village I would live. In that place where they killed men, Jesus Christ's name and His word I would teach to the people that they may become Jesus' children. My wish is just this. You know it. I have spoken.

Ruatoka."