In the Midst of Savagery 
SEVEN years passed before other missionaries came to 
Fotuna. Then Mr. and Mrs. Gunn were brought by the 
“Dayspring,” to land with their boxes upon the beach among 
the wild people of the island. 
“What a spectacle was before us!” wrote Mr. Gunn; “nu- 
merous naked forms were perched on the cliffs above. The 
sandy beach below swarmed with wild-looking men, carry- 
ing muskets, spears, clubs, and bows and arrows. Women 
with short skirts and nude breasts, and girls with the merest 
scraps of covering, stood apart or squatted on the sand. 
Bedaubed with paint, besmeared with dirt, savage looking, 
and in shameless nakedness, the people were hideous and 
repulsive, and seemed like lost souls thronging to mock us. 
“And this was the people who had come to meet the new 
missionary and his wife, and among whom our lives were 
to be spent! We were appalled, but not discouraged. Ta- 
tavaka (the teacher who had remained faithful at his post 
of duty all through those seven years) looked like an angel 
in the midst of that awful, seething crowd of heathen and 
semiheathen. But we were wrong in imagining they had 
come to meet us; the coming of the ‘Dayspring’ was their 
holiday, and they brought fowls and baskets in exchange 
for tobacco; their meeting the missionary was only sec- 
ondary.” 
Mr. and Mrs. Gunn, thus beginning life on Fotuna, were 
to drink from the cup of sorrow to the bitter dregs before 
they could rejoice as the reapers who “come again, bringing 
their sheaves with them.” Years afterward, Mr. Gunn wrote 
of the struggle, in the following words: 
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