On Tanna 
“THE island of Tanna lies to the northwest of Aneityum, 
and is distant from that island about thirty miles. The last 
public act in the eventful life of John Williams, the martyr 
of Erromango, was the introduction of Christian teachers 
to Tanna. This important event took place on the 18th 
of November, 1839, and during all the intervening years, 
with a few brief interruptions, missionary operations have 
been carried on on the island. 
“A struggle has been maintained with determined perti- 
nacity between the respective adherents of light and dark- 
ness—paganism and Christianity. The great body of the 
population have clung to heathenism with a resolution and 
constancy worthy of a better cause. I know of no island 
throughout the Pacific Ocean—east, west, north, or south— 
on which the gospel has met with so determined a resistance 
as on Tanna. Twice, after foreign missionaries had settled 
upon the island, was the mission broken up and the mis- 
sionaries were obliged to flee for their lives. 
“Privations and dangers, such as fall to the lot of few 
missionaries in modern times, have been borne and cou- 
rageously encountered by the missionaries—European and 
Polynesian—who have successively labored on Tanna. The 
first party escaped falling a sacrifice to the deluded pagans 
who sought their lives, by one of the most remarkable prov- 
idential interpositions on record. Of their successors, two 
finished their course before their work was well begun; 
the wife of one of these, a character of singular beauty and 
devotedness, died before her husband, and the wife of an- 
other laborer, who endured much and hazarded much,... 
also fell at her post after a few months of suffering and 
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