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  "I imagine that my mother and sister think so," Jerusha replied quietly. The moment of emotion having passed without Abner's even having touched her hands, she rose demurely and returned to her own chair.

  "Yet my sister Esther thought that your letter was sincere," Abner reflected.

  "And when she thought so," Jerusha said wryly, "she did her best to convince me to marry you. If Esther were here now . . ."

  Aloofly, two strange lovers, like continents undiscovered, sat apart, with oceans of uncertainty between them, but as the unique day drew to an end, Jerusha found that Abner Hale really did believe on the Lord and that in his heart he was truly afraid to take a woman to wife who was not wholly committed to God; whereas Abner learned that it was unimportant whether Jerusha Bromley was in a state of grace or not; what counted was the fact that she was willing to remain an old maid forever unless marriage brought her the honest passion of which life was capable.

  On these mutual discoveries the first interview ended, except at the door to the Bromley home Abner asked quietly, "May I be so bold as to grasp your hand tenderly before I go ... as a token of my deep esteem for you?" And when he first touched the body of Jerusha Bromley, spinster of Walpole, in what was for him the most daring gesture of his young life, a surge of such power sped from her finger tips to his that he stood for a moment transfixed, then hurried in confusion across the sleeping common and to his inn.

  Before eight the next morning all the kitchens of Walpole--at least all whose members attended the local church--knew of the precise state of the Hale-Bromley courtship, for little Mercy had been spying, and now she went from house to house relating breathlessly, "Well, he didn't really kiss her, because that would have been improper on a first visit, but he did take her hand in his, like in an English novel."

  At eight-thirty Mercy and her sister Charity called at the inn and advised their possible brother-in-law that he was about to be spirited away on a family picnic, and he asked impulsively, "Is . . . Miss Bromley attending?" And Mercy replied, "Jerusha? Naturally. How else is she going to become engaged?" But Abner, foreseeing another day spent far from a privy, refused to eat any breakfast or drink either milk or water, so that by the time the picnic baskets were opened on a New Hampshire hill, he was famished and ate prodigiously, after which he and Jerusha went for a walk along a stream, and he asked, "How do you find it possible to leave such a lovely place?" And she replied cryptically, "Not all of those who followed Jesus were peasants."

  He stopped by a bending tree and said, "I could not sleep last night, Miss Bromley, thinking that I managed badly in our conversation, but then it seemed that I hadn't managed so poorly after all, because as a result of our talking I came to know you and to appreciate your qualities. Any fool could see that you were beautiful, so there was no sense talking about that, but in other circumstances we might have said a great deal last night without having discovered as much as we did."

  "What we found out," Jerusha replied, holding onto a branch, "is that we are both stubborn people, but that we both honor the Lord."

  Standing more than six feet from her, he asked, "Would you be willing to go to Owhyhee ... on those conditions?"

  "I would, Reverend Hale."

  He swallowed, scratched at the tree trunk and asked, "Does this mean we are engaged?"

  "It does not," she said firmly, holding onto her branch and swinging back and forth provocatively.

  "Why won't you marry me?" he asked in great confusion.

  "Because you haven't asked me," she said stubbornly.

  "But I said . . ."

  "You said, 'Would you be willing to go to Owhyhee?' and I said, 'Yes.' But that certainly didn't mean I'd be willing to go all the way around Cape Horn to Owhyhee with a man who wasn't my husband."

  "Oh, I never intended . . ." Abner crimsoned in dismay and tried to make several different apologies, with no success. Finally, he stopped and looked at the slim girl in the silky summer dress, swinging on the bough so that she seemed to be dancing, and without her teasing him more, he discovered what he should say. He left the tree trunk and kneeled in the dust beside the faltering stream. "Miss Bromley, will you marry me?" he asked.

  "I will," she replied, adding nervously, "I was so afraid, Reverend Hale, that you were going to say, 'Will you marry me and go with me to Owhyhee?' That would have spoiled it all."

  She held down her hands and helped him to his feet, expecting to be embraced, but he dusted his knees and said in a burst of real joy, "We must advise your parents." Smiling wryly, she agreed, and they went back to the picnic area, but Mr. and Mrs. Bromley were sound asleep. Mercy and her sister were not, and could guess what had happened, so Mercy asked, "Are you engaged?"

  "Yes," Jerusha said.

  "Has he kissed you?"

  "Not yet."

  "Abner! Kiss her!" the sisters cried, and in the hot sun of a late July day, Abner Hale kissed Jerusha Bromley for the first time. It wasn't much, as kisses go, and the audience was nervously distracting, but when it ended he amazed himself by grabbing first Charity and kissing her and then Mercy, and crying, "You're the dearest sisters in the whole world!" Then he sat down, dazed, and confessed, "I never kissed a girl before but now I've kissed three of them!"

  Mercy awakened her parents, screaming, "They've done it!" And there were more deep greetings, after which Charity produced a piece of paper on which she had outlined numerous dates: "We can post the banns on Sunday, that's the fifth, and on Monday the twentieth you can get married."

  Mercy cried, "We'll turn Daddy's office into a sewing room and the cloth we've bought can be made into dresses and sheets . . ."

  "You've bought the cloth?" Abner asked.

  "Yes," Charity confessed. "Three weeks ago Jerusha decided to marry you, after she read Esther's letter. She told us, 'We'll let him come to visit just in case his sister's a wicked little liar.' But we all knew she wasn't. Anyway, Daddy must have got fifteen different letters about you, and we knew."

  "Did all of you read all the letters?" Abner asked in embarrassment.

  "Of course!" Mercy cried. "And the part I liked best is where you learned to cook and sew and keep house ... in case you became a missionary. I told Jerusha to marry you quick, because then she'd never have to do any work at all."

  But that evening, as the two younger sisters took their new brother-in-law-to-be back to the inn so that he could wash up before supper, Mercy pointed to a large white house and said, "That's where the sailor came to visit. He was a very handsome man, although I was only nine at the time, so he may have seemed taller than he really was."

  "What happened?" Abner asked cautiously, and he saw Charity pinch her sister's arm.

  "Ouch! Charity's trying to make me keep still, Abner, but I thought somebody ought to tell you. He was much handsomer than you are, but not as nice."

  "Jerusha would never have married him, anyway," Charity added.

  "Why not?" Abner asked.

  "It takes a certain type of girl to marry a sailor," Charity said.

  "What type?"

  "The Salem type. The New Bedford type. Women who are willing to have their husbands away for years at a time. Jerusha is not that kind of woman, Abner. She lives on affection. Do be sweet with her."

  "I shall be," he said, and on the marriage morning, when Reverend Thorn arrived by coach from Boston to conduct the ceremonies for his niece, he found his young minister friend from Yale in a state of gentle hypnosis. "I can't believe that I am going to marry this angel," Abner exploded, eager for someone to talk with after the three weeks of sewing and parties and meeting friends. "Her sisters have been unbelievable. Eighteen women were at their home all last week making me clothes. I've never known . . ."

  He showed the tall missionary six barrels of clothing made by the women of Walpole, books donated for the mission in Owhyhee, and crockery. "I have experienced an outpouring of the spirit in this town that I never knew existed," Abner confessed.

  "My sister Abigai
l is a girl who always made friends quickly," Eliphalet Thorn admitted. "I am so glad that you and Jerusha have found each other in God. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll step along to the house to complete arrangements with Charles."

  But as he left Abner's room, the innkeeper called him and said, "If you're heading for Bromley's, you can take along this letter which just came in the mail," and he handed the missionary several sheets of paper folded upon themselves to form an envelope, and it was from Canton, in China, and had been on the sea for many months to London and to Charleston in South Carolina and to New Bedford. It was addressed to Miss Jerusha Bromley, Walpole, New Hampshire, and was written in a strong, fine hand. Reverend Thorn studied the letter for a long time and rationalized: "What chance is there that the innkeeper will mention this letter before Jerusha leaves Walpole? Not very much, I should think. But there is still a chance, so I must not burn it. Besides, to do so would be a sin. But if I now honestly declare, 'Eliphalet Thorn, you are to deliver that letter to your niece, Jerusha Bromley,' my intentions will be clear. Then, if I tuck it deep inside my inner pocket, like this, it would be only logical for me to forget it. Three months hence I can post it to my sister with apologies. And with Jerusha already married, why would Abigail want to bother her daughter with such a letter? Abigail's no fool." So he hid the letter and said in a loud voice as he walked across the common, "I must give this letter to Jerusha immediately I see her."

  That afternoon Abner Hale, twenty-one, married Jerusha Bromley, twenty-two, whom he had known two weeks and four days, and on the next morning the young couple, accompanied by fourteen barrels of missionary goods, set out for Boston and the hermaphrodite brig Thetis, 230 tons, bound for Owhyhee.

  The mission party assembled for the first time on August 30, 1821, in a brick church on the Boston waterfront. When Abner and Jerusha entered, John Whipple saw them and gasped with surprise at the beauty of the young woman who stood hesitantly in a fawn-oolored coat and a pale blue poke bonnet that neatly framed her dancing brown curls and flashing eyes.

  "Amanda!" he whispered to his wife. "Look at Abner!"

  "Is that Abner?" the tiny bride from Hartford asked. "You said . . ."

  "Hello, Abner!" Whipple called softly. When the couples met, Whipple said, "This is my wife, Amanda."

  "This is Mrs. Hale," Abner replied, and they proceeded to meet the other nine mission couples.

  Of the eleven young men convened in the church, all were under the age of twenty-eight, and nine were less than twenty-four. One had been married for two years, another for almost a year. The remaining nine had been married much as Abner and Jerusha. Friends had dispatched hastily written word pictures of unmarried girls of known piety, and weddings had been abruptly arranged, usually on the first meeting between the young people. Of these nine hurried marriages, only John Whipple and his tiny cousin Amanda had known each other for more than four days before banns were announced. Of the remaining eight couples, six, when it came time to sail, had not yet relaxed sufficiently for husband and wife to call each other by their first names, and that included Reverend and Mrs. Hale.

  Few pilgrims have ever set forth upon great adventure with clearer directions than those promulgated by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in the little brick church. Tall, godlike Eliphalet Thom, drawing upon his hard years in Africa, said bluntly, "Brothers, you are about to immerse yourselves in one of the most difficult of all ventures, mission work in a pagan land. You are severely admonished to abide by these rules. First, all property is to be held in common. You are a family, and as a family you will receive from us here in Boston regular supplies which belong to no man or woman, but to the family in general. If you who are farmers raise fruit and sell the surplus, the proceeds belong to the family. If you who are good seamstresses sew clothing and sell it to the sailors in Owhyhee, the returns belong to the family. You are a family in Christ, and it is as a family that you own your houses, your lands, your schools and your churches.

  "Second, you are abjured from interfering in the government of the islands, for you must constantly repeat to yourselves the injunction of our Lord as found in Matthew: 'And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.' You are specifically abjured from participating in government. You are sent not to govern but to convert. You are directed to accomplish two divine missions: bring the heathen to the Lord and civilize him. How he governs himself is his concern. How he learns to know Christ and the alphabet is your concern, for remember that until he learns to read, he cannot know the Bible and God's redeeming word. Therefore, to speed this worthy end we are sending with you three full fonts of type, and you are to put into the language of Owhyhee the Holy Bible and such other learning as the Owhyheeans are capable of mastering. Provide them with a written language, and they will glorify the Lord.

  "Third, there is an inborn inclination on the part of all New England men to trade, and I suspect from the natural abilities which I have found among you as I have studied your careers, that many of you would do conspicuously well in business, but you have been called to serve the Lord, and it is to this business that you must attend. You will receive no salary, and you are expected to earn none. Your sole job is to serve the Lord, and if you do this with all your ability, you will have no vain and idle time for business pursuits.

  "Finally, you are to lift up the heathen step by step until he stands with you. Within the passage of years the schools you build must be taught by him, and before you leave the scene, the pulpits you erect and from which you deliver the word of God must be filled by him. You are setting forth to save immortal souls for the harvest of God."

  After Reverend Thorn had taken up questions concerning medical practices to be followed, an elderly, white-haired minister who had worked in many parts of America and in Ceylon spoke briefly. "Brothers in God," he said simply, "you are not entering upon a limited mission. You are to aim at nothing less than the complete regeneration and salvation of a society. If children now die, they are to be saved. If minds are now ignorant, they are to be enlightened. If idols flourish, they are to be supplanted by the word of Jesus. And if a road is mired and useless, it is to be paved and made straight. If there is among you any man or woman with a hundred capacities, he will find in Owhyhee full outlet for all of them. Spend yourselves in Christ so that in later years it may be said of you, 'They came to a nation in darkness; they left it in light."'

  ON THE LAST DAY of August the mission family was introduced to the ship on which they would live during the six months required for the slow passage to Hawaii. Reverend Thorn led them from the brick church, where they had engaged in morning prayers, onto the dock where a large three-masted ship lay anchored while her cargo of whale oil was being unloaded.

  "That's a substantial ship," Jerusha observed to some of the other women. "A person shouldn't get too seasick on that," she added hopefully.

  "That's not the mission ship," Reverend Thorn corrected. "Yours lies ahead."

  "Oh, no!” one of the women gasped as she saw the squat and ugly little brig Thetis. It looked scarcely large enough for a river boat.

  "Are we sailing in that?" Abner asked shakenly of John Whipple.

  "It says Thetis," Whipple replied dourly.

  The brig was almost the smallest two-master that could successfully round Cape Horn at the farthest tip of South America. It was seventy-nine feet long, twenty-four feet wide, and drew only a dozen feet when loaded. Jerusha, upon inspecting it more closely from the quay, confided to Amanda Whipple, "It looks as if it might sink if twenty-two missionaries step aboard."

  "You're free to inspect the Thetis," a rough voice called, and for the first time they met Captain Retire Janders, a rugged forty-year-old master with a circle of sandy beard that framed his clean-shaven face from one ear, down the jaw line, u
nder the chin and up to the other ear, making him look like a ruddy-faced boy peering through a hedge.

  As Reverend Thorn led his family aboard he introduced each couple formally to Captain Janders. "The captain has been instructed to look after you on this long and tedious voyage," Thorn explained. "But his first job is to run his ship."

  "Thank you, Reverend," Captain Janders growled. "Sometimes folks don't understand that a brig at sea ain't like a farm in Massachusetts." He led the missionaries forward to where a hatch stood open, and deep in the bowels of the brig they could see their boxes and books and barrels. "It's impossible, absolutely and forever impossible for anybody to touch anything that's down in that hold before we get to Hawaii. So don't ask. You live with what you can store in your stateroom."

  "Excuse me, Captain," young Whipple interrupted. "You pronounce the name of the islands Hawaii. We've been calling them Owhyhee. What is their accurate name?"

  Captain Janders stopped, stared at Whipple and growled, "I like a man who wants to know facts. The name is Hawaii. Huh-va-eee. Accent on second syllable."

  "Have you been to Hawaii?" Whipple asked, carefully accenting the name as it should be.

  "You learn well, young man," Captain Janders grunted. "I've sure been to Hawaii."

  "What's it like?"

  The captain thought a long time and said, "It could use a few missionaries. Now this hatchway aft is where you come up and down from your quarters," and he led the twenty-two down a dark, steep and narrow flight of stairs so that each wife thought: "If the boat rolls I'll never be able to manage this."

  They were little prepared for what Captain Janders now showed them. It was a gloomy, grimy, 'tween-decks area twenty feet long--less than the length of four grown men--and fifteen feet wide, out of which a substantial portion had been stolen for a rough table shaped in the form of a half-circle, through the middle of which rose the brig's mainmast. "Our public living area," Captain Janders explained. "It's a mite dark at present but when a stout storm comes along and rips away our sails, we'll take that extra suit from in front of the portholes, and things'll be a bit lighter."