DOMINOES TO TAHITI by Wayne Dixon It began with an eighteenth English cobbler named William Carey, or even before that with James Cook, the famed Pacific explorer. William Carey devoured the published journals of James Cook which extended Carey’s vision of the world to far away places. Upon his conversion, Carey carried over his plan to a missionary vision and founded a society to promote the gospel in other lands. He saw himself in Captain Cook’s Tahiti converting the heathen. Destiny determined otherwise. Carey went to India instead where he labored for decades. But Tahiti was not forgotten. In 1796 a band of would-be missionaries set off on a journey aboard the Duff, a worthy vessel under the command of Captain James Wilson. They were a mixed lot, high on hopes, and short on preparation. One was a bricklayer, and others carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, gardener, and harness maker. They were not ready for Tahiti and Tahiti was not ready for them. The missionaries were preceded not only by Captain Cook but by an assorted band of whalers and traders who had already made their mark on the island. The missionaries floundered on the beach, and faced with native and imported opposition, some took the first boat home. Others fled to Australia leaving Henry Nott behind. Henry Nott was the bricklayer, perhaps by occupation a more patient and perseverant man. He stood up to chieftains and captains alike. It took ten years of plugging before Nott had a single convert. Meanwhile he teamed up with the Pomares, the dynastic native rulers, to learn Tahitian, to encode it in nine consonants and five vowels, and begin translating the Bible. He began with John 3:16. That’s where the dominoes began to fall into place, cascading into multiple conversions first envisioned by William Carey. If God wanted the heathen converted, William Carey was told years before, He would do it in his own time. And so He did, first with a band of eighty, and then even more. Chapels were built all over the island, and native teachers were sent from there to other nearby islands. When other missionaries later came to these outlying islands, they were surprised to find their work already begun by natives to natives. On Bora Bora they were surprised to find converts already gathered in native-built chapels conducting their own prayer meetings. Venus Point on Tahiti’s Matavai Bay bears no marks of these beginnings. As we viewed the bathers on the beach one would never know what happened here, except for a plaque bearing James Cook’s name. I pocketed a piece of volcanic stone to remember these stories.