In the Wrong Paradise, and Other Stories Read online

  THE END OF PHAEACIA

  I. INTRODUCTORY. {1}

  The Rev. Thomas Gowles, well known in Colonial circles where the Truth isvalued, as "the Boanerges of the Pacific," departed this life at HackneyWick, on the 6th of March, 1885. The Laodiceans in our midst haveventured to affirm that the world at large has been a more restful placesince Mr. Gowles was taken from his corner of the vineyard. TheBoanerges of the Pacific was, indeed, one of those rarely-gifted souls,souls like a Luther or a Knox, who can tolerate no contradiction, andwill palter with no compromise, where the Truth is concerned. Papists,Puseyites, Presbyterians, and Pagans alike, found in Mr. Gowles anopponent whose convictions were firm as a rock, and whose method ofproclaiming the Truth was as the sound of a trumpet. Examples of hissingular courage and daring in the work of the ministry abound in thefollowing narrative. Born and brought up in the Bungletonian communion,himself collaterally connected, by a sister's marriage, with JedediahBungleton, the revered founder of the Very Particular People, Gowles wasinaccessible to the scepticism of the age.

  His youth, it is true, had been stormy, like that of many a brandafterwards promoted to being a vessel. His worldly education was of themost elementary and indeed eleemosynary description, consequently hedespised secular learning, and science "falsely so called." It isrecorded of him that he had almost a distaste for those difficultchapters of the Epistles in which St. Paul mentions by name his Greekfriends and converts. In a controversy with an Oxford scholar, conductedin the open air, under the Martyrs' Memorial in that centre of carelessprofessors, Gowles had spoken of "Nicodemus," "Eubulus," and "Stephanas."His unmannerly antagonist jeering at these slips of pronunciation, Gowlesuttered his celebrated and crushing retort, "Did Paul know Greek?" Theyoung man, his opponent, went away, silenced if not convinced.

  Such a man was the Rev. Thomas Gowles in his home ministry. Circumstancescalled him to that wider field of usefulness, the Pacific, in which somany millions of our dusky brethren either worship owls, butterflies,sharks, and lizards, or are led away captive by the seductive pomps ofthe Scarlet Woman, or lapse languidly into the lap of a bloated andErastian establishment, ignorant of the Truth as possessed by ourcommunity. Against all these forms of soul-destroying error the Rev.Thomas Gowles thundered nobly, "passing," as an admirer said, "like anevangelical cyclone, from the New Hebrides to the Aleutian Islands." Itwas during one of his missionary voyages, in a labour vessel, theBlackbird, that the following singular events occurred, events which Mr.Gowles faithfully recorded, as will be seen, in his missionary narrative.We omit, as of purely secular interest, the description of the stormwhich wrecked the Blackbird, the account of the destruction of thesteamer with all hands (not, let us try to hope, with all souls) onboard, and everything that transpired till Mr. Gowles found himselfalone, the sole survivor, and bestriding the mast in the midst of atempestuous sea. What follows is from the record kept on pieces of skin,shards of pottery, plates of metal, papyrus leaves, and other strangesubstitutes for paper, used by Mr. Gowles during his captivity.