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Description
“Eromanga [Erromango] - the island in which Rev John Williams, Mr. Harris, Rev G. N. Gordon and Mrs. Gordon, and Rev J. D. Gordon were murdered Mr. Williams in 1839, and Mr. and Mrs. Gordon in 1861, and their son in 1871. The river is the ‘Williams River’. On the near side among the trees is the Mission Station on the far shore is the spot where Williams was murdered. The grandson of his murderer is now one of the Mission teachers. Williams was the first missionary that landed on the New Hebrides. He visited Tanna, Futuna, and Eromanga.” Exterior view from the bank of the Williams River there are two unknown figures in the distance with horse and cart. The mouth of the river faces Dillons Bay (renamed Williams Bay in a ceremony of reconciliation in 2009). John Williams (1796–1839) was born near London, commissioned by the London Missionary Society in 1816, and active in the South Pacific. In 1839, while visiting a part of the New Hebrides where he was unknown, Williams and his fellow missionary James Harris were killed on the island of Erromango during an attempt to bring them the Gospel. He published A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises (1845). George N. Gordon (1822-1861) was a Presbyterian Canadian missionary who arrived on the coast of Eromanga in 1857. In 1861 sandalwood traders intentionally exposed the natives to measles. Two children of one of the island's chiefs had died in Gordon’s care. Blaming him for their deaths, the chief and a group of warriors killed both George and his wife, Ellen, in 1861. His brother (not son as quoted), James D. Gordon (1832-1871), sailed to Eromanga in 1864. In 1870, as the result of a misunderstanding between himself and the rest of the Presbyterian missionaries in the New Hebrides, Gordon resigned all official ties with the mission but continued his work on Eromanga. In 1871 he was killed for reasons that are still unclear. Ten years later a church building was dedicated at Dillon’s Bay named the Martyrs' Church.
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