Shaking The Pillars Of Hell
In the dense rain-forests of Ecuador, on the Pacific
side of the Andes Mountains,
lives a tribe of Indians who call themselves the Huaorani ("people" in their language, Huao), but whose neighbors have called
them the Aucas ("savages" in Quechua).
For many generations they have been completely isolated from the outside world,
disposed to kill any stranger on sight, and feared even by their head-hunting
neighbors, the Jivaro tribe.
In 1955, four missionaries from the United States who were working with the Quechas, Jivaros, and
other Indians of the interior of Ecuador
became persuaded that they were being called to preach the Gospel to the Huaorani as well.
Nate Saint was 32 years old (born 1923), and devoted to
flying. He had taken flying lessons in high school and served in the U.S. Air Force in WWII. After the war, he enrolled in Wheaton College to prepare for foreign
mission work but dropped out to join the Missionary Aviation Fellowship. With his wife, Marjorie Farris, he
established a base at Shell Mera
(an abandoned oil exploration camp in Ecuador) in September 1948, and flew
short hops to keep missionaries supplied with medicines, mail, etc. Once his
plane crashed, but a few weeks later he returned to work in a cast from his
neck to his thighs.
The other three, Ed McCully, Jim Elliot, and Peter Fleming,
all Plymouth Brethren, came to
Ecuador in 1952 to work for CMML (Christian
Missions in Many Lands).
Ed McCully was 28 years old (born 1927). He had been a
football and track star at Wheaton College and president of his senior class.
After Wheaton, he enrolled at Marquette to study law,
but dropped out to go to Ecuador. He and his wife, Marilou Hobolth, worked with
the Quechuas at Arajuno, a base
near the Huaorani. Half a dozen Quechuas had been killed at the base by
Huaorani in the previous year.
Jim Elliot was 28 years old (born 1927) and an honors
graduate of Wheaton College, where he had been a debater, public speaker, and
champion wrestler. In Ecuador, he married Elisabeth Howard. They did paramedic work, tending broken arms, malaria, snakebite. They taught
sanitation, wrote books in Quechua, and taught literacy.
Peter Fleming was 27 years old (born 1928), from the University of Washington, an honor
student, and a linguist. With his wife, Olive Ainslie, he ran a literacy
program among the Quechuas.
Nate and Ed found a Huaorani settlement from the air in late
September 1955. Nate made four more flights on Thursday, 29 September, and
found a settlement only fifteen minutes from their station. They told Jim and
Pete, and the four planned their strategy.
They would keep the project secret from everyone but their
wives, to avoid being joined by adventurers
and the press, with the chance that someone not dedicated to the mission would
start shooting at the first sign of real or imagined danger, and destroy the
project.
They had one language resource, a Huaorani girl, Dayuma, who
had fled from her tribe years earlier after her family was killed in a dispute.
Dayuma, who spoke both Huao and Quechua, was now living with Nate's sister
Rachel. From her the missionaries learned enough of the language to get
started.
They would fly over the village every Thursday and drop
gifts as a means of making contact and establishing a friendly relationship.
Eventually they would try for closer contact. Nate had discovered that, if he
lowered a bucket on a line from the plane, and flew in tight circles, the
bucket remained almost stationary, and could be used to lower objects to the
ground. He had devised a mechanism to release the bucket when it touched down.
On Thursday, 6 October, one week after locating the village,
they dropped an aluminum kettle into an apparently deserted village. On the
next flight, several Huaorani were waiting, and the missionaries dropped a machete. On the third flight, they
dropped another machete to a considerably larger crowd. Beginning with the
fourth flight, they used a loudspeaker system to call out friendly messages in
Huao.
Soon the Huaorani were responding with gifts of their own
tied to the line: a woven headband, carved wooden combs, two live parrots,
cooked fish, parcels of peanuts, a piece of smoked monkey tail.... They cleared
a space near their village and built platforms to make the exchanges easier.
After three months of air-to-ground contact, during which
they made far more progress than they had hoped, the missionaries decided that
it was time for ground contact. They feared that they could not keep their
activities secret much longer, and that delay risked a hostile encounter
between the Huaorani and some third party.
They decided that the expedition needed a fifth man, so they
brought in Roger Youderian, a 31-year-old (born 1924) former paratrooper who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge (a major German offensive in Belgium in the last stages of WWII)
and had been in General Eisenhower's
honor guard. Roger and his wife, Barbara Orton, were working with the Jivaros,
and Roger was thoroughly at home in the jungle, accustomed to living like the
Jivaros and blessed with acute survival instincts.
They located a beach that would serve as a landing strip,
about four miles from the village, and decided to go in on Tuesday, 3 January
1956. After some discussion, they decided to carry guns, having heard that the
Huaorani never attacked anyone who was carrying a gun, and having resolved that
they would, as a last resort, fire the guns into the air to ward off an attack,
but would shoot no one, even to save their own lives.
On Tuesday they flew in and made camp, then flew over the
village to invite the Huaorani to visit them. The first visitors showed up on
Friday: a man, a woman, and a teen-aged girl. They stayed for several hours in
apparent friendliness, then left abruptly. On Saturday, no one showed, and when
the plane flew over the village, the Huaorani seemed frightened at first, but
lost their fright when presents were dropped. On Sunday afternoon, 8 January
1956, at about 3 PM, all five missionaries were speared to death at their camp.
A search party the next day found no signs of a struggle, and the lookout who
was to be stationed in a tree-house overlooking the camp at ground level had
come down, so it appeared that the meeting had originally seemed friendly, and
that the attack had been a surprise. Ed McCully's body was seen and identified,
but was swept away by the river and not recovered. The other four, at the
request of their wives, were buried at the site of the camp where they had
died. Besides their wives, they left behind a total of nine children.
The effort to reach the Huaorani was not abandoned but
rather intensified. Within three weeks, Johnny Keenan, another pilot of the
Ecuador Mission, was continuing the flights over the Huaorani village. More
than twenty fliers from the United States promptly applied to take Nate's place.
More than 1000 college students volunteered for foreign missions in direct
response to the story of the Five Martyrs. In Ecuador, Indian attendance at
mission schools and church services reached record levels, and the number of
conversions skyrocketed. A Jivaro undertook to go at once to another Jivaro
tribe that had been at war with his own tribe for years, bearing the Christian message, and his visit
brought peace between the two tribes. Truly, as Tertullian said 1800 years ago, the blood of the martyrs is the
seed of the Church.
In less than three years, Rachel Saint (sister of Nate
Saint) and Elisabeth Elliot (widow of Jim Elliot) had not only renewed contact
but had established permanent residence in a Huaorani settlement, where they
practiced basic medicine and began the process of developing a written form of
the language.
Nine years after the murder of the five missionaries, two of
those who had killed Nate Saint and his companions baptized two of Nate's
children, Kathy and Stephen Saint. In June 1995, at the request of the
Huaorani, Nate's son Stephen moved to the settlement with his wife, Ginny, and
their four children, to assist the Huaorani in developing greater internal
leadership for a church committed to meeting the medical, economic, and social
needs of their own people as a means of showing them God's love and his desire
to provide for their eternal needs as well.
Why did the Huaorani suddenly turn hostile? Much later, one
of the Huaorani who had helped to kill the five martyrs explained that the
tribe, who had had almost no contact with outsiders that did not involve
killing or attempted killing on one side or another, wondered why the whites
wanted to make contact with them; and while they wanted to believe that their
visitors were friendly, they feared a trap. After the killings, they realized
their mistake. When they were attacked, one of the missionaries fired two shots
as warnings, and one shot grazed a Huaorani who was hiding in the brush,
unknown to the missionaries. It was therefore clear that the visitors had
weapons, were capable of killing, and had chosen not to do so. Thus, the
Huaorani realized that the visitors were indeed their friends, willing to die
for them if necessary. When in subsequent months they heard the message that
the Son of God had come down from heaven to reconcile men with God, and to die
in order to bring about that reconciliation, they recognized that the message
of the missionaries was the basis of what they had seen enacted in the lives of
the missionaries. They believed the Gospel preached because they had seen the
Gospel lived.
