Finally the new boat was completed. The Evangel was sold to an island trader, and the new boat commissioned. This vessel too was named the Evangel, and Florence and Northcote were pleased with her design and the way she handled in the water.
Another of Florence’s nieces, Constance, also committed herself to work with the South Sea Evangelical Mission and went to serve at One Pusu.
Florence was delighted to learn that things were going well at One Pusu, where there was a constant need for new workers. By 1916, 130 students were enrolled in the eighteen-month-long teacher-training school located there. Despite the number of people wanting to become native teachers, the demand was still far greater than the number of teachers the school could train.
Many tribal leaders begged Northcote to send them workers. When they were sent to a place, these unpaid teachers led a simple life, starting tiny Christian schools and settlements and growing the food they needed to live on. Despite the hardships, time after time these teachers would return to the biannual meeting at One Pusu with stories to tell of how God had changed the hearts of the locals and how one by one the people were accepting the gospel. Florence was always excited by such news, though it meant that even more teachers would be needed. Another smaller teacher-training school was opened at Pau, in South Malaita, in 1917 to try to keep up with the demand for teachers.
At about the same time the new school was being opened, Grace Irwin, one of the older workers serving with the mission, died of blackwater fever. Northcote’s wife, Jessie, also came down with the disease, but she did not die of it, though her recovery to full heath was very slow.
Regardless of the danger, more workers came from around the world to serve with the mission, some coming from as far away as Scotland.
Although she was now sixty years old, Florence continued to divide her time between administrative work in Australia and arduous trips to the Solomon Islands. By now she was ministering to the children and, in many cases, the grandchildren of the first Kanakas she had known at Fairymead.
Chapter 16
Her Real Legacy
When World War I ended in 1918, even more workers volunteered to join the South Sea Evangelical Mission. Among them was Florence’s niece Constance, her brother Horace’s daughter. At the same time, Florence’s nephew Norman opened a new mission station at Star Harbor, on the extreme southeastern tip of San Cristobal. Meanwhile his two sisters, Joan, now also serving with the mission, and Constance, divided their time between teaching at One Pusu and visiting outlying areas on the Evangel.
Blackwater fever continued to threaten the health of the missionaries, and in 1921 Florence received the sad news that Northcote’s wife, Jessie, had caught the disease again and died from it. After a brief trip back to New Zealand to visit his wife’s family, Northcote returned to the Solomon Islands alone to carry on the work of the mission.
In September 1924 Florence was back in Katoomba when her brother Horace died. She wrote her thoughts about his death in a letter.
Both he and my brother Ernest have been associated with the Queensland Kanaka and South Sea Evangelical Mission from the beginning at Fairymead in 1882. And through these forty-two years the work has had their sympathy and practical help and support. We will not see all of the results of his labors until we join him in heaven. God buries His workers, but carries on His work.
A month later Florence received another blow. This time it was her niece Constance, who had also contracted blackwater fever and died. She was buried at One Pusu. Florence read through some of Constance’s old letters to her, and one in particular, written three years earlier from One Pusu, comforted her:
This is a real battlefield, and I’ve got the soldier’s love of battle very strong just now, and I couldn’t leave my pals down here for a soft billet at home! They are so pitifully few already, and if I went home that would make one less to “carry on” the fight. And that’s why I have written so much home this time. I want you all at home to realize the joy of conquest as I feel it when I am sitting in school on Sunday morning and see the rows and rows of quiet earnest faces—brands plucked from the enemy’s country and from his hand. It makes you realize, when you hear them singing and praying, etc., how infinitely worth while it is—even though it does cost, for some, fever, and even death. One thing that has been coming home to me lately is this, that you must be willing to die in this kind of rescue work. What does it matter if a few missionaries die in the attack? You can’t have real WAR without casualties—if souls are really being rescued.
Florence comforted herself with the knowledge that Constance had died doing what she believed in.
At the time Florence was writing her autobiography and history of the mission. She had been asked to do so by a large English publisher, and she had already chosen the title, Pearls from the Pacific. She had been recalling so many positive experiences to include in the book as she looked back over the history of the mission, and these stories helped her through the bleak time of learning about Constance’s death.
In November Florence wrote the last few paragraphs of the book. She ended with a summary of what the Queensland Kanaka Mission and the South Sea Evangelical Mission had accomplished in the forty-two years since it had begun:
Now there are 169 out stations. Meetings are held daily, generally both morning and evening. In some stations there is an additional day school for the children and on Sunday three or four meetings. All the Christians are expected to help, though there are usually one or two recognized leaders.
God has given us exceeding joy in the ingathering and baptism of a great company of believers; 2,484 converts were baptized in Queensland and 3,716 in the Islands, making the total to November 1924 of 6,200 converts added to the visible church on earth.
It was an astonishing accomplishment for a shy girl who had started out teaching a few Kanaka men how to read at Fairymead, her brothers’ sugarcane plantation in Bundaberg, Queensland. But Florence was not ready to rest on her accomplishments; there was still a lot of work to do. Regrettably, she was able to make only two more visits to the Solomon Islands. Her last trip was in 1926, when she was seventy years old. After this trip, Florence’s body was too frail to take the pounding of the ocean voyage needed to get to the Solomons. But her heart always remained with the Solomon Islanders.
In her old age Florence settled into a small cottage at the back of the Deck family property in Killara, Sydney.
Although a new generation of missionaries had taken over the mission, Florence found great joy and satisfaction as she stayed as involved in mission affairs as she could. She loved to visit the mission house at Katoomba and attend the various meetings that missionaries home on furlough held in Sydney. As she entered her eighties, Florence still prayed daily for the South Sea Evangelical Mission and its workers, and she lived very modestly so that she could funnel as much money as she possibly could into the work.
On May 28, 1940, Florence Young died quietly at her home in Killara. She was eighty-three years old. Her funeral service was simple, just the way she would have wanted it, and she was buried at the nearby Gore Hill Cemetery.
In the months and years that followed, many missionaries traveling through Sydney visited her gravesite. But Florence would have told them that her real legacy could be found not in a cemetery but out in the remote and dangerous islands that made up the Solomon Islands, where the South Sea Evangelical Mission had by then recorded more than 7,900 conversions. Many of these later converts had never met Florence in person, but each of them knew her story well and owed her much. Florence Young had accomplished her mission.
