Palm Beach

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

— John 12:24, KJV

The Gift Drops

Five men took part in the attempt to reach the Waorani. Jim Elliot and Pete Fleming were working among the Quichua. Ed McCully was at Arajuno, the nearest station to Waorani country. Roger Youderian, a former army paratrooper who had fought in the Second World War, was working among the Shuar people in the south-east. Nate Saint, the pilot of Mission Aviation Fellowship, flew for all of them from Shell Mera. Each of the five was married, and four of them had young children. The name they gave the plan, Operation Auca, used the Quichua word for savage that was then the only name most outsiders had for the Waorani, a word the Waorani have rightly resented.

After the first sighting of Waorani houses in September 1955, the men began a programme of gift drops. Nate had worked out a way of lowering a bucket on a long line from a plane flying in tight circles, so that it hung almost still over a single spot on the ground. Week after week, from early October, he and Ed, and later the others, flew over the houses and let down machetes, cooking pots, cloth, beads and other gifts. They shouted phrases in the Waorani language through a loudspeaker. Jim had learned the phrases from Dayuma, a young Waorani woman who had fled her people some years before and was working on a hacienda in the foothills; it later became clear that they had been learned imperfectly. After a while the Waorani began to tie gifts of their own to the line: a feathered headband, food and other small things. To the men in the plane it looked like friendship.

They kept the plan almost entirely secret. They were afraid that publicity would bring others, the government or the press into Waorani country and wreck any chance of a peaceful contact, and they did not want to be talked out of it. Their wives knew. Most of their colleagues did not. Rachel Saint, Nate’s sister, who was learning the language from Dayuma at the hacienda, was not told. The secrecy has been questioned since, by historians and by some who knew the men, as has the speed with which the plan went forward. At the time, it seemed to the men the only way to proceed.

The Sandbar

On Tuesday 3 January 1956 Nate landed the plane on a sandbar on the Curaray river, a few miles from the Waorani houses, and over several flights brought in Jim, Ed and Roger with their supplies. The men built a shelter in a tree above the beach and called the place Palm Beach. Pete flew in and out with Nate, and at first the two of them spent their nights at Arajuno. For three days the men waited, called out their phrases towards the forest, and saw no one.

On Friday 6 January three Waorani came out on the far bank of the river: a young man, a young woman, and an older woman. They waded across and spent most of the day with the missionaries. They were given gifts and food, and the men photographed them. The young man was taken up in the plane and flown over the houses of his own people. The missionaries gave him and the young woman nicknames. Years later their names became known: the young man was Nenkiwi, the young woman Gimari, and the older woman Mintaka, who will appear again in this story. Towards evening the visitors drifted away. The older woman seems to have stayed on the beach after the others had gone. The men were elated. On Saturday no one came.

Sunday 8 January

On the morning of Sunday 8 January, Nate flew over the Waorani settlement and saw what he took to be a group of men walking towards the beach. Shortly after noon he spoke by radio to his wife Marj at Shell Mera, told her they expected visitors that afternoon, and promised to call again at half past four. When that time came, the radio from Palm Beach was silent. It never spoke again.

What happened that afternoon could only be pieced together years later, from the testimony of Waorani who were there, and the accounts do not agree in every particular. The outline is reasonably clear. Nenkiwi had gone off with Gimari without the older woman who should have accompanied them, and to deflect anger from himself he told his kinsmen that the foreigners had attacked them. The Waorani already believed that outsiders were dangerous, and some believed they ate people. A group of men, led by an older warrior named Gikita, decided to kill the strangers. Among them were Kimo, Mincaye, Dyuwi and Nampa, a brother of Dayuma. While women showed themselves across the river to draw the missionaries’ attention, the men came at them with spears.

The five had guns, and they had agreed beforehand that they would not use them against the Waorani. Most accounts say that shots were fired, but into the air or to frighten, not to kill. It seems that one bullet struck Nampa, probably by accident; whether that wound contributed to his death some time later is disputed. The precise order of events, who was speared first, and whether any of the five tried to reach the radio or the plane, cannot now be known with certainty, and this book does not try to reconstruct it. Nate Saint’s watch was later found stopped at a little after three o’clock. All five men died on the beach or in the river. The Waorani tore the fabric from the plane and went home.

No Fool

Six years earlier, a few months after leaving Wheaton, Jim Elliot had written in his journal on 28 October 1949 a sentence that has since been quoted more often than anything else he wrote: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” He had written it as a young man testing his own heart, not as an epitaph. Elisabeth later made it known to the world, and it has been printed on posters and bookmarks and in sermons ever since. It is worth reading it in the light of what actually happened, rather than in the glow of the legend. Jim did not know, when he wrote it, that he would die young, and on the sandbar he did not expect to die at all. The five men went in hope, not in search of martyrdom. What the sentence describes is not a plan for dying but a settled choice about what to hold loosely.

The verse at the head of this chapter is Christ’s own word about his death. A grain of wheat that is not buried remains a single grain; buried, it bears much fruit. The five men had read it many times. On the afternoon of 8 January 1956 they became, without choosing the hour or the manner, an instance of it. Whether the fruit would come, and what shape it would take, was hidden from everyone who waited that evening by the silent radios at Shell Mera and Arajuno. It was hidden most of all from Elisabeth.