Last updated September 2002. Click to return to
the David Cargill main page.
Extracts from Tonga: a guide by Norman and Ngaire Douglas, published by Pacific Profiles, Alstonvillle, NSW, Australia, 1989.
Neiafu
This is the capital of Vava'u and the second largest town in Tonga. To say this is not to say very much, since the township only contains 3883 people and "greater Neiafu", which includes six other villages, only 5237. But if there is a more beautifully—even spectacularly—situated town in the South Seas then these writers have yet to find it.
…the large Free Wesleyan Church [was] completed in 1970 to replace an earlier house of worship which was destroyed in a particularly bad cyclone in 1961. A stained glass window celebrates two figures important to Tongan Methodism—Queen Salote and John Wesley. A block behind the church, on the corner of Hala Pouono and Hala Naufalu a small, overgrown cemetery contains a royal tomb and also the graves of two early Wesleyan missionaries, Francis Wilson and David Cargill. Cargill, especially, a scholar and an outstanding linguist who did pioneer work in Fiji as well as Tonga and helped to devise orthographies for both languages, deserves a better identified memorial than this. (Pages 107, 110)