Last updated May 2024. 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)