The narrative travels forward to 1821, when young Abner Hale is a university student at Yale. Abner comes from a strict Congregationalist family that believes in Calvinist predestination. Abner himself had a conversion experience in early youth and is depicted as smug about his status among the saved. One night, his life changes dramatically when he hears an Indigenous Hawaiian named Keoki Kanakoa speak at his school. Kanakoa asks the school to send missionaries to his heathen native land. “For the engaging young savage told how he had run away from an idol-worshiping home, from polygamy, from immorality, from grossness and from bestiality to find the word of Jesus Christ” (203).

Abner’s school friend, a doctor named John Whipple, is determined to answer the call. Abner feels equally moved, but the missionary society will only send married men to the islands. A member of the governing committee, Reverend Thorn, has an unmarried niece who is pining for a sailor, and Thorn is determined to get her married off. Presenting Abner as a suitor is not easy. Inwardly, he says of Abner:

You’re an offensive, undernourished, sallow-faced little prig, the kind that wrecks any mission to which he is attached.