52 pages • 1 hour read
Elisabeth ElliotThrough Gates of Splendor
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1957A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 15-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary: “Why Did the Men Go?”
As 1955 neared its end, the members of the mission team talked more frequently about making an attempt to land in Huaorani territory. The men’s wives were all aware of the dangers involved, and the possibly fatal costs for such an attempt were in the forefront of everyone’s mind: “Well, if that’s the way God wants it to be,” Jim Elliot said, “I’m ready to die for the salvation of the Aucas” (172). There were a few flyovers where they noted that some of the Huaorani were impassive or even frightened at their appearance, but on the whole the responses remained positive, including a return gift, which included several items of food, pottery, and a live parrot from the Huaorani. Encouraged by this, the men set a date for a landing: Tuesday, January 3, 1956.
Elisabeth Elliot takes this chapter to outline the motivations that drove the missionaries, which came down to a sense of obedience to God and a love for the Huaorani, such that they were willing to undertake great risks to reach them. Devoted to their faith in Christ and impelled by their sense of obedience to his calling, they felt no further inclination to turn back, regardless of the dangers they might be facing: “The point of decision had been reached. God’s command ‘Go ye, and preach the gospel to every creature’ was the categorical imperative. The question of personal safety was wholly irrelevant” (175). The one great goal they had fixed upon was to give the Huaorani the opportunity to hear the message of the love of God and thereby to be saved to eternal life, a goal which, in order to achieve, they were willing to forfeit their own lives. As Jim Elliot had earlier written in his journal: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose” (172).
Chapter 16 Summary: “We Go Not Forth Alone”
As January 3 neared, preparations were made for the first landing in Huaorani territory. Several landings would be required—to ferry out the men, the supplies for a tree house, gifts and items of interest for the Huaorani, and any necessary articles of defense. Before leaving, the men had devotions and sang a hymn together, from which the book’s title is derived: “We rest on Thee, our Shield and our Defender, / Thine is the battle, Thine shall be the praise / When passing through the gates of pearly splendor / Victors, we rest with Thee through endless days” (179). The chapter describes the flights and landings at Palm Beach through extracts from Nate Saint’s diary. After multiple flights, the men were able to land successfully and build a small treehouse from wooden boards and aluminum sheets. Nate Saint then took another flyover of the Huaorani settlements, transmitting a message in their language for them to come down to the Curaray River the following day. The attempt was unsuccessful, and Wednesday and Thursday slipped by without event. Although the men thought it likely that they were being watched, having seen what they thought were footprints nearby, they never saw or heard from any Huaorani while they were camping out beside the river on those first few days.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Success on Friday”
It was nearing noontime on Friday, January 6, when three Huaorani stepped out of the jungle and approached their campsite on the beach: a young man and two women, showing no signs of hostility. It appeared at first that the young man (whom they called “George”) was offering the youngest woman (“Delilah”) in trade, but eventually the missionaries persuaded the three Huaorani, through repeated phrases and gestures, to simply sit and visit with them. They tried out their rudimentary knowledge of the Huaorani language, with some understanding gained but little true communication. Nonetheless, they felt hopeful that a message had been transmitted that expressed their desire to secure an invitation to the nearest Huaorani village. George and Delilah stayed most of the day, and George even consented to go up in the plane for a brief flight over the nearby settlement, during which he waved down at his fellow Huaorani. After their return to the beach, at the end of the day, George and Delilah walked back into the forest. The older woman remained on the beach for much of the night but was gone when the missionaries got up the next day.
Though they had high expectations for Saturday, none of the Huaorani appeared again. Nate Saint took a flight over the nearby village, and on one flyover even spotted George there. On the following morning—Sunday, January 8—Nate flew again over the village, and noted that there seemed only to be women and children there. The supposition was that the men of the village were off on a trek to Palm Beach and should soon arrive at the missionaries’ camp. Nate confirmed that conclusion when he spied a troop of about 10 men on their way to the river. His last communication to the station at Shell Mera conveyed his excitement: “Looks like they’ll be here for the early afternoon service. Pray for us. This is the day!” (194).
Chapter 18 Summary: “Silence”
Nate Saint had set up a radio check-in time of 4:30 pm with his wife Marj, but the time came and went with no communication. By sundown, Marj had set plans in motion to check on the men, and early the next morning Johnny Keenan, Nate’s fellow missionary pilot, was up in the air and headed for Palm Beach. When the report came back, it was not reassuring: the plane had been spotted, but its outer metal fabric appeared to have been ripped apart, and there was no sight of the five men. Over the next couple days, the five missionary wives gathered at the flight headquarters in Shell Mera, while other friends began putting together a plan for a ground mission to the Palm Beach site. On Wednesday, another of Johnny Keenan’s flyovers succeeded in making a sighting, but not of what those waiting wanted to hear: A body had been spotted floating in the river. The ground party was getting ready to head out from Arajuno, but the likely result was already widely known: “As the party left, Marilou turned […] and said with finality: ‘There is no hope. All the men are dead’” (199).
On Thursday, the ground party encountered some of the Indigenous locals from Arajuno returning from Palm Beach, where they had gone of their own accord to look for their friend, Ed McCully. They reported having found Ed’s dead body there, and they had brought back his watch to show the searchers. Even as the ground party advanced through the jungle, US military officials launched their own search and rescue operation in the area, and they returned with sobering news: They had seen four of the missionaries’ bodies, though identification was likely impossible at that time. On Friday, January 13, the ground party met a dispatched helicopter at Palm Beach, and together the teams recovered and buried the bodies of four men. The details are relayed through extracts from the writings of Frank Drown, a fellow missionary, and a correspondent from Life magazine who arrived with the helicopter. The four bodies were identified—all apparent victims of Huaorani lances. Only Ed McCully was missing, but they already knew from the earlier report that Ed was dead. The searchers buried the bodies on Palm Beach just as a jungle storm broke out around them. The next day, the five wives were given the opportunity to fly out and look down on the site, and upon seeing it, Marj Saint remarked, “That is the most beautiful little cemetery in the world” (249).
Chapters 15-18 Analysis
This set of chapters brings the readers to the climax of the story: the missionaries’ ground contact with the Huaorani and the tragic results of that encounter. Elisabeth Elliot continues to use firsthand accounts to weave her story together, but Chapter 18 brings a change—with the five men’s reflections no longer available, she shifts to narrating her own experience of the week after the men’s death, together with extracts from the writings of Frank Drown and the Life correspondent. The literary structure of Through Gates of Splendor is unusual at this point, but its uniqueness is dictated by the nature of the events. Up until Chapter 18, the main focus of the story’s rising action is on the five men as they establish their camp on Palm Beach and wait for contact with the nearby Huaorani settlement. That part of the story is never completed, and the climax is essentially missing, with no narrative of what happened at the beach on January 8, when the missionaries encountered the Huaorani party that killed them. This gap in the plotline is a reflection of the sources available to Elisabeth Elliot at the time of the book’s writing. While firsthand accounts of that day’s events on Palm Beach would become available later, from the Huaorani men who had been there, at the time of Through Gates of Splendor’s publication Elliot did not yet have access to those accounts. As such, the plot skips from the moment of tension before the climax to a tragic denouement, as the other characters wrestle with the question of what might have happened at the beach.
One of the themes that has been of primary importance up to this point—that of Discerning the Will of God—is more muted in this section because the die had already been cast. The five men who went to the beach had decided that it was God’s will for them to go. More central to the narrative of Chapters 15-18 was the continuing thematic focus on the Cross-Cultural Dynamics of Missionary Work. This is especially pronounced in Chapter 17, which describes the men’s face-to-face interactions with George, Delilah, and the other Huaorani woman. It becomes clear throughout this narrative that although the interaction is friendly, they do not have the linguistic or cultural expertise to yet interpret what their Huaorani interlocutors are expressing. Their reflections remark on the challenges of communication in those circumstances, of the necessity of using simple, repeated, exaggerated gestures and play-acted scenes to convey a meaning, but even then being unsure of whether the intended message was received: “Tossing on his bunk that night,” Elliot writes in conclusion of that scene, “Nate wondered if everything possible had been done to interest the visitors and encourage them to return with their friends. Why had they been so casual? They seemed almost bored at times as he looked back on it” (194). Despite all their efforts, the challenges of cross-cultural communication were so immense that they found themselves uncertain whether their hours of interacting with the three Huaorani actually accomplished anything of value.
The other main theme of this section, especially in Chapter 18, is that of Faith and Sacrifice. As it becomes apparent that the attempt to contact the Huaorani cost the men their lives, the narrative explores the effects of that event on the other characters—the wives, their friends, and fellow missionaries. Even outside observers with no personal knowledge of the five men expressed an understanding of their deaths’ as being a supreme act of sacrificial love, motivated by faith. The Life correspondent illustrates this understanding in his narration of another missionary’s reaction: “Missionary Don Johnson, sitting in the darkness of the house, buried his face in his hands, and offered a prayer. […] Don was not expressing sorrow for the departed so much as testifying to his faith in the Lord’s will” (240). The five men’s death was seen as tragic, but also as a supreme act of their faith in God.
