Biography
Nathaniel Saint was born on January 30, 1923, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Lawrence, was a farmer and a businessman, and the family attended a Baptist church. He grew up in New Jersey, in a home of faith and hard work. As a boy, he was fascinated by airplanes. At the age of twelve, he started to build model airplanes, and by sixteen, he had taken his first flight. His brother Sam also became a pilot. Nate was a bright and curious youth, who was a tinkerer and an inventor. He was converted as a boy, and he felt a call to missions.
In the Second World War, he joined the Army Air Corps, and he trained as a pilot. After the war, he worked as a mechanic and as a flight instructor. He felt that God wanted him to use his skills in the service of missions. In 1946, he joined the Mission Aviation Fellowship, a new organization that used airplanes for missionary work. He married Marj Farris in 1948. They had three children, Kathy, Philip and Steven. In 1948, they sailed for Ecuador, where he was to serve as a pilot for the missionaries in the jungle.
He settled at Shell Mera, a small town on the edge of the Amazon basin, in the eastern part of Ecuador. He was the only pilot of MAF in the country. He flew a small plane, a Piper Family Cruiser, over the dense jungle, to take missionaries and supplies to remote stations. He also flew the sick to hospitals. It was dangerous work. He had to fly over unmapped territory, with few landing places and unpredictable weather. In one year, he flew over five hundred flights. He was a skilled and careful pilot. He also developed several inventions, including a device to drop a basket from an airplane and pick it up again by a rope, which he used for supplying isolated groups.
He was drawn to the Waorani, a tribe that was feared for its violence. In 1955, he and his friends, Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian and Pete Fleming, began a plan to make contact. Nate flew over the tribe and dropped gifts from the plane in a basket. The Waorani responded by sending gifts of their own. The men grew hopeful. In January 1956, they established a camp on a sandbar along the Curaray River. Nate flew the plane and landed on the sandbar. He and the others made friendly contact with a few Waorani on January 6.
On January 8, 1956, a group of Waorani warriors attacked the camp and killed all five men with spears. Nate was thirty-two years old. He left behind his wife, Marj, and three children. His body was found in the river. His plane was torn apart. His death was a shock to the Christian world. His story was told in the book Through Gates of Splendor, by Elisabeth Elliot. It moved many young people to give their lives to missions. His sister, Rachel Saint, went to live among the Waorani. His son Steve, who was five at the time of the killing, later came to know the men who had killed his father, and he grew close to them. He lived among the Waorani and was baptized by one of the killers.
He was a man of practical faith, who gave his skill to the work. He was a man of simple trust. Before the expedition, he had said that he was ready to die for the gospel. He was not without fault. He was an independent man, who often worked at a pace that was too fast. His life shows how a pilot may serve the church, and how a death may bear fruit in the lives of those who killed him.