ii0'4 Voijage of the Novara. 



ish monks so lamentably astray, Murphy believed that '' hell 

 itself must have been moved and puzzled by such an event !" * 

 Murphy, or Columban, as he now called himself, travelled as 

 a working carpenter, wore a thick beard, smoked a ^' cutty" 

 pipe, and might have been taken for anything else under 

 the sun than a Catholic priest. Although serious misgivings 

 were felt by the native authorities as to his real quality, he 

 nevertheless received permission to settle upon the island. 

 He accordingly spent a couple of months here, and laboured 

 with great zeal to pave the way for a Catholic settlement at 

 a future period. In November of the same year, two more 

 missionaries, Fathers Caret and Laval, came on to Tahiti. 

 The circumstances under which they arrived aroused the sus- 

 picions of the authorities and of the entire population. For 

 they did not land at Wilks's Harbour, at that time the only 

 accessible harbour on the island, but secretly, on the opposite 

 side. According to the law of the country, however, no cap- 

 tain or owner of a ship was permitted to land a passenger 

 without having previously obtained the permission of the 

 Queen or Governor of the island. After the two Catholic 

 priests had gone the round of the island and had visited 

 nearly all the native villages along the coast, they at last 

 came to Wilks's Harbour, now Papeete, where they received a 



* " It is not surprising," he writes in a letter to his superiors, " that on the arrival 

 in this country, so long given over to the evil spirit of a child of the Sucre coeur 

 (Divine heart), that enemy of all which is good should have raged with redoubled 

 fury, and that the Protestant emissaries should have believed I came to overthrow 

 their empire ! ! " — Vide A?itiales de la ProjMfjalion de la Foi, No. Ivi. p, 204. 



