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until he had stood up and said grace ; and it was then eUcited from him 

 that Fletcher Christian had enjoined the practice upon his household, 

 and had also taught its members to repeat this confession every day at 

 noon : "Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am 

 no more worthy to be called thy son!" For three or four years at first 

 all went pretty smoothly upon the island, after which it became for a 

 ime the scene of some terrible and bloody tragedies. One of the 

 mutineers, Williams, whose wife had been killed by a fall from a cliff, 

 insisted that the wife of one of the Otaheitan men should be given up to 

 him. This act naturally excited the indignation of the Otaheitans, and 

 led to a conspiracy amongst them to murder all the Englishmen ; but 

 the scheme was frustrated by the women, who had been let into the 

 secret, and gave warning to the intended victims by singing them a song, 

 of which the refrain ran : "Why does black man sharpen axe'? — to kill 

 white man." The result was a disturbance which ended in the death of 

 two of the Otaheitan men. Two or three years afterwards the peace of 

 the colony was again interrupted by a conspiracy of the Otaheitans, by 

 whom five of the Englishmen were treacherously butchered. One of the 

 five was Fletcher Christian himself, the hero of my story, who was shot 

 down whilst quietly working in his garden. I have already put before 

 you my interpretation of his motives and character, and I will not pause 

 now to moralize upon his untimely fate. The account I have given of 

 Fletcher Christian's end is the one which passed current among the 

 Pitcairn Islanders in after times : but I should omit the strangest of all 

 the strange stories about him if I did not tell you there is some reason 

 to doubt this explanation, and to suppose that in reality Christian 

 escaped from the island, and found his way back to England, to survive 

 there for several years in seclusion and disguise. Many tales were rife, 

 from sixty to seventy years ago, of his having been met and recognised 

 in the woods and bye-paths in this neighbourhood, but by those who 

 had too much sympathy for him and his family to betray the secret. It 

 was also said that his first cousin, John Christian Curwen, M.P., used 

 his great influence to prevent any official search being made for the 

 fugitive. But the theory of Christian's return is supported by something 



