78 MYSTIC ISLES 



her and I knew men who knew him. He was given a 

 gorgeous uniform of gold lace by his promoters, which 

 I think killed him, though when he sweated, he would 

 strip to his handsomely marked skin and sit naked in 

 the breeze. The queen never wore more than a diaper 

 or a gown. 



"With the Marquesas Islands taken, the French war- 

 ships camfe to Tahiti. French Catholic priests had been 

 deported from here because the Protestants were al- 

 ready in possession, and objected to competition, saying 

 that the priests were children of Beelzebub, and taught 

 false doctrines and morals. The Queen of Tahiti, 

 whose dynasty the Protestant missionaries had created, 

 advised the pope's men to seek a heathen people not 

 already worshiping the true God. The zealous priests 

 who had come with explicit commands to found a mis- 

 sion in Tahiti, launched the curse of Rome upon the 

 king, the Protestant ministers, and especially upon Mr. 

 Pritchard, the British consul and the queen's physician 

 and spiritual adviser. 



"Pritchard had the interests of England and the Lord 

 at heart, and his whispers in the queen's ear sent the 

 earnest priests aboard a ship bound for a distant port. 

 They complained, and the French admiral then arrived 

 and pointed his guns at the palace and the Protestant 

 mission, and demanded thirty thousand dollars for the 

 insult to the French flag; and for the jibe at the pope, 

 the matching of every Protestant church in the islands 

 by a Catholic edifice. The queen had a panic and fled 

 to Moorea in a canoe. The admiral then put Consul 

 Pritchard in jail for ten days, and after chastening his 

 mood, put him on an English ship at sea homeward 



