408 EFFLUVIUM FROM THE MARSH. CHAP. XV. 



companions. We did not suffer more from fever in the 

 mangrove swamps, where we inhaled so much of the 

 heavy mousey smell that it was distinguishable in the 

 odour of our shirts and flannels, than we did elsewhere. 



We tarried in the foul and blackening emanations from 

 the marsh because we had agreed to receive on board about 

 thirty poor orphan boys and girls, and a few helpless 

 widows whom Bishop Mackenzie had attached to his 

 Mission. All who were able to support themselves had 

 been encouraged by the Missionaries to do so by culti- 

 vating the ground, and they now formed a little free 

 community. But the boys and girls who were only from 

 seven to twelve years of age, and orphans without any 

 one to help them, could not be abandoned without bring- 

 ing odium on the English name. The effect of an outcry 

 by some persons in England, who knew nothing of the 

 circumstances in which Bishop Mackenzie was placed, and 

 who certainly had not given up their own right of appeal 

 to the sword of the magistrate, was, that the new head of 

 the Mission had gone to extremes in the opposite direction 

 from his predecessor ; not even protesting against the one 

 monstrous evil of the country, the slave-trade. We believed 

 that we ought to leave the English name in the same good 

 repute among the natives that we had found it ; and in 

 removing the poor creatures, who had lived with Mackenzie 

 as children with a father, to a land where the education he 

 began would be completed, we had the aid and sympathy 

 of the best of the Portuguese, and of the whole population. 

 The difference between shipping slaves and receiving these 

 free orphans struck us as they came on board. As soon as 

 permission to embark was given, the rush into the boat 

 nearly swamped her — their eagerness to be safe on the 

 " Pioneer's " deck had to be repressed. 



Bishop Tozer had already left for Quillimane when we 

 took these people and the last of the Universities' Mission- 



