POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
139 
exposed. On one occasion, Mr. Nott, returning from a 
visit to the king, was resting in a native house, when a 
party of the rebels approached the spot; his native com¬ 
panion, one of Pomare’s warriors, observing them, 
touched him on the shoulder, and urged him to fly to the 
canoe lying on the beach : he and his fellow-traveller had 
scarcely pushed off from the shore, when the men came 
up, and, finding they had escaped, invited them to land, 
or requested the native to allow the foreigner to walk. 
Mr. Nott’s companion assured him, however, that if he 
landed, his life would certainly be taken, merely because 
he was a friend to the king. The natives followed the 
canoe for some miles, but Mr. Nott was mercifully pre¬ 
served, and reached Matavai in safety, indebted, under 
God, to the vigilance and promptitude of his Tahitian 
friend for his life. Before this time, a musket ball (aimed 
at a native who had taken shelter in his house) was 
fired through the window of the room in which he was 
sitting; and during another war, the spear of one of the 
king’s enemies was already poised, and would in all 
probability have inflicted a fatal wound in his body, 
when the interference of one of Mr. Nott’s friends, at 
the moment saved him from the deadly thrust. 
It is not easy to form an accurate idea of the distress 
of the last Missionaries who reluctantly left Tahiti, when 
they beheld their gardens demolished, their houses plun¬ 
dered and burnt, their pupils engaged in all the barbarity 
of a savage war ; and the people, among whom they had 
hoped to introduce order, and peace, and happiness, 
doomed to the complicated miseries attending anarchy, 
idolatry, and all the varied horrors of cruelty and of vice. 
The enterprise in which they had embarked, had at its 
commencement united in bonds of disinterested philan- 
