PERILOUS STATE OF THE MISSION. 83 
native house, when a party of the rebels approach¬ 
ed the spot; Ills native companion, 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 preserved, 
and reached Matavai in safety, indebted, under 
God, to the vigilance and promptitude of his Tahi¬ 
tian 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, had not 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 plundered and burnt, their pupils en¬ 
gaged in all the barbarity of a savage war; and 
the people, among whom they had hoped to intro¬ 
duce order, and peace, and happiness, doomed to 
the complicated miseries attending anarchy, idola¬ 
try, and the varied horrors of cruelty and vice. 
The enterprise in which they had embarked, had 
at its commencement united, in bonds of disin¬ 
terested philanthropy, parties before but seldom 
g 2 
