CIIAP. I. 
FIRST PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS. 
5 
Long before this interruption of commercial intercourse 
between the natives and foreigners, which it was the interest 
of both parties to maintain, the queen’s government had 
shown its fixed determination not only to arrest the progress 
of Christianity in the country, but to destroy it wherever it 
might appear. Scarcely had the missionaries left the capital 
in 1836, before a number of persons suspected of being 
Christians were required to prove their innocence by drinking 
the Tangena, or poison-water, which to many of them proved 
fatal. 
In the following year a considerable number of the people 
were accused of reading religious books and uniting in 
Christian worship. Several of these were severely punished 
by fine, imprisonment, or unredeemable slavery: and one de¬ 
voted Christian woman, Easalama, was put to death. In 1838, 
Kafaralahy, a young man who had accompanied the first 
Malagasy martyr to the place of execution, shared her fate; 
and before the close of the year, Kafaravavy, with four of her 
companions, who subsequently visited England, only saved 
their lives by escaping from the island. Others wandered 
from place to place in much suffering and imminent peril, 
often seeking concealment and safety in the almost impervious 
forests and in the dreary caverns of the mountains, until the 
year 1842, when sixteen of them, while on their way to the 
coast with a view of escaping from the island, were betrayed 
by their guides and taken back to the capital, where nine of 
them were cruelly put to death. 
The effect of these sanguinary proceedings seemed to be 
the very reverse of what the government intended. The at¬ 
tention of all classes was thereby drawn to the subject of 
religion, and the confidence of many in their idols appeared 
greatly weakened, while the Christians seemed to be confirmed 
in their faith by the severe ordeal through which it had sus¬ 
tained them. 
