ng one."

"Don't let me catch you with more than one eye shut at a time, or I'll
be down on you," answered the boatswain. "As I was saying, now listen.
You've heard of Captain Cook, the great navigator, who sailed over and
across these seas in every direction, and found out many islands not
before known to civilised men. His business was to try and discover new
lands, and to do any good he could to the inhabitants, by leaving them
seeds and plants and animals; but there was nothing in his directions
that I know of about teaching them religion. There would not have been
time for him to do much, even if he had had any such instructions,
unless he had carried out missionaries with him; but in those days
missionaries to heathen lands were not so much as thought of in England.
You have heard how Cook was killed by the savages of the Sandwich
Islands, who have now become the most civilised of all the people of
these seas. The descriptions he and his companions gave of the
islanders made some Christian people at home think that, if missionaries
were sent to them, they might be persuaded to become Christians. The
London Missionary Society had just been formed--that was as far back as
1797. The first of their many noble enterprises was to send out
twenty-nine missionaries in the ship Duff, commanded by Captain Wilson.
The greater number settled at Tahiti, where they were well received by
the natives; while others went to Tongatabu, and two of them attempted
to commence a mission at Saint Christina, one of the Marquesas. The
latter mission was, however, soon afterwards abandoned, and has never
since been resumed; and unhappily, as the French have taken possession
of the group, there is not much probability of an English Protestant
mission being established there, whatever the French Protestants may do.

"At Tahiti many years passed before any fruits of the missionaries'
labours were perceived, not indeed till 1813, when some praying natives
were discovered, and a church was formed. From that time, however,
Christianity spread rapidly, and the converted natives were eager to go
forth themselves as missionaries, not only to neighbouring islands, such
as the Paumotre, the Austral, and Hervey groups, but to Raratonga and
Samoa, and, still farther, to the New Hebrides, Loyalty Islands, and New
Caledonia and Penryn Islands.

"The climate of those islands in the Western Pacific, near the equator,
is nearly as hurtful to the co