een treated, Mr. Atkin
insisted on taking the boat in again to learn the Bishop's fate. This
time no attack was made upon them; but a canoe was towed out part of the
way and then left to drift towards the boat. In it was the dead body of
the Bishop tied up in a native mat. How he died no one ever knew, but
his face was calm and no anguish seems to have troubled him in the hour
of death. 'The placid smile was still on the face: there was a palm leaf
fastened over the breast, and, when the mat was opened, there were five
wounds, no more. The strange mysterious beauty, as it may be called, of
the circumstances almost make one feel as if this were the legend of a
martyr of the Primitive Church.'[41]

Miss Yonge, from whom these lines are quoted, goes on to show that the
five wounds, of which the first probably proved fatal, while the other
four were deliberately inflicted afterwards, were to be explained by
native custom. In the long leaflets of the palm five knots had been
tied. Five men in Fiji were known to have been stolen from this island,
and there can be little doubt that the relatives were exacting, in
native fashion, their vengeance from the first European victim who fell
into their power. The Bishop would have been the first to make allowance
for their superstitious error and to lay the blame in the right quarter.
His surviving comrades knew this, and in reporting the tragedy they sent
a special petition that the Colonial Office would not order a
bombardment of the island. Unfortunately, when a ship was sent on a
mission of inquiry, the natives themselves began hostilities and
bloodshed ensued. But at last the Bishop had by his death secured what
he was labouring in his life to effect. The Imperial Parliament was
stirred to examine the Labour trade in the Pacific and regulations were
enforced which put an end to the abuse.

[Note 41: _Life of John Coleridge Patteson_, by Charlotte Yonge, 2
vols. (Macmillan, 1874).]

'Quae caret ora cruore nostro?' The Roman poet puts this question in his
horror at the wide extension of the civil wars which stained with Roman
blood all the seas known to the world of his day.

Great Britain has its martyrs in a nobler warfare yet more widely
spread. Not all have fallen by the weapons of war. Nature has claimed
many victims through disease or the rigour of unknown climes. The death
of some is a mystery to this day. India, the Soudan, South and West
Africa, the Arctic and Antarcti