’I think if the weather be fair, that we shall go off to-morrow.  Oh! if we do meet, and spend, it may be, Christmas together.

28th, 3 P.M.—­The first anniversary of our dear Father’s death.  How you are all recalling what took place then!  How full of thankfulness for his gain, far outweighing the sorrow for our loss!  And yet how you must feel it, more than I do, and yet I feel it deeply:  but the little fond memories of the last months, and above all the looks and spoken words of love, I can’t altogether enter into them.  His letters are all that letters can be, more than any other letters can be, but they are not the same thing in all ways.  The Primate has left us to hurry down the sailing master of the “Sea Breeze.”  It was a very rough morning, but is calm now, boats passing and repassing between the shore and the schooner at anchor off Kohimarama.’

The habit of writing journals was not at once resumed by Bishop Patteson when his father was not there to read them; and the chance of seeing his sisters, no doubt, made him write less fully to them, since they might be on the voyage when the letters arrived in England.  Thus the fullest record of the early part of the voyage is in a report which he drew up and printed in the form of a letter to the Rev. J. Keble:—­

’We chartered the “Sea Breeze” schooner in June last for four months:  she is a vessel of seventy tons register, a little larger than the old “Southern Cross,” and as well suited for our purpose as a vessel can be which is built to carry passengers in the ordinary way.  No voyage can of course equal in importance those early expeditions of the Primate, when he sailed in his little schooner among seas unknown, to islands never before visited, or visited only by the sandal-wood traders.  But I never recollect myself so remarkable a voyage as this last.  I do not mean that any new method was adopted in visiting islands, or communicating with the natives.  God gave to the Bishop of New Zealand wisdom to see and carry out from the first the plan, which more and more approves itself as the best and only feasible plan, for our peculiar work.  But all through this voyage, both in revisiting islands well known to us, and in recommencing the work in other islands, where, amidst the multitude of the Primate’s engagements, it had been impossible to keep up our acquaintance with the people, and in opening the way in islands now visited for the first time, from the beginning to the end, it pleased God to prosper us beyond all our utmost hopes.  I was not only able to land on many places where, as far as I know, no white man had set foot before, but to go inland, to inspect the houses, canoes, &c., in crowded villages (as at Santa Cruz), or to sit for two hours alone amidst a throng of people (as at Pentecost Island), or to walk two and a half miles inland (as at Tariko or Aspee).  From no less than eight islands have we for the first time received, young people for our