Mr. Brooke asked if he would have a little Sal volatile.

‘No.’

‘A little brandy?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want anything?’

‘I want nothing but to die.’

Those were his last words.  He lay convulsed on a mattress on the floor for about an hour longer, and was released on the morning of the 29th.

Stephen, with an arrow wound in the lungs, and several more of these wounds in the chest, could hardly have lived, even without the terrible tetanus.  He had spent his time in reading his Mota Gospel and Prayer-book, praying and speaking earnestly to the other men on board, before the full agony came on.  He was a tall, large, powerfully framed man; and the struggles were violent before he too sank into rest on the morning of the 28th, all the time most assiduously nursed by Joseph Wate.  On St. Michael’s Day, these two teachers of poor Bauro received at the same time their funeral at sea.

John Coleridge Patteson was forty-four years and a half old.

Joseph Atkin, twenty-nine.

Stephen Taroniara probably twenty-five—­as he was about eighteen when he joined the Mission in 1864.  His little girl will be brought up at Norfolk Island; his wife Tara, to whom he had been married only just before his voyage, became consumptive, and died January, 1873, only twenty minutes after her Baptism.  As one of the scholars said, “Had the songs of the angels for joy of her being made a child of God finished before they were again singing to welcome her an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven?’

John Nonono showed no symptoms of tetanus, but was landed at Mota to recover under more favourable circumstances than the crowded cabin could afford.

Calms and baffling winds made the return to this island trying and difficult, and Mota was not reached till the 4th of October.  George Sarawia was still perfectly satisfactory; and his community, on the whole, going on hopefully.  Want of provisions, which Mota could not supply, made the stay very brief; and after obtaining the necessary supplies at Aurora, the ‘Southern Cross’ brought her sad tidings to Norfolk Island on the 17th.  That day Mrs. Palmer wrote:—­

’On Monday afternoon, 15th, Mr. Codrington went for a ride to the other side of the island, and there espied the schooner, eight miles off.  He rode home quickly, and soon the shouting and racing of the boys told us that the vessel had come.  They were all at arrowroot-making.  Never, I think, had the whole party, English and natives, seemed in higher spirits.  Mr. Bice walked to the settlement, to see if she was far in enough to land that night; we asked him to call and tell us on his way home.

’Next morning Mr. Bice rode down to see if it really was the schooner, and was back to breakfast, all thinking we should soon see them come up.

’Mr. Codrington and Mr. Bice got their horses ready to ride down, and I got the rooms ready, when, in an hour, a Norfolk Island boy rode up to say the flag was half-mast high.’