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 Rh and a well-equipped party proceeded accordingly to East Africa in the spring of 1876. The first leader, Lieutenant G. Shergold Smith, R.N., and Mr T. O'Neill were killed; and later several others, including Bishop Parker in 1888, died before reaching the country. The mission, however, maintained its position in Uganda from July 1877, and this notwithstanding tremendous difficulties. A French Roman Catholic Mission arrived in 1879. King Mtesa, who died in 1884, was succeeded by Mwanga, and the new King was led, in 1885, to regard the missionaries with suspicion. He caused Bishop Hannington, while in Busoga, en route for Uganda from the coast, to be murdered on October 31 of that year. The storm reached its climax in the arrest of many native Christians, several of whom were tortured and burned to death. In August 1888, King Mwanga was driven from the throne. In October, through the hostility of the Mohammedan Arabs, the English and French missionaries were expelled from the country, and a period of revolution and bloodshed ensued. In October 1889, exactly a year from the missionaries' expulsion, Mwanga re-entered Uganda and regained his throne through the help of his Christian subjects, and the missionaries returned with him. In the same year King Mwanga accepted a British flag from the representatives of the Imperial British East Africa Company. Sir Gerald Portal reached Uganda, as Queen's Commissioner, in March 1893,