Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/490

474 with terror, and all with the loss of one Christian, who was killed by the bursting of his own gun. Such acts reveal the darker side of mission history, and the attempt has been often made to free the priests from the blame of such transactions, on the ground that they were ignorant of the extreme means employed. Such



can hardly have been the case. Even when the ostensible purpose of the visits of the converts was peace and not war, they were armed, the boat being often provided, as Beechey tells us, with cannon and musketry. Under such circumstances of superiority it would have needed no prophet to foretell the probable action