Ships, highly insured, were said to be sent into our Island trade to be deliberately wrecked. One Sabbath evening, towards dark, the notorious Captain H——, in command of a large ship, allowed her to drift ashore and be wrecked without any apparent effort to save her. Next morning, the whole company were wading about in the water and pretending to have lost everything! The Captain, put in prison when he returned to Sydney for running away with another man’s wife and property, imposed on Mr. Copeland and myself, getting all the biscuits, flour, and blankets we could spare for his destitute and shipwrecked company. We discovered afterwards that she was lying on a beautiful bank of sand, only a few yards from the shore, and that everything contained in her could be easily rescued without danger to life or limb! What we parted with was almost necessary for our life and health; of course he gave us an order on Captain T—— for everything, but not one farthing was ever repaid. At first he made a pretence of paying the Natives for food received; but afterwards, an armed band went inland night by night and robbed and plundered whatever came to hand. The Natives, seeing the food of their children ruthlessly stolen, were shot down without mercy when they dared to interfere; and the life of every white man was marked for speedy revenge. Glad were we when a vessel called, and carried away these white heathen Savages. The same Captain T—— also began the shocking Kanaka labour-traffic to the Colonies, after the sandal-wood trade was exhausted, which has since destroyed so many thousands of the Natives in what was nothing less than Colonial slavery, and has largely depopulated the Islands either directly or indirectly. And yet he wrote, and published in Sydney, a pamphlet declaring that he and his sandal-wooders and Kanaka labour collectors had done more to civilize the Islanders than all our Mission efforts combined. Civilize them, indeed! By spreading disease and vice, misery and death amongst them, even at the best; at the worst, slaving many of them till they perished at their toils, shooting down others under one or other guilty pretence, and positively sweeping thousands into an untimely grave. A common cry on their lips was,— “Let them perish and let the white men occupy these Isles.”