Thanking the Governor for his exceeding kindness, I referred to their Man-of-war about to go to Sydney, and offered to pay full passage money if they would take me, instead of leaving me to wait for a “trader.” He at once granted my request, and arranged that we should be charged only at the daily cost for the sailors. At his suggestion, however, I took a number of things on board with me, and presented them to be used at the Cabin table. We were most generously treated,—the Captain giving up his own room to my wife and myself, as they had no special accommodation for passengers. Noumea appeared to me at that time to be wholly given over to drunkenness and vice, supported as a great Convict settlement by the Government of France, and showing every extreme of reckless, worldly pleasure, and of cruel, slavish toil. When I saw it again, three-and-twenty years thereafter, it showed no signs of progress for the better. In his book on the French Colonies, J. Bonwick, F.R.G.S., says that even yet Noumea and its dependencies contain only 1,068 Colonists from France. If there be a God of justice and of love, His blight cannot but rest on a nation whose pathway is stained with corruption and steeped in blood, as is undeniably the case with France in the Pacific Isles. Arriving at Sydney, I was at once plunged into a whirlpool of horrors. H.M.S. _Curaçoa_ had just returned from her official trip to the Islands, in which the Commodore, Sir William Wiseman, had thought it his duty to inflict punishment on the Natives for murder and robbery of Traders and others. On these Islands, as in all similar cases, the Missionaries had acted as interpreters, and of course always used their influence on the side of mercy, and in the interests of peace. But Sydney, and indeed Australia and the Christian World, were thrown into a ferment just a few days before our arrival, by certain articles in a leading publication there, and by the pictorial illustrations of the same. They were professedly from an officer on board Her Majesty’s ship, and the sensation was increased by their apparent truthfulness and reality. Tanna was the scene of the first event, and a series was to follow in succeeding numbers. The _Curaçoa_ was pictured lying off the shore, having the _Dayspring_ in tow. The Tannese warriors were being blown to pieces by shot and shell, and lay in heaps on the bloody coast. And the Missionaries were represented as safe in the lee of the Man-of-war, directing the onslaught, and gloating over the carnage.