Meantime, shortly before the raid, the attention of the Roman Catholic “Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary” in Valparaiso had been drawn to the island by the account received from a passing ship, and they determined to inaugurate a mission. Three of the Community left for Easter Island, their route taking them by way of Tahiti. Finally, only one continued, Eugène Eyraud, who landed on the island in January 1864. Eyraud was a lay brother in the Order, having been a merchant in South America; he devoted his life to the call to take the Gospel to Easter, and the accounts of his work, which are extraordinarily interesting, leave a great impression of his courage and devotion.[36] He was alone on the island for eight or nine months, and was at the mercy of the natives, who stole his belongings, even to the clothes he was wearing, and compelled him to make a boat for them. In March 1866, Eyraud, after a visit to Chile, returned with another missionary, Father Roussel, and the two were for a while blockaded in a house which they had put up, but the tide now turned. Either Roussel was a man of greater determination than Eyraud, or with increased numbers a firmer attitude was possible. Surgeon Palmer of H.M.S. _Topaze_ tells us that when one of the natives took up a stone with a menacing gesture, Roussel quietly felled him with his stick and went on his way, after which there was no further trouble. The missionaries were joined later in the year by two more of their number, and became a power in the land. Eyraud on his return from Chile was suffering from phthisis, of which he died in August 1868. When he was nearing his end he asked Roussel if there still remained any heathen in the island, to which the Father replied “not one”; the last seven had been baptized on the Feast of the Assumption. It seems natural to connect with Eyraud’s illness the fact that there was at the same time a severe epidemic of phthisis in the island; so little was the need of precaution understood at this date, that even Surgeon Palmer, writing of the inroads made by consumption, remarks “which they (the natives) believe infectious.”[37] The ravages of this disease, following on those of smallpox, reduced the population, which at the time of the arrival of the mission had stood at twelve hundred, by about one-fourth.