When able to travel, Mr. Jones returned to Mauritius to recruit his strength, and in September, 1820, he returned to Madagascar, along with Mr. Hastie, the first British Agent appointed to the court of Radàma I. The king received them very kindly, and when he understood the object of Mr. Jones’s coming, he sent a letter to the Directors of the London Missionary Society, in which he said: ‘I request you to send me, if convenient, as many missionaries as you may deem proper, together with their families, if they desire it, provided you send skilful artisans, to make my people workmen as well as good Christians.’ Accordingly between 1820 and 1828 the Directors of the London Missionary Society sent fourteen missionaries to Madagascar--six ordained men and eight missionary artisans. Among the latter were a carpenter, a blacksmith, a tanner, a cotton-spinner, and a printer. Thus almost all that the Malagasy know to-day of the arts and industries of civilized life, in addition to the knowledge of ‘the way of Salvation,’ they owe to the missionaries of the London Missionary Society. The best of the Malagasy people have always been grateful to the Society for all it has done through its agents for their temporal and spiritual welfare. Recently, however, another and a very different version of Malagasy history has been produced. It begins by casting reflections upon our work in Madagascar. We are told that the British missionaries have never done anything for the Malagasy, except to teach them to sing a few hymns and make hypocrites of them! We are seriously asked to believe that the Malagasy owe all their knowledge of civilization, and of the various arts and handicrafts of civilization, to a French sailor, who was wrecked on the coast of the island, found his way up to the capital, and there became the very intimate friend (or more, as some French writers maintain) of Rànavàlona I, the persecuting queen. Voltaire is credited with saying that he could ‘write history a great deal better without facts than with them.’ This ‘New Version of Malagasy History’ fully conforms to his ideal--the facts are lacking. This ‘old man of the sea’ is a myth like his prototype. Whatever else they may have done, it cannot be denied that the British missionaries were the first to reduce the language to writing. When the missionaries arrived in Madagascar the people had no written language. The king had four Arabic secretaries, and, but for the advent of the missionaries, in all probability the characters used in the language of Madagascar would have been Arabic, which of course would have made the acquisition of the language much more difficult to foreigners than it is. When the king saw the Roman characters, he said: ‘Yes, I like these better, they are simpler, we’ll have these.’ And so the character in which the language of Madagascar was to be written and printed was settled by the despotic word of the king under the influence of the missionaries.