Tu allowed them to go, and they started at once for Matavai, expecting never to reach it. "I thought the scene of March 26 was again about to be acted, only in a more tragic manner, inasmuch as the natives’ suspicions then were small when compared with the present. At that time they suspected we had prevented Captains Bishop and Simpson, of the Nautilus, from bartering with them for musquets, but now they believed we had cursed the medicine that it might kill the patient, and that the greatest man on the island, he being closely allied with Otoo against his father and mother."

The suspicion that the missionaries were sent by Pomare to curse Temarii and cause his death was not only a natural but a reasonable one to the natives. Pomare was quite capable of it, and as far as the natives knew, the missionaries were Pomare’s men. The accident itself was due to the English gunpowder, which had been as great a curse as every other English thing or thought had been; and perhaps it was fortunate for the missionaries that they had nothing to do with furnishing the powder. Temarii was well known to set great store on his armory. "His grand object was gunpowder; musquets he had a number of." The accident was due to his anxiety about the quality of some powder which he got from the whalers Cornwall and Sally on the 25th of August.

"Orepiah received his powder, to the amount of some pounds weight, out of one of the ships last here (Otoo, Pomere, &c., received

Indigenous Histories