The Sultan told off a band of his soldiers to go with the two men and to protect them from any molesting till they reached the Crusaders’ Camp.  There is a legend—­though no one now can tell whether it is true or not—­that when the Sultan of Egypt lay dying he sent for a disciple of Francis to be with him and pray for him.  Whether this was so or not, it is quite clear that Francis had left in the memory of the Sultan such a vision of dauntless faith as he had never seen before or was ever to see again.

The Crusaders failed to win Egypt or the Holy Land; but to-day men are going from America and Britain in the footsteps of Francis of Assisi the Christian missionary, to carry to the people in Egypt, in the Holy Land and in all the Near East, the message that Francis took of the love of Jesus Christ.  The stories of some of the deeds they have done and are to-day doing, we shall read in later chapters in this book.

Book Two:  THE ISLAND ADVENTURERS

CHAPTER V

THE ADVENTUROUS SHIP

The Duff

(Date of Incident, 1796)

A ship crept quietly down the River Thames on an ebb-tide.  She was slipping out from the river into the estuary when suddenly a challenge rang out across the grey water.

“What ship is that?”

“The Duff,” was the answer that came back from the little ship whose captain had passed through a hundred hairsbreadth escapes in his life but was now starting on the strangest adventure of them all.

“Whither bound?” came the challenge again from the man-o’-war that had hailed them.

“Otaheite,” came the answer, which would startle the Government officer.  For Tahiti[11] (as we now call it) was many thousands of miles away in the heart of the South Pacific Ocean.  Indeed it had only been discovered by Captain Cook twenty-eight years earlier in 1768. The Duff was a small sailing-ship such as one of our American ocean liners of to-day could put into her dining saloon.

“What cargo?” The question came again from the officer on the man-o’-war.

“Missionaries and provisions,” was Captain Wilson’s answer.

The man-o’-war’s captain was puzzled.  He did not know what strange beings might be meant by missionaries.  He was suspicious.  Were they pirates, perhaps, in disguise!

We can understand how curious it would sound to him when we remember that (although Wilfrid and Augustine and Columba had gone to Britain as missionaries over a thousand years before The Duff started down the Thames) no cargo of missionaries had ever before sailed from those North Sea Islands of Britain to the savages of other lands like the South Sea Islands.

There was a hurried order and a scurry on board the Government ship.  A boat was let down into the Thames, and half a dozen sailors tumbled into her and rowed to The Duff. What did the officer find?