’This will not involve an abandonment of St Andrew’s, but the work must expand.  I think Australia will supply near 1,000 pounds a year, perhaps more before long.

’To teach me that all is in His hands, we have again had a visitation from dysentery.  It has been very prevalent everywhere, no medical men remember such a season.  We have lost from consumption two, and from dysentery six this year; in fourteen months not less than fourteen:  more than in all the other years put together.  Marvellous to relate, all our old baptized and confirmed scholars are spared to us.  Good-bye, and God ever bless and keep you.

’Your affectionate cousin,

‘J.  C. Patteson, Bishop.’

One of these deaths was that of Kareambat, the little New Caledonian confided to the Bishop of New Zealand by poor Basset.  He had been christened on the previous Epiphany.

No doubt this grief on coming home increased the effect of this year of trial.  Indeed even on the voyage there had been this admission, ’Somehow I don’t feel right with all this holiday; I have worked really very hard, but “change of work is the best holiday.”  I don’t feel springy.  I am not so young as I was, that’s the truth of it, and this life is not likely to be a long one.  Yet when used up for this work, absence of continual anxiety and more opportunity of relaxation may carry a man on without his being wholly useless!’

The Maori war was a constant grief and anxiety to all the friends on shore, and there was thus evidently much less elasticity left to meet the great shock that was preparing for the voyagers in the expedition of 1864.  Mr. Codrington was not of the party, having been obliged to go to England to decide whether it was possible to give himself wholly to the Mission; and the staff therefore consisted of Mr. Pritt, Mr. Kerr, and Mr. Palmer, with Mr. Joseph Atkin, whose journal his family have kindly put at my disposal.

The endeavour was to start after the Ascension Day Communion, but things were not forward enough.  May was not, however, very far advanced before the ‘Southern Cross’ was at sea.

On May 17, Norfolk Island was visited, and Edwin Nobbs and Fisher Young had what proved to be their last sight, of their home and friends.  The plan was to go on to Nengone and Erromango, take up the stores sent to the latter place from Sydney, drop the two clergymen at Mota, and after a stay there, go to the New Hebrides, and then take up the party, and if possible leave them to make experiment of Curtis Island, while going to those Santa Cruz islands for which he always seems to have had such a yearning.

‘I feel as usual,’ he finishes the letter sent from Norfolk Island, ’that no one can tell what may be the issue of such voyages.  I pray and trust that God will mercifully reveal to me “what I ought to do, and give me grace and power to fulfil the same.”

’I have now been for some time out of the way of this kind of work, but I hope that all may be safely ordered for us.  It is all in His hands; and you all feel, as I try to do, that there should be no cause for anxiety or trouble.