CUAP. I, 1'IRST PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS. 5 of both parties to maintain, the queen’s government had shown its fixed determination not only to arrest the progress of Christianity in the country, but to destroy it wherever it might appear. Scarcely had the missionaries left the capital in 1836, before a number of persons suspected of being Christians were required to prove their innocence by drinking the Tangena, or poison-water, which to many of them proved fatal. In the following year a considerable number of the people were accused of reading religious books and uniting in Christian worship. Several of these were severely punished by fine, imprisonment, or unredeemable slavery; and one de voted Christian woman, Rasalama, was put to death. In 1838, Rafaralahy, a young man who had accompanied the first Malagasy martyr to the place of execution, shared her fate; and before the close of the year, Rafaravavy, with four of her companions, who subsequently visited England, only saved their lives by escaping from the island. Others wandered from place to place in much suffering and imminent peril, often seeking concealment and safety in the almost impervious forests and in the dreary caverns of the mountains, until the year 1842, when sixteen of them, while on their way to the coast with a view of escaping from the island, were betrayed by their guides and taken back to the capital, where nine of them were cruelly put to death. The effect of these sanguinary proceedings seemed to be the very reverse of what the government intended. The at tention of all classes was thereby drawn to the subject of religion, and the confidence of many in their idols appeared greatly weakened, while the Christians seemed to be confirmed in their faith by the severe ordeal through- which it had sus tained them. Amongst others over whose minds the pretended power of the idols had ceased to operate was the queen’s son, then in
