(4) Public Appeal for Mrs. Guard.

The dreadful case of Mrs. Guard and her two infant children, who have been so providentially preserved amongst, and at last rescued from the cannibals of New Zealand, by whom they were seized and carried away, is already before the public, and has excited greater interest and a more general expression of sympathy than perhaps any case of distress and suffering upon record, indeed the case is happily without a parallel. At the time that Captain Guard had the misfortune to be wrecked upon the coast of New Zealand, in the barque Harriett, in which he was a shareholder and by which wreck, besides the personal page 428 sufferings to which the survivors were exposed in common with the whole crew (of which twelve, including a brother of Mrs. Guard, were inhumanly butchered and eaten by the savages), Mr. Guard lost the whole of his property, which had been left him by the former wreck on the same coast of the schooner Waterloo, of which he was joint owner, in October 1833, the very hull of which vessel it may be remembered was burned by the natives.

The promptitude of His Excellency and the Colonial Government in despatching forces to New Zealand, and the gallantry of His Majesty's 50th, under the command of Captain Johnstone, and of the marine force under Captain Lambert, effectually seconding the local knowledge of Mr. Guard himself, are entitled to the highest praise and to the unbounded gratitude of the sufferers. These have rescued the captives from a situation more dreadful than was perhaps ever before known or heard of; and the public now appealed to will not be backward in displaying its sympathy and genuine commiseration; but impelled by every feeling of humanity as husbands or wives, as parents or as children and as Christians, the attention cannot be directed to the extraordinary case of poor Mr. and Mrs. Guard, and their two infants, without the heart being irresistibly impelled by every feeling honourable to human nature, to open wide the hand and extend substantial relief to the sufferers.

Had Providence seen fit to deprive these parties of the husband and father, the mother or the children, money indeed could not purchase their restoration; or even had they been shipwrecked without loss of property, it might be unfair to apply for pecuniary recompence; but this is a case in which a female and her children have been for months exposed to every conceivable horror—shipwrecked, seized, and detained among savages—her husband and some of her companions effecting their escape, but twelve of them, including her brother, killed and eaten in her presence; and the husband a sober and industrious man, loses by the act of God many hundred pounds of property— page 429 the whole of the hard earnings of many years—and though recovering his wife and children, finds himself with his family, rescued indeed from the jaws of death, but robbed of everything literally to their very skin, for the natives left them in a state of nudity.

To recompense the world after such losses and sufferings as these—to enable this family to preserve its energies and again exert them usefully, and it is hoped successfully, this appeal is made to all such as are blessed with hearts to commiserate such great and unparalleled distress.

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Mrs. Kentish	5	0	0
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Mr. Jones	0	10	0
Captain Irving	2	0	0
Mr. Ferraby	1	0	0
Mr. Ross	0	5	0
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A Friend of the Distressed	0	10	0
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