4IO THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



pression these accounts would make the continued existence of the 

 mission might depend. The christianization of Tahiti tended in a sense 

 to degenerate into a "business," and as such its success might be 

 measured in terms of time and number. It is only in the sad stern 

 school of experience that we learn in things of charity between man and 

 man, and these pioneer missionaries lacked the advantage of an historic 

 past to point the way to slower but truer betterment of those for whose 

 welfare they labored so zealously. 



Moderation, charity and intelligent sympathy are all things of these 

 later years in religion, when as the trappings of the priestly autocrat 

 have fallen away the spiritual leader stands revealed. Expediency sug.- 

 gested the worldly course, and the Tahitian missionaries who at first had 

 declined to take sides in native wars or fashion weapons now gave guns 

 to Pomare, aiding him in his bloody quarrels. 



As we read in the " Memoirs of Ariitaimai/' a Chiefess of Tahiti, 

 Pomare determined to destroy his rivals and 



knew that what he was trying to do could be done only by wholesale destruc- 

 tion, and that in order to do it he must depend on outsiders; white men, or 

 Raiatians, or savages from the Paumotos. The missionaries knew it also, for 

 Pomare made no secret of it, and yet they recorded it as though it did not con- 

 cern them. 



From this time onward until the French annexed Tahiti the mis- 

 sionaries were the leaders of a party in the State, and the history of the 

 mission is an unwholesome commingling of religious zeal with political 

 aspiration. 



Friends they doubtless won, for they were brave and earnest men, 

 but enemies they certainly aroused. Their patron Pomare I. did not take 

 kindly to their doctrines, but he was enough of a diplomat to properly 

 appraise their value to him as aids on his raids of murder. According 

 to the " Memoirs of Ariitaimai " the action of the missionaries is sum- 

 marized as follows: 



Alternately praying for peace and helping Pomare and Tu (Pomare II.) to 

 make war, the missionaries innocently hastened the destruction of the natives 

 and encouraged the establishment of a tyranny impossible for me to describe. 

 Pomare was vicious and cruel, treacherous and violent beyond the code of 

 chiefly morals^ but Pomare was an angel compared with his son. 



Pomare II. reveals this policy in a naive letter which he wrote in 

 1807 to the Directors of the London Missionary Society and which ap- 

 pears in their "Narrative of the Mission at Otaheiti" published in 1818. 

 In this labored epistle he asserts his firm faith and deep love in Jehovah 

 (he was then indulging in every practise of the Tahitian religion), and 

 after calling attention to the fact that he is beset with enemies, and is 

 the only powerful friend the missionaries have, and that should he die 

 the lives of his dear friends would be imperilled, he ends by expressing 

 his desire for guns and ammunition. 



{To he concluded) 



