POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
243 
to travel by short stages, and, by conversation with the 
chiefs of the different districts, to inform them of the 
nature of Christianity, endeavour to induce them to 
receive it, and recommend it to the people. IJe vras 
not at first exempt from some degree of ridicule in 
this undertaking; for many of the chiefs and landed 
proprietors in Eimeo, were by no means strongly 
attached to his family. They were, moreover, at that 
time the firm supporters of idolatry, and considered 
his neglect of the gods of his ancestors, as the cause 
of his own troubles, and the disastrous war then 
desolating Tahiti, his hereditary kingdom. He was 
not, however, discouraged; a,nd it must have been 
truly gratifying to have beheld him thus usefully 
engaged. 
Whatever may have been the influence of Christian 
principles on his own mind, in subsequent periods of 
his life, Pomare certainly was employed by the Almighty, 
as an instrument most effectually to promote the im¬ 
portant process, at this time changing altogether the 
moral, civil, and religious aspect of the nation. The 
success that attended his endeavours appears from a 
letter which he addressed to the Missionaries while 
encamped in the district of Maatea, on the side of 
the island nearly opposite to that in which the Euro¬ 
pean settlement stood. In this letter he stated his 
delight in beholding the chiefs inclined to obey the 
word of God ; which, he said, Jehovah himself was 
causing to grow, so that it prospered exceedingly. 
Thirty-four or thirty-six, in one district, had, to use 
his own expression, ^Haid hold of the word of God,'’ 
though there were others who paid no attention to 
those things. 
