POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
31 
junctions or requisitions of the priest, delivered in 
the name, and under the authority, of the gods. 
Tati, however, remarked to Mr. Davies, that it was 
the observing, not the neglecting of the directions 
of the priest, that had nearly produced its actual 
accomplishment. 
At the time when the nation renounced idolatry, 
the population was so much reduced, that many of the 
more observant natives thought the denunciation of the 
prophet was about to be literally fulfilled. Tati, the 
chief of Papara, talking with Mr. Davies on this sub¬ 
ject, in 1815, said, with great emphasis, that if God 
had not sent his word at the time he did, wars, infant- 
murder, human sacrifices, &c. would have made an end of 
the small remnant of the nation.” A similar declaration 
was pathetically made by Pomare soon after, when some 
visitors from England waited upon him at his residence. 
He addressed them to the following effect: You have 
come to see us under circumstances very different from 
those under which your countrymen formerly visited our 
ancestors. They came in the aera of men, when the 
islands were inhabited, but you are come to behold just 
the remnant of the people.” I have often heard the 
chiefs speak of themselves and the natives as only a small 
toeay remainder, left after the extermination of Satani, 
or the evil spirit 5 comparing themselves to a firebrand 
unconsumed among the mouldering embers of a recent 
conflagration. These figures, and others equally affecting 
and impressive, were but too appropriate, as emblems 
of the actual state to which they were at that time 
reduced. Under the depopulating influence of vicious 
habits—the dreadful devastation of diseases that followed, 
and the early destruction of health—the prevalence 
