102 
POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
and, proceeding onward with the tide of commerce 
that rolled round the world, the progress of discovery 
and science penetrating every remote, inhospitable 
section of our globe; the Bible and the Missionary had 
not been sent. Had Cowper witnessed these operations 
of Christian benevolence, how he would have cheered, 
with his own numbers, those who had gone out from 
Britain, and other lands, not only to civilize, but to 
attempt the moral renovation of the heathen world. 
The regularly framed and plastered chapels in Huahine 
and Raiatea were of the first kind in the Leeward or 
Windward Islands; they were not, however, the only 
large buildings erected for public worship. Pomare 
had, ever since our arrival, been engaged in preparing 
materials, and erecting a chapel, at Papaoa, by far the 
largest ever built in the islands j it had been opened 
twelve months before those in the Leeward Islands 
were finished. 
This building, which is called the Royal Mission 
Chapel, is certainly, when we consider the imperfect 
skill of the artificers, the rude nature of their tools, the 
amazing quantity of materials used, and the manner in 
which its workmanship is completed, an astonishing 
structure. It is seven hundred and twelve feet in length, 
and fifty-four wide. Thirty-six massj^ cylindrical pillars 
of the bread-fruit tree sustain the centre of the roof, and 
two hundred and eighty smaller ones, of the same 
material, support the wall-plate along the sides, and 
around the circular ends, of the building. The sides or 
walls around are composed of planks of the bread¬ 
fruit tree, fixed perpendicularly in square sleepers. 
The whole, either smoothed with a carpenter’s plane, 
or polished, according to the practice of the natives, by 
