376 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
operations of Christian benevolence, 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. 
The regularly framed and plastered chapels in 
Huahine and Raiatea were the first of the kind in 
the Leeward or Windward Islands; they were not, 
however, the only large buildings erected for pub¬ 
lic ^worship. Pomare had, ever since our arrival, 
been engaged in preparing materials, and erecting 
a chapel, at Papaoa, by lur the largest ever built 
in the islands ; it had been opened twelve months 
before those in the Leeward Islands were finished. 
This building, which is called the Royal Mis¬ 
sion Chapel, and might, not inappropriately, be 
termed the cathedral of Tahiti, is certainly, when 
we consider the imperfect skill of the artifi¬ 
cers, their rude tools, the amazing quantity of 
materials used, and the manner in which its 
workmanship is completed, an astonishing struc¬ 
ture. It is seven hundred and twelve feet in 
length, and fifty-four wide. Thirty-six massy 
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 rubbing the timber with smooth coral 
and sand. One hundred and thirty-three windows 
or apertures, furnished with sliding shutters, admit 
both light and air, and twenty-nine doors afford 
