With better reasoning the natives looked at the missionaries as a kind of children, or idiots, incapable of understanding the simplest facts of island politics or society, and serving only as the unconscious tools of the Tu family. Day by day, the anxious party, studying their grammars at Matavai, learned more of the dangers which had menaced, and still threatened them, from Pare. The vital importance of Temarii’s death to their interests gradually opened itself to their understandings.

"September 12.... The dead body, we hear, is to be carried in procession round the island, and much ceremony used on the occasion. This awful visitation is evidently to us a singular interposition of providence. What may be the consequences of it, time will unfold. There seemed to be such a rooted jealousy subsisting between Pomere, Edea, and the deceased, that we were every day in expectation of an open rupture. Orepiah seldom visited us; when he did. he always treated us civilly; though we have some ground to suppose he and Otoo were the principal agents in causing the four brethren to be stripped at Opare".

Temarii’s body was carried, in the usual state, round the island to all his districts and duly mourned; and in the regular course prescribed by the island ceremonial, his head was secretly hidden in the cave at Papara, where, I believe, it still exists, marked by the gunpowder which caused Temarii’s death. To the Papara people the disaster was hard to exaggerate, for the danger of their falling under the direct control of the Tu family, as Opunohu, Faaa, and Taiarapu had already done, was made imminent by the loss of their chief, who left no children and whose successor had no such connections or authority as the Temarii Ariifaataia had managed to acquire. To the rest of the island

Indigenous Histories