Thirty years had elapsed between the coming of Captain Wallis in the Dolphin and the coming of the missionaries in the Duff. Little was left of all that had charmed the discoverers. In these thirty years Europe had also passed through the experience of centuries; the dreams of Rousseau and the ideals of nature were already as far away as the kingdom of heaven. In 1797 the philosophers were dead; the guillotine had disposed of the innate virtues of the human heart; and war had swept away most of the landmarks of old Europe, with much of its old population; but the wreck of society that had occurred in Europe was not to be compared with the wreck of our world in the South Seas. When England and France began to show us the advantages of their civilization, we were, as races then went, a great people. Hawaii, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Tonga, Samoa, and New Zealand made a respectable figure on the earth’s surface, and contained a population of no small size, better fitted than any other possible community for the conditions in which they lived. Tahiti, being first to come into close contact with, the foreigners, was first to suffer. The people, who numbered, according to Cook, two hundred thousand in 1767, numbered less than twenty thousand in 1797, according to the missionaries, and only about five thousand in 1803. This frightful mortality has been often doubted, because Europeans have naturally shrunk from admitting the horrors of their own work, but no one doubts it who belongs to the native race. Tahiti did not stand alone in misery. What happened there happened everywhere, not only in the great groups of high islands, like Hawaii, with three or four hundred thousand people, but in little coral atolls which could support only a few score. Moerenhout, who was the most familiar of all travellers with

Indigenous Histories