United States or Ireland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
What wonderful glimpses we get of strange wild lives! But the Tahitian Mission had not included any one leading character, so that it may be enough to state that, after years of patient effort and often of danger, the missionaries beheld King Pomare II., the successor of him whom they had found on the throne, solemnly burn his idols, and profess himself a Christian.
Pomaré, directed by the now militant missionaries, sent a body of gunmen to Tautira to capture the god Oro, whose principal temple was very near where stood my kitchen. The iconoclasts, with the zeal of neophytes, destroyed every vestige of the magnificent marae, and, unwinding the many coverings of Oro, carried to the king the huge log which had been the national god for ages.
Fortunately, says the missionary chronicle, the Christians had their arms with them, and after prayers and exhortations by the clergy, Pomaré led his cohorts, men and women; and by the grace of God and the whites, with a few muskets, they smote the devil-worshipers hip and thigh, and chased them to the distant valleys.
In the greater number of instances by far, a considerable proportion of the people have become Christians before the chief has given up his idols. Pomare was still an idolater when many of his subjects had been converted.
Williams's work; the next was the inducing Tamatoa and the other chiefs to bind themselves to govern by a code of Christian laws, not complex, but based on the Ten Commandments, and agreeing with those newly established by Pomare in Tahiti, but with this difference, that Williams ventured to introduce trial by jury, in the hope that it would tend to qualify the despotic power of the chiefs.
Tootaha was killed in one of these, and when Cook again arrived, in 1773, Pomare was king, though Cook only knew him by his title of Otou, which he apparently still retained, though there was no regent. In 1789 Captain Bligh called at Tahiti in the Bounty, to export young bread-fruit trees to the West Indies.
Nay, it has been whispered that more than once close veiled and clinging tightly to her husband's arm Isabel witnessed at Mabille and the Chaumière the choregraphic triumphs of Frisette, Pomare, and Mogador. My hand trembles while I record such enormities and backslidings.
Compelled at the end of these ten years, in consequence of the revolutions which convulsed Otaheite, to take refuge at Eimeo and other islands of the same group, their efforts were there crowned with more success. In 1817, Pomaré, king of Otaheite, recalled the missionaries, made them a grant of land, and declared himself a convert to Christianity.
The French commandant lives in a charming residence, surrounded by gardens, just opposite the palace of Queen Pomare, who is at present at the island of Bola-Bola, taking care of her little grandchild, aged five, the queen of the island. She went down in a French man-of-war, the 'Limier, ten days ago, and has been obliged to remain, owing to some disturbances amongst the natives.
The hoary cliffs are crown'd wi' flowers, White o'er the linn the burnie pours, And rising, weets wi' misty showers The birks of Aberfeldy. This summer, brown Queen Pomare, and the affairs of far-off Tahiti, had a strange, inordinate amount of attention from the English public.
Word Of The Day