After this Marsden returned to Sydney.  The Active took back spars and dressed flax to the value of L450.  The flax was sold at L110 a ton.  Kauri timber brought half a crown a foot, and the duty charged on it at the Sydney customs house was a shilling a foot.  The day of Free Trade there was not yet.  One cloud was hanging over the mission when Marsden sailed.  Ruatara lay dying.  He had been seized with a fever, and the natives, believing him to be attacked by a devouring demon, placed him under tapu, and kept food, medicine, and his white friends from him.  When Marsden, by threatening to bombard the village obtained access to the sick man, it was too late; he found his friend past hope.  Thus was the life of this staunch ally—­a life which might have been of the first value to the Maori race—­thrown away.  Though the missionary’s friend, Ruatara died a heathen, and his head wife hung herself in customary Maori form.

Such was the setting up of the first mission station.  Its founders were sterling men.  Kendall had been a London schoolmaster in good circumstances.  King, a master carpenter, had given up L400 a year to labour among the savages.  Marsden, though he made seven more voyages to the country, the last after he had reached threescore years and ten, never settled there.  Henry Williams, however, coming on the scene in 1823, became his chief lieutenant.  Williams had been a naval officer, had fought at Copenhagen, and had in him the stuff of which Nelson’s sailors were made.  Wesleyan missionaries, following in the footsteps of Marsden’s pioneers, established themselves in 1822, and chose for the place of their labours the scene of the Boyd disaster.  Roman Catholic activity began in 1838.

It took ten years to make one convert, and up to 1830 the baptisms were very few.  After that the work began to tell and the patient labourers to reap their harvest.  By 1838 a fourth of the natives had been baptized.  But this was far from representing the whole achievement of the missionaries.  Many thousands who never formally became Christians felt their influence, marked their example, profited by their schools.  They fought against war, discredited cannibalism, abolished slavery.  From the first Marsden had a sound belief in the uses of trade and of teaching savages the decencies and handicrafts of civilized life.  He looked upon such knowledge as the best path to religious belief.  Almost alone amongst his class, he was far-sighted enough to perceive, at any rate in the latter years of his life, that the only hope of New Zealand lay in annexation, and that any dream of a Protestant Paraguay was Utopian.  Quite naturally, but most unfortunately, most missionaries thought otherwise, and were at the outset of colonization placed in antagonism to the pioneers.  Meanwhile they taught the elements of a rough-and-ready civilization, which the chiefs were acute enough to value.  But the courage and singleness of purpose of many