Moreover, he took active steps to enforce the prohibition.

When Charles Darwin visited the mission station near the Bay of Islands in 1835, the missionaries confessed to him that they had grown so accustomed to associate tattooing with rank and dignity--had so absorbed the Maori social code relating thereto--that an unmarked face seemed to them vulgar and mean.

Nevertheless, their influence led the way in discountenancing the art, and it has so entirely died out that there is probably not a completely tattooed Maori head on living shoulders to-day.
Cook had found the Maoris still in the Stone Age.

They were far too intelligent to stay there a day after the use of metals had been demonstrated to them.

Wits much less acute than a Maori's would appreciate the difference between hacking at hardwood trees with a jade tomahawk, and cutting them down with a European axe.