CHAPTER VI.
MISSION SCHOONER AND WHALE BOAT "Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy."-- _Text of Samuel Marsden's first sermon at the Bay of Islands, Christmas Day_, 1814.
Maoris, shipping before the mast on board whalers and traders, made some of the best seamen on the Pacific.

They visited Sydney and other civilized ports, where their fine physique, bold bearing, and strangely tattooed faces, heightened the interest felt in them as specimens of their ferocious and dreaded race.

Stories of the Maoris went far and wide--of their fierce fights, their cannibal orgies, their grotesque ornaments and customs, their lonely, fertile, and little-known country.

Humane men conceived the wish to civilize and Christianize this people.

Benjamin Franklin had planned something of the kind when the news of Cook's discovery first reached England.
Thirty years later, Samuel Marsden, a New South Wales chaplain, resolved to be the Gregory or Augustine of this Britain of the South.
The wish became the master-passion of his life, and he lived to fulfil it.