Almost every less serious injury had to be endured.

In the face of hardship, insult, and plunder, the work went on.

A schooner, the _Herald_, was built in the Bay of Islands to act as messenger and carrier between the missionary stations, which--pleasant oases in the desert of barbarism--began to dot the North Island from Whangaroa as far south as Rotorua among the Hot Lakes.

By 1838 there were thirteen of them.
The ruins of some are still to be seen, surrounded by straggling plots run to waste, "where once a garden smiled." When Charles Darwin, during the voyage of the _Beagle_, visited the Bay of Islands, the missionary station at Waimate struck him as the one bright spot in a gloomy and ill-ordered land.

Darwin, by the way, was singularly despondent in his estimate both of Australia and New Zealand.