Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/88

64 "Near the village is a well-built church of stone; it is in charge of a Catholic priest, and we were told that there is an average of one church to every two hundred inhabitants all over the islands. The first missionaries to the Marquesas came in the London Mission ship Duff near the end of the last century, but after a short residence they became disheartened and abandoned the effort to convert and civilize the people. Several attempts were made in the first quarter of the present century, but with a similar result. In 1833 some American missionaries tried the experiment, and in 1834 the London Mission Society sent a fresh party of missionaries, but all to little purpose.

"In 1853 an English missionary named Bicknell and four Hawaiian teachers, accompanied by their wives, went to the Marquesas at the request of a Marquesan chief, who had gone to the Sandwich Islands in a whale-ship to present the invitation. The French priests opposed the coming of these missionaries, but the chiefs refused to give them up, and so the teachers remained, but they made little progress in converting the natives to Christianity.

"The Catholic mission supports quite a number of priests and a bishop at the Marquesas. The mission has had very poor success in securing adherents to its faith, but it has done much good in the way of showing the natives the result of industry. Around each mission station there is a well-cultivated garden, and some of the finest cotton-fields on the islands may be found there. I have never seen anywhere a prettier cotton-field than at the mission we visited.

"There is a convent at Nookaheeva, where the French Sisters are educating about sixty Marquesan girls, whose ages vary from four to sixteen years. There is a similar school for boys, which is under the charge of the mission; and the bishop hopes that these boys and girls will be of service in educating and converting their people to the religion and civilization of the foreigner. But from all we can learn it will be a long time before his hopes are realized. The Queen is a devout Catholic, while the King is a nominal one, and each missionary has a small flock of followers; but the great majority are as much heathen as ever, and cling firmly to their old superstitions.

"One of the curious customs of the South Sea Islands is the tabu, and it prevails much more strongly at the Marquesas at the present time