91 a captain in James Wilson, hastily recruited thirty missionaries, and sent them off to Tahiti. The missionaries themselves were a motley lot. Only four were ordained ministers. Most were of the artisan class— bricklayers, carpenters, buckle and harness makers, wheelwrights. They had next to no training. Some had wives and a few had children. Most were in their twenties, all were zealous Christians, and none spoke Tahitian. LMS historian Richard Lovett referred to them as “this strange company.”2 They reached Tahiti in 1797. Progress was slow for the fi rst fi fteen years, which they referred to as “the night of toil.”3 They faced many diffi culties—warfare, alcoholism, rivalry, discord, defection, “indecent behavior,” even murder. But they were persistent, and they learned from experience. The turning point came when Tahitian paramount chief Pomare II renounced idolatry, albeit to gain muskets and power. Pomare’s aid in effecting conversion cannot be underestimated. As he announced, “if any man may speak a contemptuous word against my God Jehovah, I will draw out his rectum, & dry it in the sun.”4 With incentives such as this, along with the remarkable enthusiasm of the Tahitians toward the magic of the written word, books, and singing hymns, Christianity fi nally took root. Even before the society was born, the LMS directors, having seen displays of the pagan idols brought back by Captain Cook, discussed the idea of establishing a public museum to display South Seas idols as evidence of heathen depravity. The missionaries, however, thought quite the opposite. They wanted the idols destroyed as proof of the triumph of Christianity over idolatry—proof to themselves as well as to the Polynesians. They considered the idols “food for the fl ames,”5 and idol bonfi res became legendary. Surprisingly, it was Pomare II, the Christianized “king” of Tahiti, who was the fi rst to think otherwise. He convinced the missionaries not to burn the idols but rather to send them to London so Europeans could “know Tahiti’s foolish gods.”6 Indeed, for the most part, the idols in LMS collections were collected not by English missionaries but by Christianized Polynesian “teachers.” The most important of these was Papeiha, who had been one of the fi rst Ta- FIG. 9 (above): Headrest. Tahiti. Label reads “Pillows, made of the wood of the Bread Fruit Tree, Tahite. G. Bennet Esq. (Sheffi eld).” Wood. CUM 1907,615. Elegantly proportioned and well carved, Society Island headrests differed in the treatment of the vertical elements. Wooden headrests went out of use almost as fast as stone adzes. Frederick Bennett, who visited Tahiti and Ra‘iatea as a scientist and surgeon on a whaler, remarked that by the time he was there (1834) “cotton pillows had all but superseded ancient wooden pillows.” FIG. 10 (below): Bowl. Collected on Mangaia, southern Cook Islands, but probably made on Rarotonga. Labeled “Tata . . . or scoop used for baleing water out of canoes in Island of Mangea . . . G Bennet July 1824.” Wood. CUM E1906.136. Despite the information on the label, bowls such as this were probably used for food rather than as bailers. This example was collected on the return of the Deputation to England via Sydney, on the Endeavour portion of the voyage. Their journey covered an astonishing 90,000 miles and took eight years, three of which were spent in Polynesia. The Deputation’s members, Tyerman and Bennet, also sent back a number of other non-idol artifacts along with many natural history specimens.
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