learned Fijian customs and acquired an interest in the political affairs of the islands. Finally they began to overrun and conquer the Fijians and were the cause of much disorder and distress.
In about 1848 a powerful rebellion headed by Maafu the cousin of the Christian king broke out in Tonga, but was suppressed by George Tubou. Maafu, its leader, was exiled to Fiji and it was intimated to him that if he desired a kingdom it was his to conquer.
Of the highest Tongan birth, young, ambitious, of superb physique, energetic and in every sense a leader among men of action, Maafu came to Fiji and at once became the ruler of all Tongans in the group.
His policy was to assist the weaker Fijian chiefs at war with stronger enemies, and then the combined Tongan and Fijian army having been victorious, he would turn upon his erstwhile allies and overpower them. Thus he gained a foothold at Vanua Mbalavu and from this as a base he proceeded to conquer the Fijis. As Seeman says in his account of his Government Mission to Fiji:
Where Maafu and his hords had been it was as if a host of locusts had descended.
Famine and poverty stalked in his wake, yet wherever he went there was a Tongan "teacher" by his side; and, as Seeman says,
the Wesleyan missionaries were kept quiet by Maafu making it the first condition in arranging articles of peace that the conquered should renounce heathenism and become Christians.
There is a strange silence in missionary accounts respecting Maafu, for not once does his name appear in Calvert's "Missionary Labors among the Cannibals" published in 1870, yet he added hundreds of "converts" to their flocks, and the Tongans and missionaries remained upon the best of terms; and only after the treacherous and brutal torture and massacre of prisoners at Natakala[1] and Naduri were the missionaries forced by outraged public opinion to wash their hands of Maafu and join weakly in the protest against Tongan cruelty. It seems almost incomprehensible that this sad and revolting abuse of power should have been exhibited by the missionaries in the part they took in conniving at native warfare in Tonga Tahiti, and Fiji in order that their reports to the home mission might "glow with the glorious story of conversions."
By 1858 there were but two great chiefs left in Fiji, Maafu and Thakombau, and the two powers were face to face. Doubtless the missionaries would have had their own way more readily with Maafu, for when they had suggested to Thakombau the abolition of the old system and the establishment of a "constitutional monarchy," he had
- ↑ See William T. Pritchard, 1866; Polynesian reminiscences, pp. 225-234. London.
