It took ten years to make one convert, and up to 1830 the baptisms were very few. After that the work began to tell and the patient labourers to reap their harvest. By 1838 a fourth of the natives had been baptized. But this was far from representing the whole achievement of the missionaries. Many thousands who never formally became Christians felt their influence, marked their example, profited by their schools. They fought against war, discredited cannibalism, abolished slavery. From the first Marsden had a sound belief in the uses of trade and of teaching savages the decencies and handicrafts of civilized life. He looked upon such knowledge as the best path to religious belief. Almost alone amongst his class, he was far-sighted enough to perceive, at any rate in the latter years of his life, that the only hope of New Zealand lay in annexation, and that any dream of a Protestant Paraguay was Utopian. Quite naturally, but most unfortunately, most missionaries thought otherwise, and were at the outset of colonization placed in antagonism to the pioneers. Meanwhile they taught the elements of a rough-and-ready civilization, which the chiefs were acute enough to value. But the courage and singleness of purpose of many of them gave them a higher claim to respect. To do the Maoris justice, they recognised it, and the long journeys which the preachers of peace were able to make from tribe to tribe of cannibals and warriors say something for the generosity of the latter as well as for the devotion of the travellers. For fifty years after Marsden's landing no white missionary lost his life by Maori hands. 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. Colonial evolution was clearly not amongst his studies. [Illustration: CARVED GATEWAY OF MAORI VILLAGE _From a Sketch by_ GENERAL ROBLEY.]