Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas, 1797-1860

Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas, 1797 to 1860, Niel Gunson's 1978 scholarly history from Oxford University Press, Melbourne, is the foundational academic history of Protestant, principally London Missionary Society, missions in the South Seas across that period, with Tahiti as its earliest and best documented case: marae destruction, and dance and tattoo bans under the Christianized Pomare monarchy. Its strength is that it remains foundational for the period it covers. Its limit is that it covers the suppression itself; it does not reach the late twentieth century Ma'ohi cultural revival, a later development outside a 1978 book's own scope.