actions of the New Zealand Insurute, mostly in Maori as well as English—good everyday English, interesting to compare with Sir George Grey's stately translations. It fascinated Wohlers to find so much common ground between the Biblical and Maori accounts of creation: ‘then he returned and saw what he had done—kua pai.’ When he later prepared his notes for the New Zealand Institute he omitted repetitions, but kept the Murihiku turn of phrase: unfortunately, he altered the spelling to standard (northern) Maori. In his own memoirs, he writes of ‘Rangiura’ and ‘ngaeo’ for Stewart Island and the edible sea-squirt, though the ng is pronounced k in the south. To a nineteenth-century European whose homeland was, geographically, an extension of spotless Holland, cleanliness came a very close second to godliness. Wohlers began by making his bedroom flea-proof; and he built a garden: ‘these flowers were sermons.’ He travelled about the island, preaching in turn at each of the seven little villages there. Later he built a church, mainly with his own hands, but helped by a few old Maoris—‘for tobacco’. People came along to be baptised. One woman told him: ‘I think of [myself as] a shag, a koao: it swims in the waves, dives under, comes up—flies off—perches on a rock. And Christ is that rock.’ He went by whaleboat to other settlements: The Neck, Williams' and Tupouri's Bay, Otaku and Port William; Whakaputaputa, Koraka Pe and Jacob's River. Some of these Foveaux Strait villages were whaling bases, some kaikas, some mixed. With his limited funds (his home mission thought New Zealand was a cheap place to live in), he sent away for improving literature: A Book of Common Prayer. The Art of Correspondence and The Medical Guide for the use of the Clergi, heads of families, and practitioners in Medicine and Surgery, comprising a practical Dispensatory and Treatise on the Sumtoms, Causes, Prevention and Cure of the Diseases incident to the human frame; with the latest discoveries in Medicine. Whaling households where Maori wives were encouraged in Pakeha notions of hygiene set a good example, but Wohlers was saddened to find poor health among the full-blooded Maori population. In spite of his medical books, he couldn't really cope with the ‘sumtoms’. His own health, mental and physical, began to suffer. At last his mission friends at Waikouaiti asked him up for a holiday; later, when he had to revisit Nelson and call at Wellington, he had with him a letter of introduction to ‘a pious female’, view matrimony. ‘Es wirkte’, wrote Wohlers: it worked! Mrs Wohlers was a tower of strength and character. Cries of, ‘Here comes Mata!’ sent the Maori housewives scurrying with their brooms; patches of many colours began appearing on Sunday clothes; sick children were no longer allowed to be shaken in the belief that it kept them alert and alive. She ran home-science classes in the mission house, and Eliza Wohlers taught hymns in church. What she achieved by energy, Wohlers managed by tact. Tuckett (the surveyor of the Deborah cruise) kept sending ploughs and mills and demanding immediate results: ‘Wait a little bit!’ protested Wohlers, who understood the Polynesian point of view, ‘Nothing will make a Maori do till his time is come.’ And in the fullness of time Ruapuke had its wheatfields, its flour mill, its cows and sheep, with all hands busy harvesting, churning and shearing. Fishing and mutton-birding there had always been; but in bad weather the people (including Wohlers) had had nothing but potatoes and water. Now the standard of health rose hearteningly. Ruapuke (apart from the mission house) grew prosperous, trading with the mainland; ladies swept into church in silk dresses. Wohlers had a school full of pupils learning to spell and read English and grow up in the way they ought to go: ‘our Gretchen (the Wohlers' little daughter) also grows well, only she will not speak English—she only speaks Maori.’ Where is that community now? A handful of its descendants farm the descendants of the