relief from heaven.

Marsden states that on occasion of the caterpillars one year making
great ravages among the crops of sweet potatoes at Rangheehoo,[BR] the
people of that place sent to Cowa-Cowa[BS] for a great priest to avert
the heavy judgment; and that he came and remained with them for several
months, during which he employed himself busily in the performance of
prayers and ceremonies. The New Zealanders also

consider all their priests as a species of sorcerers, and believe they
have the power to take the lives of whomsoever they choose by
incantation. Themorangha,[BT] one of the most enlightened of the chiefs,
came one day to Marsden, in great agitation, to inform him that a
brother chief had threatened to employ a priest to destroy him in this
manner, for not having sold to sufficient advantage an article which he
had given him to dispose of. "I endeavoured," says Marsden, "to convince
him of the absurdity of such a threat; but to no purpose; he still
persisted that he should die, and that the priest possessed that power;
and began to draw the lines of incantation on the ship's deck, in order
to convince me how the operation was performed. He said that the
messenger was waiting alongside, in a canoe, for his answer. Finding it
of no use to argue with him, I gave him an axe, which he joyfully
received, and delivered to the messenger, with a request that the chief
would be satisfied, and not proceed against him."

Themorangha seems to have been particularly selected by these priests as
a subject for their roguish practices, perhaps by way of revenge for the
freedom with which he occasionally expressed himself in regard to their
pretensions, when his fears were not excited. A short time before this,
one of them had terrified him not a little by telling him that he had
seen his ghost during the night, and had been informed, by the atua,
that if he went to a certain place to which he was then about to
proceed, he would die in a few days. He soon, however, got so far the
better of his fears as, notwithstanding this alarming intimation, to
venture to accompany Marsden to the forbidden district; and he expressed
his feelings of contempt for the sacred order in no measured terms, when
he found that at the expiration of the predicted period he was still
alive.

He said that there were too many priests at New Zealand, and that they
"tabooed" and prayed the people to death. Others, as well as the
priests, however, a