Various political leaders realized just how much advantage they might gain against rivals from missionary backing – often, as large-scale conversions took place, combatants in murderous wars would ally with missionaries of rival denominations, who frequently did not quite grasp how they were being used in local politics. When the Wesleyan Methodists and the LMS, in a laudable attempt to end their own rivalries, agreed in the 1830s to allot Samoa to the LMS and Tonga and Fiji to the Wesleyans,
