The Reverend John Eliot arrived in Boston in 1631, where he began an ambitious project to learn the Massachusett language, which was widely understood throughout New England. He worked to convert the Native Americans to Christianity, and published a Bible translated in Massachusett, as well as a grammar of the language. His efforts, with colonial government backing, established several 'Indian plantations' or 'Praying towns', where Native Americans were coerced to settle and be instructed in English customs, Christianity. They were governed and preached to by other Native Americans and in their own dialects. (Some historians consider these to have been predecessors to the 19th-century Indian reservations.)