Sounds like a good plan. You may have got a hold of some of the scratchy pads that have an abrasive impregnated in the fibers...the kind I've seen use silicon carbide which is hard enough to scratch steel or chrome.
Don't panic, all polishing is is just scratching the surface with sucessively smaller scratches, until they are so small we can't see them...take your time and try to get the pattern of scratches very even before you move to the next finer abrasive. As long as you don't get too agressive and "burn through" the plating, it CAN be polished to a high shine.