Aside from literature reinforcing the Christian and Jewish ways of life, studies in religion in the Oceanic region began with reports on the customs and beliefs of "savage" or "native" peoples in and near European colonies. Along with the published diaries of early explorers, whose observations were highly cursory, most of the early commentators were missionaries, including the Spanish Jesuit Juan Antonio Cantova, who wrote about the Caroline Islands as early as the 1720s; William Ellis of the London Missionary Society, who documented various Polynesian cultures by 1829; and the German Lutherans Carl Ottow and Johann Geissler, who described the New Guinea Biak people in 1857. In addition, visitors who utilized missionary informants—such as the French captain François Leconte, who wrote about northern New Caledonia in 1847—also recorded events of interest to...