( ging their own thirst for knowledge p...)Polynesia explorers created worldwide web of scientific knowledge

In truth, their enterprises engaged a cast of thousands, all of whom interacted in the "multifaceted network": patrons, collaborators, philosophers back home, missionaries abroad and travel writers such as Charles Darwin and Herman Melville.

During this era, scientific travelers were young, poor and "painfully dependent" on the goodwill and deep pockets of their patrons. They also were ambitious, enduring the "madness of long, lonely voyages" for the fame they might claim upon their return.Their bosses, the voyage sponsors, tended to be high-ranking naval officers, ministers of state or monarchs ?wealthy men who paid them to be reporters, but who also had their own "conceptions of truth." In such a dynamic, travelers were obliged to write with their "guardians of privilege" uppermost in their minds.

Although traveler-naturalists expected that rigorous empirical work would lead them to the "straightforward truths" about human nature in "natural" societies, they discovered otherwise: "no single pattern of human nature, but rather an irreducible multiplicity of cultures, an ever-greater variety of forms of sex, politics, language and every other human institution," in short, "a greatly enlarged inventory of human possibilities."

When missionaries arrived, they shook things up even more.

Most of the era's proselytizers came out of the ecumenical London Missionary Society, founded in 1795 in response to broad evangelical shock over Polynesian mores, customs and practices, including a few reports of public copulation.

LMS missionaries would construct an independent network of knowledge with its own patrons, informants and audience, and they would bring back "their own ethnographic vision of the island peoples they wished to convert." Because of their continuous fieldwork, they claimed to be better informed than the scientists.

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Source:University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign