Having spent nineteen years in the Pacific, the missionary George Turner developed a great interest in Pacific Islander culture, principally that of Samoa, where he had spent much of his time. In 1861 he published Nineteen Years in Polynesia which described in detail his missionary travels in the Pacific and he hoped to return to Samoa one day to continue his work.

The introduction of Christianity in order to ‘civilise’ the Pacific led to Islanders being forced to abandon customs and beliefs that had developed over many years and European writers such as Turner began to see it as their duty to write down these customs before they were lost forever. In his preface to this book describing Samoan and wider Pacific Islander society and culture before European intervention, he explains his reasoning behind the work. He argued that as Islanders were now “dressed in Manchester print and Bradford cloth, receiving European ideas from the pulpit, the school and the newspaper” and therefore were prone to the ‘vices’ as well as the ‘virtues’ of Europeans, it was important to produce a volume that had “descriptions of Polynesian life in its unaltered state” so that Europeans could learn from this apparently idyllic way of life. This attitude was very influential and formed European and American visions of the Pacific for many years.