Michael Corboy has spent a huge amount of time researching the early missionary period. This is not PapersPast territory. There are few digital aids to the pre-1840 period. Rather than offering generalisations that lack sufficient evidence to be credible historiographically, Corboy has exhaustively researched the correspondence, the diaries and the reports of those early missionaries. The result is an account for the period from 1814 to 1840 that is neither pro-missionary nor anti-missionary. This fills a gap between those extremes. He has carefully examined the arguments of decades of scholars trying to push an edge in favour of or in criticism of the missionaries. This is a most detailed account of the period.