In the 1890s, Rev. Robert Codrington, one of the Melanesian Mission's most important ethnographers, donated a large number of Melanesian artifacts to what is now the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Feldman's history of "the romantic story of curare" is useful for understanding more of the cultural influences behind assumptions about Melanesian poisoned arrows. Whether visiting a Victorian missionary museum, viewing an ethnographic display at a secular museum a century later, or going to the movies today, Western audiences can still have an affective response to exotic objects, despite the efforts of donors or curators to provide academic context. Meanwhile, several Christian denominations had founded missions in the Melanesian islands by the mid-nineteenth century, among them the Melanesian Mission, a high church Anglican endeavor established in 1847 by Bishop George Selwyn of New Zealand. Poisoned ethnographies have travelled extremely well down the centuries, creeping through imperial networks of medicine, exploration, mission activity, and the media.