William Churchill was consul general at the American embassy in Samoa where he became intrigued by the languages spoken in the South Sea Islands. In his time linguistics was largely concerned with Indo-European and Semitic languages, largely neglecting anything spoken outside of the Western world. This paper marks the beginning of the shift in linguistics away from a Euro-centric view of language to a more universal methodology and likewise documents the Polynesian languages prior to greater Western involvement in the wake of the second World War. Linguists will find this a key work, and also interesting coming as it does from an author outside the normal walks of academia.