In 1880 young Jean Baptiste Mouton left Belgium and his trade as widmaker's apprentice to better his prospects in the Pacific. With his father, a leather worker, he joined the rascally Marquis de Rays's ill-fated colonising venture in New Ireland and stayed to become a wealthy trader and copra planter. Mouton was refreshingly free of the pompous superiority of most Europeans. He was not misled by his own preconceptions but sympathised with native feelings and perceived something of the relationship of customs to the institutions of kinship and authority. Indeed he married a local woman and adopted certain local practices - inevitably incurring the disapproval of his European fellow-settlers.