The expedition was led and financed by Major William Cooke Daniels (1870-1918), a wealthy American retailer who met the British anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligmann (1873-1940) by chance on a fishing trip in England .
Seligmann had taken part in the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait and had visited what was then British New Guinea .
The photographs , which include inscriptions in pencil , possibly by Seligmann, were taken by photographer Arthur Henry Dunning (1884-l959), are a record of the fast vanishing traditional culture.
Daniels and his yacht, the Kori, arrived in Port Moresby on 23 May. Over the next five months, the team visited Hula and the Mekeo and Rigo districts in what is now Central Province, and islands in Milne Bay including Samarai, Tubetube, Muyua, Gawa, Kwaiawata, Iwa, and the Trobriand Islands. They also visited Dogura in Bartle Bay, and Wagawaga, a village on the coast of Milne Bay.
In Port Moresby, Dunning, assisted by the British Resident Magistrate Francis Rockman Barton, recorded three wax cyclinders of lagatoi songs.
Lagatoi are the double-hulled sailing canoes used in the hiri, the annual trading expedition that Motu / Koita people took to the Papuan Gulf to trade their clay pots for sago; the hiri is still celebrated today and remains an important symbol for the Motu / Koita people.
(Photos, Expedition,Guinea).