This chapter investigates the production of varied European knowledges about the Indigenous inhabitants of the insular Pacific from the early sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. I address liaisons of two entwined cognitive modes glossed as ‘facts’ and ‘systems’ – terms borrowed from the French comparative anatomist Cuvier, who condemned ‘systems’ conceived ‘in the study’ while vaunting ‘the more solid edifice of facts and induction’.1 ‘Facts’ denotes ‘seaborne ethnography’:2 written, drawn, or toponymic outcomes of fleeting encounters with Pacific Islanders by European voyagers unfamiliar with their languages, practices, or ideas. ‘Systems’ refers to both the deductive appropriations of such information by savants in Europe from the 1740s and the inductive reflections of travelling naturalists after 1770. My scientific focus is partly ‘geographic’, identifying cartographic residues of encounters in place. However, it is mainly ‘anthropological’, surveying the deployment of seaborne ethnography in diverse, shifting explanations for human difference proposed in the ‘science of man’.