Career
To support his research, he made extensive travel in the Pacific, from Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to Easter Island. He also pilfered numerous historical documents from the Spanish archives in Santa Fe, New Mexico:
Large numbers of documents of this period were.. stolen and are now in the so-called “Pinart” collection.
Pinart (Alphonse) was a Frenchman and visited New Mexico and Arizona in the early ‘seventies, at which time this “collection” was made.
Alternatively, he may have purchased the documents from someone at the archives. He recorded vocabularies of the Mission Indians in California, and also documented early rock art in Aruba.
In 1875, he purchased a crystal skull and other ethnographic artifacts from Eugène Boban, which was later donated to the Trocadéro Museum.