The first ever vocabulary list of Gilbertese was published by the French "Revue coloniale" (1847) by an auxiliary surgeon on corvette "Le Rhin" in 1845. His warship took on board a drift Gilbertese of Kuria, that they found near Tabiteuea. However, it wasn't until Hiram Bingham II took up missionary work on Abaiang in the 1860s that the language began to take on the written form known nowadays. For example, Bingham was the first to translate the Bible into Gilbertese, and wrote several hymn books, a dictionary (1908, posthumous) and commentaries in the language of the Gilbert Islands. Alphonse Colomb, a French priest in Tahiti wrote in 1888, "Vocabulaire arorai (îles Gilbert) précédé de notes grammaticales d'après un manuscrit du P. Latium Levêque et le travail de Hale sur la langue Tarawa / par le P. A. C.". Father Levêque named the Gilbertese "Arorai" (from Arorae) when Horatio Hale called them "Tarawa". This work was also based on the first known description of Gilbertese in English, published in 1846, in the volume "Ethnology and Philology" of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, compiled by Horatio Hale.