Tracking Travelling Taonga
Tracking Travelling Taonga
Rhys Richards Paremata Press 2015 274 pp.
ISBN 0473331993, 9780473331993
Blurb
Very few Maori items with adequate provenances survive from the fifty years between the death of Captain Cook and the start of the colony of New Zealand in 1840. This narrative-review looks at how Pacific maritime history and other sources can be used to track travelling taonga now in museums and other collections around the globe.
The global narrative begins with a chance meeting off North Cape on 11 June 1793 and two items now in Norway. Other taonga from Muriwhenua in 1793 and Waihou (Thames) in 1795 are in Australian and UK museums. A big chapter arises from the American traders to China from 1802 to 1812, whose Maori donations are in Salem, Mass. Another chapter illustrates the large collections made by Russian visitors to Queen Charlotte Sound in 1820 and now in Russia and Estonia.
Two Royal Navy ships seeking spars in 1820-1821 prompted the sale of muskets for preserved human heads, mokomokai, which led to the disastrous musket wars among the northern tribes. (An annex surveys the evidence in early British and Australian newspapers of the growth, and prohibition, of this gruesome trade.) The brief trade in flax from 1828 to 1830 spread the inter-tribal fighting further south including to the South Island.
Other surviving taonga are traced to museum collections in the U.K., the USA, France, Germany and elsewhere, but so many museum items have lost all record of their origins.
Where once so much was collected, little survives today. Over 5,000 Maori items are in museums overseas, but only about seven percent have any supporting evidence of when and where they were collected before 1840. The few that remain today are now all national taonga.
This narrative is the product of extensive travel to most of the relevant collections and has required two further years checking and cross-checking a very wide range of sources.
Priority has been given to finding taonga and to making their whereabouts better known.
Obtaining top quality illustrations in colour was far beyond the resources of this budget venture, but every effort has been made to include over 100 existing illustrations in black and white. Other writers with better resources can now meet the challenge to develop this beginning so that the motifs and styles developed by Maori are better known.
