Artefacts of Encounter: the Cook-Voyage Collections in Cambridge

Artefacts of Encounter: the Cook-Voyage Collections in Cambridge

Article for a special issue of the

Journal of the History of Collections

edited by

Jeremy Coote

Amiria J.M. Salmond

June 2011

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ABSTRACT

The University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (MAA) houses more than 250 objects that have been authoritatively traced to Cook’s Pacific expeditions, including the largest documented collection of first-voyage artefacts anywhere in the world. The Museum also holds many objects known to have been acquired during the second and third voyages, a number of which once formed part of the Leverian Museum. Some are linked to specific encounters between local peoples and members of Cook’s crews, described in detail in voyage accounts. The collections have been the focus of considerable scholarly attention over the past four decades, and firm provenances have been established for component assemblages and specific objects. At the same time, interest in these collections on the part of Pacific peoples, and the affordances of new information technologies, suggest novel ways in which our understanding of these singular artefacts of encounter might in future be enhanced.

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Collections of artefacts assembled during eighteenth-century voyages of exploration in the Pacific are important yet under-utilised sources of primary historical and ethnographic evidence. Whereas much scholarly energy has been devoted to the study of textual and pictorial records from the voyages, the objects actually exchanged in the course of transactions between the European explorers and islanders have largely resisted such close analytic attention. Although many have written about early modern collecting, and the role such assemblages played in European intellectual life, few have subjected the artefacts that constitute these collections to the kind of scrutiny and critical analysis routinely employed when dealing with archival sources. This is not to say that artefacts have not been a focus of study; the Cook voyages in particular have generated a plethora of writing about the several thousand natural and artificial curiosities gathered in the Pacific by the explorer and his crews. The primary focus of this work has tended, however, to be either on establishing authoritative provenances for particular objects by linking them to documentary and pictorial sources, or on describing how these artefacts, and the assemblages of which they are part, fit into larger discussions about Enlightenment collecting and the development of scientific thought. What is often elided is the artefact itself; both as an object of (rather than one merely surrounded by) evidence, and as an instantiation of relationships forged on Pacific beaches that continue to unfold today.

Yet close examination of the fabric and construction of such artefacts, together with analyses of the kinds of objects that were collected in different places at different times, has the potential to shed new light on the nature of the earliest exchanges between local peoples and Europeans, and on the far-reaching consequences of these encounters in theatres of empire and colonisation. The research presented here offers some examples of how close physical and sensory engagement with items collected on Cook’s voyages, combined with systematic overviews of particular collections, can expose new strands of understanding about these seminal histories – insights that are impossible to reach through the study of textual and graphic sources alone.

The methods involved in treating such objects as evidence are of course not new, dating back at least as far as the emergence of museums as ‘storehouses of science’, laboratories devoted to the cultivation and dissemination of artefact-based knowledge.[1] The analytic affordances of such techniques are greatly extended, however, by the advent of new theoretical perspectives as well as by information technologies that allow data about specific collections to be organized, searched and shared more widely and more quickly than ever before. In the course of researching this paper, for example, copies of published articles and archival material were located on the internet, often through online databases, then downloaded or ordered via email, and digital images were sent to expert authorities and discussed electronically. Such technologies cannot replace the need to ‘be in touch with’ the objects themselves – physical contact is crucial to forming many of the conclusions advanced here – but they open possibilities for comparison and cross-referencing that were simply not available to most scholars in the past, due to the tyranny of distance and the expense associated with travelling to all the relevant museum collections and ordering photographic records of a large range of material.

With particular reference to Cook collections, one of the problems that has inhibited such research, concentrating it in the hands of just a few, well-resourced, scholars, is the vast volume of data relating to the voyages in the form of log books, crew lists, journals, paintings, engravings, artefact collections and almost innumerable publications, access to which is required in order to participate with authority in scholarly discussions of these histories. Gradually, however, and with gathering momentum as more and more archives, publishers and museums digitize their collections, scholarship in this and other fields is becoming increasingly disembedded from traditional centres of intellectual power, opening up to a wider, more varied, and more geographically dispersed group of researchers.

A case in point is the participation of contemporary Pacific scholars and artists, the descendants of Cook’s Islander interlocutors, in research projects and associated initiatives related to the voyages. In Britain, for example, a new standard of practice has emerged in recent years whereby members of the cultural groups on which such projects are focused are routinely invited to collaborate with academics and curators, often from an early stage of planning and research. Four major exhibitions incorporating Cook voyage artefacts, mounted between 2006 and 2010, adopted this modus operandi, engaging with Europe- and Pacific-based groups of mainly Polynesian origin, in developing the structure of their displays and enhancing the intellectual and cultural reach of their work.[2] While each relied extensively (and necessarily) on face-to-face contact, these scholarly endeavours also capitalized on possibilities for networking and international communication opened up by new information technologies. Relationships were forged with artists and communities via email, weblogs and websites were launched, and artworks were developed that fed the results of first-hand contact with artefacts in museum collections into digital video, photography, MP3 formats and digitally-manipulated graphic imagery. Each project also sought to disseminate its findings and outputs to even broader audiences by publicizing the work as widely as possible. In this activity, European institutions are adopting practices pioneered in museums in Canada, New Zealand, and the US, where indigenous groups have been involved in exhibiting their cultures for several decades. In New Zealand, for example, groups such as Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, from the small settlement of Uawa (named Tolaga Bay by Cook when he first visited in 1769), began working with local and national museums in the 1990s with a view to physically repatriating important taonga or treasured ancestral artefacts to their tribal area.[3]Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti went on to develop a sophisticated ‘digital repatriation’ project in collaboration with the national museum, resulting in an interactive CD containing images of taonga from their region, and are currently expand the scope of their research to encompass international collections, with a focus on museums holding material from their area collected on the Cook voyages. Visits have been made to collections in the UK, Austria, Italy and Germany, and a web-based database is being built as a repository for digital taonga (images, sound files, video and text) relating to the voyages and to the wooden, stone, paper and textile taonga held in European museums.[4]

Working with contemporary Polynesian peoples who have interests in Cook collections reveals the present-day importance of these artefacts of encounter for members of the communities for whom they are ancestral treasures. Whilst the assertion of such ties is often construed politically, for example in debates about cultural property and repatriation, my experiences as a curator responsible for three important Cook voyage collections in Cambridge led me to see these connections rather differently. In Pasifika Styles, an exhibition co-curated in 2006 with Rosanna Raymond, a New Zealand-Samoan artist and writer, for instance, a number of the contemporary artworks displayed were created in response to artefacts in the Museum’s collections, including those acquired on Cook’s voyages. Whilst some of these new artworks commented on issues of ownership and expropriation, others emphasized the importance of relationships established through early exchanges involving treasured ancestral objects. Raymond herself has said that she is ‘sure her Pacific ancestors had given their taonga (treasured artefacts) to foreign collectors because they knew their descendants would, in time, join them overseas’.[5] Speaking of her own museum-based practice as an independent curator, artist and scholar she notes: ‘I feel a strong bond to my ancestors when I meet “artefacts”. It is like a direct line opens up with my cultural heritage, the past becomes present’.[6] Other artists responded more specifically to artefacts linked to Cook’s voyages. On the label for George Nuku’s Perspex Patoo Patoo Pasifika (2006), for example (now in the Museum’s permanent collection), the artist noted:

After returning with Captain Cook from the Pacific in 1771, the naturalist Joseph Banks commissioned a set of bronze patu (hand clubs) bearing his coat-of-arms, cast from a Māoripatu onewa. His purpose was to take them on Cook’s second voyage to use to impress the locals. This work is an echo of those earlier works. By bringing this patu to England, I am returning the favour.[7]

For these artists, as for other Pacific people, ‘Cook artefacts’ are neither simply ‘evidence for recent “Stone Age” technologies which no longer exist’,[8] nor exotic curiosities marshalled in the cause of Enlightenment Science. More than objets d’art or relics of an age of cultural purity, prior to the arrival of Europeans, they are taonga that were used to bring peoples together, and which continue to do so in the present. The significance of this for curators is increasingly clear; cultural descendants of those who traded gifts with Cook and his men regard the relationships thus established as still active, and many, including Toi Hauiti, Raymond and Nuku, are actively cultivating ties with the museums in which these gifts are now held. For scholars of Cook’s collecting, the implications of recognising these artefacts as taonga are less self-evident, but, I will argue, suggest ways of approaching artefacts of encounter that may yield new insights into what these peoples made of one another the very first few times they met, as well as the repercussions of these early exchanges for successive generations into the present.

Cook Collections in Cambridge

The Cook voyage material at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) includes the Sandwich collection – the largest well-documented assemblage of artefacts acquired on Cook’s first Pacific voyage – as well as two other collectionscontaining items that have been authoritatively traced to Cook’s second and third expeditions. The explorer in fact had kinship ties to Cambridge, which make it somehow appropriate that one of the most extensive collections of material gathered on his journeys now resides within the University. His youngest son Hugh was enrolled as a student at Christ’s College, just around the corner from the Museum, but died in 1793 of scarlet fever during his first term, aged just seventeen. Hugh was buried in the church of St. Andrew the Great, which still stands opposite the College. One month later his elder brother James drowned and was also interred there. Their mother Elizabeth Cook, wife of the famous explorer, joined them under the central aisle upon her own death in 1835. The routes by which the artefacts came to Cambridge were rather more circuitous, as explored in detail below.

Over the past four decades, the Cambridge Cook collections have been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. Celebrations of the bicentenary of the voyages and commemorations of Cook’s 1779 death in Hawaii inspired a series of international exhibitions and associated publications that prompted research and focused critical attention upon the expeditions and their aftermath, including the fate of artefacts collected on the voyages.[9] Archaeologist Wilfred Shawcross was among the first to draw international attention to the Cambridge material, through a 1970 article in the Journal of the Polynesian Society (JPS) on Māori artefacts said to have been collected on the voyage of the Endeavour.[10] Adrienne Kaeppler’s meticulous research in preparation for the 1978 exhibition Artificial Curiosities at the Bishop Museum, Hawaii, established authoritative Cook provenances for many objects in Cambridge, as elsewhere, few of which have been subsequently queried.[11] Her work on the Cambridge material, conducted collaboratively with Peter Gathercole (then MAA’s Curator) involved combing museum records and other archival and published material for documentary evidence of Cook connections, which in many cases allowed certain artefacts to be traced to specific voyages and even (in a small number of cases) precise locations. Some of their findings were brought together in the late 1990s by Julia Tanner, whose 1999 publication From Pacific Shores remains a primary reference point on the Museum’s eighteenth-century collections.[12]

Gathercole’s own essays provide invaluable background information on the Cambridge Cook material, whilst homing in on specific encounters and their artefacts, like the Māori putatara (shell trumpet) MAA1925.374, which he convincingly argued was acquired by the Forsters at Queen Charlotte Sound in the South Island of New Zealand during a trading session on 4 June 1773.[13] In later articles Gathercole similarly deployed an intimate knowledge of the fabric and construction of individual objects, weaving this together with strands drawn from documentary and artistic material—even poetry—to reconstruct and question the significance of encounters between Europeans, local people and their artefacts as seminal moments in the development of enduring and complex relationships.[14] Because the publications in which some of his work appeared were relatively obscure, Gathercole’s research can be difficult to access—particularly from the Pacific—and has not always received the attention it deserves. David Simmons’ 1981 discussion of the same Māori shell trumpet,[15] for example, overlooked evidence that Gathercole presented in his 1976 article, resulting in a summary refutation of Simmons’ argument by Kaeppler in a spirited exchange played out in the pages of the JPS.[16] The maintenance of such rigorous scholarly standards has provided a firm foundation on which current and future researchers can build. Yet it was Gathercole’s use of artefacts as primary historical and ethnographic evidence, and his emphasis on the relationships established through those early encounters that have anticipated the direction of theoretical developments in the field, setting innovative (and interdisciplinary) methodological precedents, and posing questions that continue to tantalize Cook scholars today.

Together, the Cambridge Cook voyage collections comprise over 250 objects derived from three main sources. The first material to arrive in the Museum was a group of items once belonging to the English antiquary and zoologist Thomas Pennant (1726-1798)—an associate of Cook, Banks, Sir Ashton Lever and Johann Reinhold Forster, among others—which were deposited in 1912-13 by Rudolph Feilding, 9th Earl of Denbigh and his wife.[17] Feilding had inherited the collection from his father, whose first wife Louisa was a great-granddaughter of the famous naturalist, and Pennant was said to have received many of the items as personal gifts from Joseph Banks. The second collection consists of artefacts acquired over a period of years from the Holdsworth family of Widdicombe House near Stokenham, Devon, many of which once graced the halls of the Leverian Museum. The third ‘Cook collection’ at Cambridge, deposited in 1914 and 1924 by the Fellows of Trinity College, includes many articles gifted in the late eighteenth century by a former Trinity student of the College, John Montagu (1718-1792), 4th Earl of Sandwich. Sandwich was Cook’s patron and First Lord of the Admiralty during much of the period covered by the voyages.[18] In these roles he became the recipient of many items officially collected in the Pacific by the crew of the Endeavour including much of Cook’s own first voyage collection, a large group of which Sandwich passed on to his alma mater, whilst others went to the British Museum. Two lists itemizing his original gift to Trinity of 1771 survive in the College Library and have enabled many of the objects sent to Cambridge, now held at MAA, to be provenanced to the Endeavour voyage. Further material from Sandwich’s collection was gifted to the Museum by a descendent in 1922.