Surprising Barkcloth

Sometimes, objects can surprise us.  The barkcloth mentioned in the last post, 1886.21.19, was collected in Tahiti by Joseph Banks and donated by him to Christ Church, his old Oxford College.  Our museum database suggested that it was nearly 4 metres long, and just over a metre wide.
Once the barkcloth had been brought to the Conservation Lab for treatment, it was soon obvious that these were the folded measurements.  The piece of barkcloth actually measures 3.35m wide by 3.85m long.

Barkcloth fully unfolded

In our small conservation lab objects this size can pose a problem.  It was impossible to open the barkcloth out fully, and the processes of surface cleaning and reinforcement of tears had to be carried out by keeping the barkcloth rolled at each end, like a scroll, and working on the small unrolled section.  We had to decide how to store the barkcloth, and came to the conclusion that our stores could only accomodate it if it were folded in half and then rolled.  Folding it needed the largest tables in the museum, found in our Researchers area, and it was amazing to see such a large sheet of fine, almost translucent barkcloth and to think about how it would have been made, probably by groups of women working together.  The barkcloth is so finely beaten, however, that there is no evidence of any joins.

Folding the barkcloth

The barkcloth has been rolled for storage around a custom made support sewn from calico and filled with polyester wadding.

The Paste-Beater of Lava

1886.1.1164 Breadfruit pounder

This is Forster 28, 1886.1.1164, described in the Catalogue of Curiosities as 'the paste-beater of lava'.  Made of basalt, this heavy pounder, or penu, was used to grind cooked breadfruit into a paste.   Breadfruit is the large starchy fruit from a type of mulberry tree.  The starchy fruit, when baked, is said to taste like fresh bread or potato.

Breadfruit, attributed to Sydney Parkinson, from the National Library of Australia

Forster writes that 'we found the Tahitian method of dressing breadfruit and other victuals, with heated stones under ground, infinitely superior to our usual way of boiling them; in the former all the juices remained, and were concentrated by the heat; but in the latter, the fruit imbibed many watery particles, and lost a great deal of its fine flavour and mealiness.'

Cooked breadfruit could be ground to a paste with the penu, in a large wooden trough.  This produced popoi, a sweetish paste.  Sometimes other fruit, such as coconut, was added, to make poe, a 'custard'.

Because breadfruits ripened only at certain times of the year, a method was developed to store the fruit.  Joseph Banks described the process of making fermented breadfruit paste, mahi, in 'The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768-1771'

'As I have mentioned sour paste, I will proceed to describe what it is.  Bread-fruit, by what I can find, remains in season during only nine or ten of their thirteen months, so that a reserve of food must be made…the fruit is gathered when just upon the pint of ripening, and laid in heaps, where it undergoes a fermentation, and becomes disagreeably sweet.  The core is then taken out, which is easily done…and the rest of the fruit thrown into a hole dug for the purpose, generally in their houses.  The sides and bottom of this hole are neatly lined with grass, the whole is covered with leaves, and heavy stones laid upon them.  Here it undergoes a second fermentation and becomes sourish, in which condition it will keep, as they tell me, many months.  Custom has, I suppose, made this agreeable to their palates, though we disliked it extremely; we seldom saw them make a meal without some of it in some shape or form.'

A Brass Patu

1932.86.1 front

 

 

1932.86.1 back

Joseph Banks, the naturalist on Cook's first voyage, had forty brass replicas of Maori patu onewa made to take with him on the second voyage.  They were made in 1772 in Eleanor Gyles's brass foundry at No.9, Shoe Lane, Fleet Street, at a cost of nine shillings and sixpence each, and engraved with Bank's coat of arms by Thomas Orpin, at his shop opposite Northumberland Court, in the Strand, London, at a cost of one shilling each. 

At least two of the patu onewa collected by Banks on the first voyage were used as patterns for the brass replicas, being used to make a two part mould from sand and clay, which would have been destroyed in the casting process.  The marks in the surface of the stone cleaver can be seen replicated in the surface of one of the brass versions in the Pitt Rivers collection.

Banks withdrew from the second voyage after disagreements with the Admiralty over additional cabin accommodation on the Resolution - his place as naturalist on the voyage was taken by the Forsters.  Some or all of the brass patus were later given to Charles Clerke to take on the third voyage in the Discovery.  It has been suggested that the patus were meant to serve as a form of permanent visiting card, recording for posterity Bank's activities and connections.

The brass patus were sighted in various places in the next few years - in 1787, on the Northwest Coast of America in Hecate Straits, in 1788 Nootka sound, and in 1801 and 1816 in New Zealand.  Today the whereabouts of six are known - two in the Pitt Rivers, one in the British Museum, one in the Museum of London, one in the Tamatslikt Cultural Institute of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (which was said to have been excavated from a grave on the shore of the Columbia River in Oregon, and 'repatriated' to the Umatilla Nation in 2005) and one in a private collection.

One of the Pitt Rivers brass patus can be seen in the temporary exhibition 'Made for Trade' until the 27th January 2013.

See Coote, Jeremy, 2008: Joseph Banks’s Forty Brass Patus in the Journal of Museum Ethnography No 20 (March) pp 49-68.