Wooden club with perforated grip.

Collection type: Object
Description: Wooden club with perforated grip.
Long description: Wooden hand-weapon, patu, with a perforation for a strap near the grip. [JU 10/08/2012]
Geographical reference: New Zealand
Oceania > Australia and New Zealand > New Zealand
Cultural groups: Māori
Person: Field collector Joseph Banks; PRM source Christ Church, University of Oxford; PRM source Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Date / Period: Date made: Before 03/1770
Date collected: Between October 1769 and March 1770
Acquisition information: Loaned: 1886 Found unentered: 04/1978
Materials and processes: Material Wood Plant, Process Perforated, Process Carved
Dimensions: Length 365 mm, Width 110 mm
Object numbers: Accession number: 1887.1.388
Research and responses: In 1978, David Simmons recorded the holdings of Māori material in a number of museums in Europe and North America including, in May 1978, the Pitt Rivers Museum. (For copies of his notes and related correspondence, see RDF: Researchers: Simmons.) In 1996, Simmons put together the ‘draft catalogues’ he had prepared, depositing copies in, at least, the National Library of New Zealand / Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa and the British Museum. The ‘draft catalogue’ of the Māori material in the PRM, which includes photocopies of some of the relevant catalogue index cards and annotations supplied by PRM assistant curator Lynne Williamson in 1982, was included in ‘Draft Catalogues of Maori Material in English Museums II. Prepared by David Simmons from records made in 1978… Compiled in Auckland in 1996’. It is now widely accepted that Simmons’s assertions about the provenance and history of individual Māori objects are not to be trusted without further evidence and/or documentation. Nevertheless, as the entries in this document have been referred in the literature, in July 2016 I obtained from the British Museum scans of the pages devoted to the PRM’s collections (numbered by hand as pages 43 to 62), printing out a copy for the RDF. For the entry for this object, see page 54 (page 10 of Simmons's original list). [JC 28 7 2016]
Associated publications: For an account of the collection of which this is a part, see 'An Interim Report on a Previously Unknown Collection from Cook's First Voyage: The Christ Church Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford', by Jeremy Coote, in Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (2004), pp. 111-21. This item is listed on page 116. (Copy of article in RDF: Biographies: Banks.) [JC 8 4 2004] Listed on page 23 and illustrated in colour as Figure 11 on page 13 of Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection—Pacific Artefacts Given by Joseph Banks to Christ Church, Oxford after the First Voyage, by Jeremy Coote (Whitby: Captain Cook Memorial Museum, 2004). (Copies of exhibition leaflets, poster, catalogue, etc. in RDF: Biographies: Banks.) [JC 14 4 2004; JC 25 6 2004] See also 'Forgotten Treasures from Cook's First Voyage', by Jeremy Coote and Sophie Forgan, in Cook's Log, Vol. XXVII, no. 2 (April 2004), pp. 4-6. (Copy in RDF: Biographies: Banks.) [JC 25 6 2004] See also 'Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection', by Jeremy Coote, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 49 (July 2004), pp. 6-7. (Copy in RDF: Biographies: Banks.) [JC 1 9 2004] See also 'Uncovered: "Lost" Treasures from the South Seas', by Julie Webb, in Limited Edition [supplement to the Oxford Times], number 215 (December 2004), pp. 31-33. This object can be seen in its storage drawer in the colour illustration on page 31. (Copy in RDF: Biographies: Banks.) [JC 15 12 2004] Listed as catalogue number 236 and illustrated in colour on page 183 of James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, by Adrienne l. Kaeppler et al. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009): with the caption '236-240 Five clubs, patu paraoa, patu, kotiate, wahaika, patu onewa | New Zealand, by March 1770 | Whalebone 47.8x9.4 cm; wood, 36.5 x 11 cm; wood 38 x 13 cm; wood, 44 x 11 cm, basalt, 34.3 x 10 cm | Christ Church, Oxford (courtesy of Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1887.1.387; 1887.1.388; 1887.1.389; 1887.1.393; 1887.1.714) | These five hand-weapons - made for use in close combat - from part of the collection given by Joseph Banks to Christ Church, after the first voyage. The variety in material and form may be seen as illustrating Bank's desire to send a 'structured' collection of types of Maori object to his old Oxford college. J[eremy].C[oote]' [FB 08/04/2013] For an account of the history of the collection of which this is part, see 'The Cook-Voyage Collections at Oxford, 1772–1775', by Jeremy Coote, in Jeremy Coote (ed.), Cook-Voyage Collections of 'Artificial Curiosities' in Britain and Ireland, 1771–2015 (MEG Occasional Paper No. 5), Oxford: Museum Ethnographers Group (2015), pp. 74–122. (Copy in RDF: Researchers: Jeremy Coote (Cook-Voyage Collections).) [JC 9 6 2016] Referred to (with 1887.1.389 and 1887.1.381) on page 102 of Tracking Travelling Taonga: A Narrative Review of How Maori Items Got to London from 1798, to Salem in 1802, 1807 and 1812, and Elsewhere up to 1840, by Rhys Richards (Paremata: Paremata Press, 2015): ‘In the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford is item coll.xi.67, a patu rakau or wooden club [1887.1.388], ‘probably given to Dr Lee by Hongi Hika’, in 1820, and also a kotiate club [1887.1.389] and a baler [1887.1.381]. Professor Samuel Lee of Cambridge University worked with the chiefs Honi and Waikato in 1820 to create a written form of the Maori language in which to publish the first text in Maori. It would be interesting to test the woods of these items as they may have been carved by Hongi while he was living in England, [sic; insert ‘or’?] while living in Parramatta [in Australia].’ NB Richards does not provide any references for this wholly inaccurate and misleading account of the history of 1887.1.388, 1887.1.389, and 1887.1.381, though his source is presumably Volume 2 of Draft Catalogues of Maori Material in English Museums Prepared by David Simmons from Records Made in 1978 (unpublished typescript dated 1996 [?]). It is now known, however, that these objects were never in the possession of a ‘Dr Lee’. Rather, as the early documentation makes clear, they were part of the collection of ‘Dr Lee’s Trustees’ (that is, The Dean, Chapter and Students of Christ Church) that was transferred on loan to the University Museum in 1860 and thence to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1886. It is also now known that they are part of a collection of objects from Tahiti and New Zealand acquired on Cook’s first voyage on the Endeavour in 17681771 and given to Christ Church by Joseph Banks before 16 January 1773. Note also that ‘coll.xi.67’ is not an accession number, but a reference to the page of the accession register in which these objects are recorded. [JC 12 5 2017]

Search terms: Weapon, Club