Collecting in the South Sea: The voyage of Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, 1791–1794.Tiki: Marquesan art and the Krusenstern expeditionResonant Histories: Pacific artefacts and the voyages of HMS Royalist, 1890–1893

Abstract

Ever since the 1760s, European visitors to the South Seas have acquired objects made by Pacific Islanders and taken them away. With motives ranging from philosophical curiosity to avarice, explorers, naval officers, traders, whalers, missionaries, colonial officials, anthropologists, archaeologists, collectors and tourists have traded for, received as gifts, purchased, looted and confiscated objects, removing them from their original contexts of production and use, reclassified them as ‘curiosities’, ‘trifles’, ‘idols’, ‘artefacts’, ‘specimens’ and ‘souvenirs’, and put them up for sale, gifted them to institutions and retained them as family heirlooms. Over time, of course, many of these collected objects have ended up in museums, especially in Europe, which is why we know about them – or, at least, some of them. The practice of cataloguing and writing about collections of Pacific art and artefacts began as soon as the first collections were brought to Europe, but the modern, systematic study of the history of Pacific collections can be said to have begun with the publication in 1978 of Adrienne L. Kaeppler’s ‘Artificial Curiosities’: An exposition of native manufactures collected on the three Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook, R.N. (Honolulu, 1978). This was both a catalogue of a special exhibition, held at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, and a groundbreaking study of the fate and current whereabouts of the objects collected on the three famous Pacific voyages commanded by James Cook in the eighteenth century, providing researchers with a wealth of information and questions to be followed up, and demonstrating the crucial importance of the careful assessment of documentary evidence to the study of historic collections. ‘Artificial Curiosities’ demonstrated what could be done to trace the history of collections and individual objects and how scholars should go about doing it.