MUSEUM OF NATURE

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33579, 6 July 1974, Page 11

MUSEUM OF NATURE

Cook relic returns

/Contributed by the Canterbury Museum) Thanks largely to a moa which died 5000 years ago in a shallow lake on what is now the Pyramid Valley farm of Messrs R. and M. Hodgen, near Waikari, the museum has received its first undoubted Maori artefact to have been collected by Cook on his first voyage, 205 years ago.

The illustration, from the engraving after the original painting by Cook’s artist, Sidney Parkinson, shows what we believe to be this particular example of a class which Cook described as the most highly prized pendant-ornament of the Maori chiefs of the time, outrating the more common hei tiki "of green talc” as Cook described "greenstone.” Known to the Maori as rei puta (the tusk which sticks out) it was the glistening ivory tooth of the sperm whale, modified with some art to convey a reptilian face on the point and conveying permanently the aggressiveness of the wearer’s tongue thrust out as still in the war haka of today. A particular marvel was the neck cord, where the inner core of twisted flax-fibre in its outer casing of finely-braided fibre, and secured at the back of the wearer’s neck by a toggle-catch of bone, reminds us of this generally absent fitting of most breast-ornaments as displayed in museums today. Permanent loan Originally lent to the museum’s Cook Bicentenary Exhibition of Polynesian Art which circulated through 13 New Zealand centres from 1969 to 1972, the relic was recalled by the Hancock Museum of Natural History, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to be the subject of 18 months negotiation before the writer was able to bring it back on permanent loan during his visit to Britain in March last Our position in the negotiations was greatly aided by the Hodgen offer of one of the matchless moa skeletons we have received from their farm. The rei puta is now open for public viewing in the reconstituted Cook bicentenary display in the Museum’s Pacific Hall. The sperm-whale tooth in New Zealand appears at the time of the arrival of the moa-hunter Maoris about 1000 years ago. In the early moa-hunter phase, as demonstrated by our Wairau Bar display, the tooth was unmodified and attached as the central pendant of a necklace of tubular beads —themselves often of tooth ivory—as well as moa-bone, fossil shell, hard limestone and serpentine. Alternatively, necklaces of moa-bone or tooth ivory were shaped to represent teeth of the killerwhale. In the late moa-hunter or transitional phases the sperm-whale tusk, in single or paired versions, W as fret-carved into

curiously powerful designs known by Dr Skinner’s term of “chevroned” amulets.

During the classic Maori phase as recorded by Cook in the late eighteenth century the sperm-whale tooth now appeared, without necklace beads, as the rei puta of our article.

The root portion has been shaved thin for ease

in attaching the neck cord, and to provide the contrast of the embellishment of the fully rounded point. Our rei puta illustrates the standardised decoration, but examples found in Horowhenua, Birdling’s Flat and Taieri and Clutha river-mouths, display a presumably earlier feature of a reliefcarved reptile. —R.S.D.