MAORI CHIEF'S TOMB.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19328, 15 May 1926, Page 10

MAORI CHIEF'S TOMB.

RETAINED BY PARIS MUSEUM. AUCKLAND'S VAIN EFFORTS. EXCHANGE OFFER REJECTED. EARL JELLICOE'S NEGOTIATIONS. For a number of years the Auckland Institute lias been trying to obtain fiom the ethnographical museum of the Trocadero, Paris, a historic carved Maori tomb, offering in exchange a Napoleonic relic now in the Auckland Museum. It now appears that all the efforts have been useless. The French institution will not part with the treasure. The Maori relic consists of a wooden case, or sarcophagus, which once formed the temporary resting-place of a chief Waata Taronui, pending his final burial in <1 mountain cave. It stood in the entrance of the carved house, Rangitihi, which is one of the most valued Maori objects in the Auckland Museum. The tomb was the property of Sir Walter Buller, the great authority on New Zealand birds. Sir Walter took it with him on his return to England, and deposited it in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. There it attracted (he attention of a French ethnologist, and Sir Walter was persuaded cither to give or to sell it to the French Government. The Auckland Institute, which possesses the house in which it once stood, has made repeated efforts to have the tomb restored to its proper resting-place. When the French Mission visited New Zealand in 1919, the institute invoked the help of General Pau, who made representations in the proper quarter without result. On the departure of Earl Jellicoe from New Zcaand, it tried again. By way of exchange, as on previous occasions, it offered to return to France a tablet of slate taken from a river barge and commemorating the fact that on the craft the body of Napoleon had been conveyed up the Seine on the way from St. Helena to its last home in the Invalided. Earl Jellicoe submitted the request to the British Ambassador in Paris, and recently, through the same channel, the institute received a copy of a long letter in French from the secretary to the French Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. The letter, after reciting the history of the tomb, states it is one of the museum's most treasured possessions, and the authorities are altogether unwilling to part with it. "It seems they are desolated at the idea of losing it, and that it is a great joy to (hem," remarked Mr. H. E. Vaile, president, when the matter came before the council of the institute yesterday. He added that he had gone to the trouble of translating the letter himself. "C'cst impossible," commented Professor A. P. \V. Thomas sadly, and the council passed on to the next business.