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Description

Quiver of ?seal skin sewn with sinew. The base of the quiver has been added from a different piece of skin. There is a small thong of leather near the top of the quiver. There are several patches of bare skin.; Good.

Context

Adrienne Kaeppler in Artificial Curiosities (1978, Bishop Museum Press: Honolulu, Hawaii) notes that the quiver although attributed to the Northwest Coast was probably collected on Cook' s 1st or 2nd voyage and gives the provenance as Tierra del Fuego, page 279. The original European tribal names and, where possible, current tribal names have both been given in separate GLT fields. Quiver had old number when it was accessioned as a deposit, D 1912.19; Collected in ?1769.
Literature: See Artificial Curiosities (1978), A. Kaeppler, p. 279. Kaeppler designates this quiver as from Tierra del Fuego, South America. 1st or 2nd voyage. Also see the 'Catalogue of the Northwest Coast Collection: Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology' (1996), Dr Gillian Crowther. Also see British Library Add. Ms. 23, 920.21 [Fig.617]. (J.Tanner, May 1998). See 'From Pacific Shores: Eighteenth-century Ethnographic Collections at Cambridge - The Voyages of Cook, Vancouver and the First Fleet' (J. Tanner, 1999:86).
Cook Collection: Captain James Cook undertook three world voyages around the globe from 1768 - 1779. The stated purpose of the first voyage (1768-1771) on the HMS Endeavour was to send a Royal Society team to observe the transit of the planet Venus from the vantage point of newly discovered Tahiti. However, the primary governmental motivation behind the first expedition was to establish the existence of ' Terra Australis Incognita' or the ' Great Southern Continent' , which was believed to exist in order to balance the great northern land mass. Cook set sail from Plymouth on Friday 26th August 1768 and headed to South America, round Cape Horn and westwards to carry out the experiment in Tahiti, and then went on to circumnavigate the globe in pursuit of the presumed continent. The purpose of the second voyage (1772-1775) on the HMS Resolution and the HMS Adventure was to extend the search for the ' southern continent' . They sailed from Plymouth on 27 June 1772 and headed directly south past Cape Town and then set out on an eastward course of circumnavigation, crossing the Antartic Circle several times en route in an effort to seek the imagined continent. The third voyage (1776-1780) on the HMS Resolution and the HMS Discovery, was concerned with the search for a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. They sailed from Plymouth on 13th July 1772, heading first for the Society Islands from whence they set course to search for the Northwest Passage. However, Cook was killed in Hawaii in 1779 and his command was taken up by Charles Clerke.
More than 2000 extant pieces can be traced from Cook' s voyages (Kaeppler:1978), of which UCMAA has 215 identified objects. The majority of the material at UCMAA was collected from the Pacific, but also includes objects from the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America, the Northeast Coast of Asia and Tierra del Fuego in South America. Furthermore, all the three voyages are represented by objects in UCMAA' s collection.
(J. Tanner, 1999).