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Description

Harpoon head with thick line attached made from sinew wrapped with nettle fibre cord. The harpoon head is composed of a two prongs of bone bound together with the aforementioned line and some bark. The head is lacking an iron point which was present when it was registered as a deposit in 1912. The are traces of spruce gum or some such material on the head.; Good.

Context

The catalogue card notes the harpoon is certainly from Nootka Sound, where the whaling industry was only carried out in British Columbia by certain hereditary chiefs. Very similar whaling equipment is Makah. 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 1912.28; The harpoon head and line would have had a float, made of seal skin to slow the whale down, and was thrust into the whale using a stout yew lance. The whales were hunted in March through the summer months, the species being the Californian gray whale and the humpback. Whaling was carried out by chiefs and entailed a considerable amount of ritual purification to ensure success, such as bathing, praying and avoiding pollution. The hunting trips were undertaken with canoes and ritually purified crews. Once the whale was speared other canoes would also attach lines until the whale finally weakened and was killed. The whale was towed back to the village, with its mouth tied closed to ensure buoyancy, where it was cut up and distributed throughout the population.; Collected in ?1778.
Literature: See 'Artificial Curiosities' (1978), A. Kaeppler, p.275. Evidence: Pennant collection of Cook voyage objects from various sources. 3rd voyage. Kaeppler states that the provenance is uncertain and gives the general area as Northwest Coast of America/Northeast Coast of Asia. Also see the 'Catalogue of the Northwest Coast Collection: Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology' (1996), Dr Gillian Crowther. (J.Tanner, May 1998). cf. Harpoon point in James Cook: Gifts and Treasures from the South Seas (1998), edited by Brigitta Hauser-Schublin and Gundolf Krger, p. 340, fig. 319. (J. Tanner; February 1999). See 'From Pacific Shores: Eighteenth-century Ethnographic Collections at Cambridge - The Voyages of Cook, Vancouver and the First Fleet' (J. Tanner, 1999:80). See 'Artificial Curiosities from the Northwest Coast of America (J.C.H. King, 1981: cf. Monochrome Plate 83; 119).
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).Exhibited in the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby in 'Smoking Coasts and Ice-bound Seas, Cook's Voyage to the Arctic' Feb- November 2008'