Cook-Voyage Collections

Cook-Voyage Collections
at the Pitt Rivers Museum

History

Timeline

In this timeline we present the most important events in the history of the Banks and Forster collections, now housed at the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum. The timeline includes information on the donations, exhibitions, loans, publications, and new discoveries.

Jeremy Coote and Jeremy Uden (November 2013)

Year/Years	Month/Months	Day/Days	Event
1760	December	16	Joseph Banks matriculates as a student at Christ Church, Oxford. He spends much of his time botanizing with, amongst others, his friend and fellow student John Parsons. He keeps rooms at Christ Church until the late summer of 1765 when he leaves without taking a degree.
1768	August	25	The Endeavour (under the command of James Cook) sets sail from Plymouth on a voyage of discovery to the South Seas. On board is Joseph Banks, accompanied—at his own expense—by Dr Daniel Solander (companion and fellow scientist), Herman Dietrich Spöring (secretary), Sydney Parkinson (botanical and natural history draughtsman), Alexander Buchan (landscape and figure artist), as well as Peter Briscoe, James Roberts, Thomas Richmond, and George Dorlton (assistants).
1771	July	13	The Endeavour anchors in the Downs after its three-year circumnavigation. Banks and Solander bring back an estimated 30,000 plant specimens and 1,000 zoological specimens, as well as sketches, drawings, and watercolours of the specimens and of the peoples and places visited. They also bring back an unknown number of 'artificial curiosities', perhaps 200 or 300.
1771	November	21	Joseph Banks is given an honorary degree by the University of Oxford (as is Daniel Solander).
1771/72			Sometime between July 1771 and 16 January 1773, Banks sends to Christ Church a small collection of 'artificial curiosities' from Tahiti and New Zealand. (In fact, he probably sent them to his friend John Parsons, who in 1767 had been appointed Lee's Reader at Christ Church and University Lecturer in Anatomy. Parsons had responsibility for the college's Anatomy School where, presumably, the collection was housed. No records for the collection appear to have survived at Christ Church.)
1772	June	12	Johann Reinhold Forster is appointed 'at the King's pleasure', along with his son, naturalist to the expedition we now refer to as Cook's second voyage.
1773	January	16	Thomas Falconer (1738–92), classical scholar and Recorder of Chester, writes to Banks: 'I was highly entertained at Oxford with a sight of some curiosities you sent from Otaheita & new Zealand'. This is the only record of the existence of the collection until its 'rediscovery' by Jeremy Coote in 2002.
1773			John Hawkesworth's An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, and Successively Performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret, and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the Endeavour is first published in London in three volumes.
1775	November	22	Johann Reinhold Forster is awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law by the University of Oxford.
1776	January		Johann Reinhold and George Forster send to Oxford copies of their publications and some 220 curiosities they had collected on Cook's second voyage, along with a manuscript 'Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford'. The 'Catalogue' is not made use of by any cataloguer or scholar until it is 'rediscovered' by Adrienne Kaeppler in 1969.
1776	February	1	Johann Reinhold and George Forster write to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, referring to the books and objects they sent to Oxford 'some days ago'.
1776	March	8	The Forsters' letter is read out at the meeting of Convocation (University of Oxford).
1777	October	11	Danish scientist Thomas Bugge visits the Ashmolean Museum and sees at least some of the Forster collection on display in the Natural History School. He notes in his Journal: 'There are costumes and other curiosities from the South as well as from Otaheite. A man dressed for war, and another figure in mourning. They correspond exactly to the drawings found in Cook's voyages'.
1800s			The Forster collection is apparently removed from display at the Ashmolean.
1836			Some of the objects in the Forster collection are listed in the Ashmolean's publication: A Catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum Descriptive of the Zoological Specimens, Antiquities, Coins, and Miscellaneous Curiosities, Oxford.
1860			Twenty of the objects in the Banks collection are transferred on loan from Christ Church to the newly founded University Museum, but without documentation.
Mid-1860s			Part of the Forster collection is now apparently on display 'on the staircase leading to the basement' at the Ashmolean.
1863			George Griffith, MA, of Jesus College, Oxford, donates to the Ashmolean Museum a carved wooden figure from Rapanui (Easter Island), which is later said to be thought to be 'a native representation of Captain Cook'. The figure survives at the PRM, where it has the accession number 1886.1.1271; see http://objects.prm.ox.ac.uk/pages/PRMUID25531.html
1877			The Vistors of the Ashmolean decline a request from the Paris Société de Géographie to borrow some objects from the Forster collection.
1883	May		The Ashmolean loans fourteen objects from the Forster collection to the Exposition Internationale Coloniale et d'Exportation Générale in Amsterdam (1 May to 31 October 1883).
1886			The Banks-collection objects transferred on loan from Christ Church to the University Museum in 1860 are incorporated into the newly arrived Pitt Rivers Collection, but without documentation.
1886			The Banks-collection objects remaining at Christ Church are transferred to the University Museum to join the newly arrived Pitt Rivers Collection, but without documentation. At the time they are believed, mistakenly, to be part of the collection of Dr Charles A. Pope of St Louis, Missouri.
1885-87			The Ashmolean's anthropological collections, including the objects in the Forster collection, are transferred to the University Museum to join the newly arrived Pitt Rivers Collection.
1895	December	20	The curator of the PRM, Henry Balfour, writes to Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, thanking him for the loan of a copy of Alexander Shaw's Catalogue of the Different Specimens of Cloth Collected in the Three Voyages of Captain Cook... The book was later donated (in October 1908) and accessioned as 1908.28.1; see http://objects.prm.ox.ac.uk/pages/PRMUID44625.html
Circa 1900			Objects from the Forster collection are installed in a dedicated 'permanent' display in the court of the PRM under the title '[...]ed on the Voyages of Captain Cook'.
1932			The PRM receives on loan from The Royal Society one of the forty brass patus made by Eleanor Gyles for Joseph Banks. The patu is accessioned as 1932.86.1 and is later donated (July 1979); see http://objects.prm.ox.ac.uk/pages/PRMUID14147.html
1966			Ernest S. Dodge publishes an account of his visits to various Cook-voyage collections in Europe in Expedition: The Bulletin of The University Museum of the University of Philadelphia (Vol. 8, no. 2 (Winter), pp. 4–11).
1968	October	1	Peter Gathercole takes up the post of Lecturer in Ethnology at the University of Oxford, attached to the Pitt Rivers Museum.
1969			Adrienne Kaeppler rediscovers the Forsters 'Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford' in an accession book at the PRM.
1969	July		The PRM loans six objects from the Forster collection to the King's Lynn Museum and Art Gallery for the exhibition Six Explorers (July to September 1969).
1970	May	1	The exhibition 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4': An Exhibition of a Collection Made on Capn. Cook's Second Voyage of Discovery by J. R. Forster opens at the PRM (1 May 1970 to late 1971).
1970	May	1	The PRM publishes Peter Gathercole's 'short guide' to the exhibition: 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4': An Exhibition of a Collection Made on Capn. Cook's Second Voyage of Discovery by J. R. Forster—A Short Guide.
1970	May	19	Adrienne Kaeppler gives a lecture at Oxford on 'Eighteenth-Century Tonga: New Interpretations of Tongan Society and Material Culture at the Time of Captain Cook'.
1970	September	30	Peter Gathercole gives up the post of Lecturer in Ethnology at the University of Oxford, attached to the Pitt Rivers Museum, to take up the post of Curator of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
1971			Peter Gathercole presents a paper on 'The Significance for Polynesian Ethnohistory of the Reinhold Forster Collection at Oxford University' Twenty-Eighth Congress of Orientalists in Canberra.
1971			Roger Rose completes his thesis on the material culture of Tahiti, which includes detailed accounts of objects in the Forster collection: 'The Material Culture of Ancient Tahiti' (4 vols), Harvard University (Department of Anthropology), Cambridge, Mass: Ph.D. thesis.
1972	January		The PRM loans ten objects from the Forster collection to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris for the exhibition La Découverte de la Polynésie (20 January to 15 June 1972).
1972			The PRM mounts a revised version of the special exhibition 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4': An Exhibition of a Collection Made on Capn. Cook's Second Voyage of Discovery by J. R. Forster as a dedicated 'permanent' display on the lower gallery.
1973	January		The PRM loans ten objects from the Forster collection to the Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm for the exhibition La Découverte de la Polynésie (January to June 1973).
1978	January	18	The PRM loans five objects from the Forster collection to Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu for the exhibition 'Artificial Curiosities': Being an Exposition of Native Manufactures Collected on the Three Pacific Voyages of Captain James Cook, R.N. at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum January 18, 1978–August 31, 1978 on the Occasion of the Bicentennial of the European Discovery of the Hawaiian Islands by Captain Cook—January 18, 1778 (from 18 January to 31 August 1978).
1978			Adrienne Kaeppler publishes 'Artificial Curiosities': Being an Exposition of Native Manufactures Collected on the Three Pacific Voyages of Captain James Cook, R.N. at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum January 18, 1978–August 31, 1978 on the Occasion of the Bicentennial of the European Discovery of the Hawaiian Islands by Captain Cook—January 18, 1778 (Bernice P. Bishop Museum Special Publication 65), Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. This is, in effect, a catalogue raisonné of ethnographic objects with a documented Cook-voyage provenance and includes entries for all the objects listed in the Forsters 'Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford', some forty or more of which are recorded as 'missing'.
1979	February		The PRM loans five objects from the Forster collection to the British Museum in London for the exhibition Captain Cook in the South Seas (February 1979 to September 1980).
1979	August		The brass patu in the Museum's founding collection (1884.12.280) is loaned to the City Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham for the exhibition Captain Cook's Voyages (23 August to 11 November 1979).
1996			The PRM publishes a small concertina-format booklet about the Forster collection, written by Jeremy Coote: Arts of the Pacific in the Nineteenth Century: The 'Cook Collection' at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
1998			Anne D'Alleva completes her doctoral thesis on the art of the Society Islands in the eighteenth-century, which includes detailed accounts of objects in the Forster collection: 'Shaping the Body Politic: Gender, Status, and Power in the Art of Eighteenth-Century Tahiti and the Society Islands' (2 vols), Columbia University, New York: Ph.D. Thesis.
1999	July		Jeremy Coote publishes an account of the computerization of the records for the Forster collection in Pacific Arts (nos. 19/20 (July), pp. 48–80).
2000			Jeremy Coote, Peter Gathercole, and Nicolette Meister publish an article about the original documentation of the Forster collection Journal of the History of Collections (Vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 177–92.)
2000			A transcription of Edward Evans's manuscript catalogue of the ethnographic collections transferred from the Ashmolean Museum to the PRM in the mid-1880s is published in Arthur MacGregor's Manuscript Catalogues of the Early Museum Collections, 1683–1886 (Part I) (British Archaeological Reports, International Series 907), Oxford: Archaeopress (in association with the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), pp. 255–413.
2001			The PRM launches a website dedicated to the Forster Collection.
2002			Jeremy Coote 'discovers' the Banks collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
2004	March		Jeremy Coote reports the 'discovery' of the Banks collection in the Journal of Museum Ethnography (no. 16, pp. 111–21.) [LINK]
2004	March		The PRM loans twenty-four of the twenty-seven objects in the Banks collection to the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby for the exhibition Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection (6 March to 30 November), for which an illustrated catalogue is published. [LINK]
2004			Peter Gathercole's previously unpublished paper 'The Significance for Polynesian Ethnohistory of the Reinhold Forster Collection at Oxford University' is published, with an introduction by Jeremy Coote, on the Forster Collection' website.
2005			Jeremy Coote publishes an article about the PRM's 1970 exhibition 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4' in the Journal of Museum Ethnography (no. 17, pp. 8–31).
2005	June		The PRM loans the Tahitian taumi from the Banks collection (1887.1.392) and the hei tiki from the Forster collection (1886.1.1167) to the National Archives, Kew for the exhibition Captains, Pirates and Castaways: Battles and Voyages of Nelson, Cook and Bligh (22 June to 19 November 2005).
2006	May		The PRM loans the Maori canoe-baler from the Banks collection (1887.1.381) and six objects from the Forster collection to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich for the exhibition Pacific Encounters: Art & Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860 (21 May to 13 August 2006).
2006	July	28	Paul Tapsell suggests that some of the Maori objects in the Banks collection may have been given by Maori to the Raietean priest/navigator Tupaia and appropriated by Banks after Tupaia's death in Batavia.
2008	March		Jeremy Coote publishes an article about the brass patus made for Joseph Banks in the Journal of Museum Ethnography (no. 20, pp. 49–68).
2008	June		The PRM loans the Maori canoe-baler from the Banks collection (1887.1.381) and six objects from the Forster collection to the Musée du quai Branly in Paris for the exhibition Polynésie: arts et divinités, 1760–1860 (16 June to 14 September 2008).
2009			The 'Cook Collection' display on the lower gallery is dismantled in order to prepare more than sixty objects from the PRM's Cook-voyage collection for loan to a major exhibition to be shown in Bonn, Vienna, and Berne in 2009–2011.
2009	August		The PRM loans eighteen objects from the Banks collection and forty-three from the Forster collection to the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn for the exhibition James Cook und die Entdeckung der Sūdsee / James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific (28 August 2009 to 28 February 2010).
2010	May		The PRM loans eighteen objects from the Banks collection and forty-three from the Forster collection to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna for the exhibition James Cook und die Entdeckung der Sūdsee / James Cook and the Discovery of the South Seas (12 May to 13 September 2010).
2010	October		The PRM loans sixteen objects from the Banks collection and thirty-nine from the Forster collection to the Historisches Museum Bern / Musée Historique de Berne for the exhibition James Cook und die Entdeckung der Sūdsee / James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific (7 October 2010 to 13 February 2011).
2012	March		The PRM loans a Tahitian shark-hook from the Banks collection (1887.1.378) and seven objects from the Forster collection to the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby for the exhibition Eating the Exotic! Food on a Voyage to Polynesia (1 March to 31 October 2012).
2013	September		Jeremy Coote and Jeremy Uden publish an article in the Journal of the Polynesian Society about the recent rediscovery of the tamau from the Forster collection. [LINK]
2014	February	15	The PRM loans eighteen objects from its Cook-voyage collections to The Collection, Lincoln, for the exhibition Joseph Banks: A Great Endeavour—A Lincolnshire Gentleman and his Legacy (15 February to 11 May 2014).
2014	April		The PRM launches a new website devoted to its Cook-voyage collections.

Front cover of the manuscript 'Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford', which lists the objects donated by Johann Reinhold Forster and Johann George Forster in January 1776. (University of Oxford, Pitt Rivers Museum, Manuscript Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum Paper, Box 3, Item 1.)

First page of the manuscript 'Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford', which lists entries 1 to 11, all of which relate to the Tahitian mourner's dress. (University of Oxford, Pitt Rivers Museum, Manuscript Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum Paper, Box 3, Item 1.)

Breastplate and apron from the Tahitian mourner's dress, wood, mother-of-pearl shell, 900 mm wide, from the Society Islands, part of the Forster collection (1886.1.1637 .2 .1)

Front cover of the 'Short Guide', designed for the Museum by John Rhodes for the 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4' exhibition, which opened on 1 May 1970.

Poster designed for the Museum by John Rhodes for the 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4' exhibition, which opened on 1 May 1970.

Photograph by Alfred Robinson of part of the display of the Forster collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum circa 1900 (B67.N19).

Assistant curator Schuyler Jones (foreground) and designer John Rhodes working in the Museum's special exhibition area during the preparation of the 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4' exhibition, which opened on 1 May 1970 (PRM neg. no. R1.9).

Technician Bob Rivers working in the Museum's special exhibition area during the preparation of the 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4' exhibition, which opened on 1 May 1970 (PRM neg. no. R1.10).

Student assistant Carroll Anne Hogan and curator Peter Gathercole in the Museum's special exhibition area during the preparation of the 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4' exhibition, which opened on 1 May 1970 (PRM neg. no. R3.2).

View of the Marquesas Islands and New Zealand sections of the Museum's special exhibition 'From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773–4', which opened on 1 May 1970 (PRM neg. no. R5.11).

View of the Society Islands tamau, part of the Forster collection 'rediscovered' in July 2010, mounted on a mannequin in the photographic studio at the museum in June 2012 (PRM0001303025179).