NiueExtra long paddle club from Niue, Oceania. Owned by Robert Henry Ramsden. Transferred to the Museum from the Ashmlolean Museum in 1886.

This wooden club is extremely long (over 2.2 metres) with a flat, pointed head, which is shown in this photograph. It was collected in Niue, a small island 2,400 km northeast of New Zealand, in a triangle created between Tonga, Samoa and the Cook Islands.

Similar extra-long clubs are found in other Central Polynesian archipelagos, such as the Cook and Society Islands, and can be seen as a fusion of a spear's stabbing point with a club's lateral blade, handling and clout. This is quite different from the modes of warfare in Western Polynesia where the roles of clubs and spears were quite distinct, even if they were used concurrently. This illustrates the high degree of interaction within culturally interconnected and demarcated 'zones' in the South Pacific, a historical trend that long pre-dated the arrival of Europeans and European-Americans.

The Beautiful Warrior

For several decades after the first European contact with Niue by Captain James Cook in 1774, it was known as 'Savage Island'. This was possibly due to a misunderstanding by Cook's crewmen, who misread a formal, military challenge of greeting on the beach as an actual attack, and mistaking the red banana paint worn by the natives for blood. This misnomer temporarily obscured the richness and vibrancy of Niuean culture, one aspect of which was the act of formal duelling for the purposes of entertainment, spectacle and the preservation of personal honour.

Performance duelling can be seen in many other parts of Oceania such as Kiribati, where some of the weapons involved reach an equally enormous length. However, in the Niuean tradition, this duelling is strictly non-contact and is in fact more like an elaborate and masculinised form of dance in which these clubs are brandished as objects of status and display. Therefore, although the point of this particular weapon is sufficiently sharp enough to make incision wounds, it is likely that it was not used in actual combat.