So one of the most culturally significant
and visually impressive objects collected on Cook's voyages
is what's known as a mourner's costume from the islands of Tahiti.
The mourner's costume it's something that's very important in Tahiti
because that's a unique costume that is used for the ceremonies when the Chiefs die
and there are very few conserved in the world
so this project is very very exciting
and the way we are working all together on this project is very exciting too.
The mourner's costume was worn during the ceremonies for the death of a chief
or for the very important people of the society
so maybe it was a priest maybe it was someone from the family of the dead person
that was wearing this costume and that performed a kind of ceremony
with other young people that were accompanying him.
So Joseph Banks, the botanist on Cook's first voyage,
wrote in his journal how he and several members of the crew
witnessed this incredible ceremony that was taking place to mark the death of a Tahitian chief
Banks writes in his journal this description, this very vivid scene
of how he witnessed the chief mourner emerging from the shadows at dawn and dusk
wearing this incredible costume.
Banks witnesses this ceremony and Cook and he are really keen to try
and acquire one of these Tahitian mourner's costumes
but the Tahitians are not willing to part with it
for them it's made up of this kind of layers and layers of valuable materials
and it would have taken so much time and effort to create these fine layers of bark cloth,
the feathered cloak, the feathered headdress, the pearl shell chest piece
which is made of thousands of tiny pieces of cut pearl shell.
The endeavor that has gone into making this costume
there's nothing that Cook's crew have with them that is worth them trading this object for
but when Cook returned on his second voyage
he had realized that there was something that Tahitians were interested in trading
and that was red feathers in Tahiti and across Polynesia the color red is very important.
So Cook being a cunning an intelligent chap when he went back on the second voyage
he had collected red feathers in another one of the Pacific Islands
and he took them to Tahiti and one of the things he was then able to do with was to trade those red feathers
and Tahitians agreed at that point to part with a number of Tahitian mourner's costumes
and one of those costumes is the one that subsequently came to the British Museum.
We were lucky enough to be able to dedicate about six months of time
to the conservation work on the costume and what's been exciting from my perspective, as a curator
is that the opportunity that that six-month period has provided
to bring a whole range of people into the museum basically to stand around
and talk about this amazing artifact.
So it's the collaborative nature of the conservation work that for me has been the most exciting part.
As you can see we have quite a lot of pieces that make up the costume
and we've got them laid out now because what we're doing is having a look at them and checking
if they're stable enough for display and thinking about what kind of conservation work
and what kind of mounting they might need to enable us to have them on display.
Conservation wise lots of different materials, lots of things to think about when we think about mounting
all these things together make it quite a heavy object
and we want that to hang and look really really special when it's on display.
Some of these smaller pearl shell elements are coming loose so we're going to look at stabilizing them,
we also have the feathers to think of as well so like with lots of other pieces of the costume
some of the feathers have been damaged in the past by over-handling, by pests
and we need to make sure that they're stable so that we don't lose
any of these fantastic feathers as part of the display .
Many of the costume elements of the Tahitian mourner's costume
are made out of material called bark cloth
and bark cloth is made from the inner fiber of many different varieties of tree bark and when it's beaten together the fibers start to mesh into a fabric
that can essentially be thought of as a non-woven textile.
Here we have two bark cloth tiputas and what is absolutely fantastic
is that when we started this project and we were looking at the mourners costume
we only knew about one of the tiputas, as we were actually taking parts of the costume
off of the easel we found a bundle that was attached to the easel,
we got that bundle out and we unwrapped it and inside of it we found this second tiputa.
So what we thought was originally really amazing and is absolutely fantastic
is this large tiputa here you can see the faint stripes of colour
that would have gone along the arms and down the front
and this was all kind of put really in perspective when we opened up the bundle and found this tiputa that hadn't been seen for hundreds of years
and had been protected against light so you can see really the vibrant red color there.
So especially with the second tiputa because it has been folded up in this bundle
you can see that there are a lot of creases there and from a conservation point of view
creases are places where materials become weak
so we want to try and remove those creases as much as possible.
For us it's very interesting to know about the exact materials,
the dyes, the vegetal elements that were used, to make this costume.
One of the most important materials that as part of the costume are birds' feathers.
We invited colleagues from the Natural History Museum to come and examine the feathers
because we wanted to try and make sure that we knew exactly what species were being used.
Today I'm here because the British Museum asked me to look at lots of feather material
that is used in artifacts coming from Tahiti, the species we found in here,
some are rather interesting, others are very, well, expected
but overall when you look at the feathers, the feather cloaks and the headdresses
many black feathers but from different species, like chickens are used, frigate birds
but also lots of Imperial pigeon, one of the objects we found, a headdress,
had clearly pigeon feathers in them but a few of those feathers catch my eye
because I thought I recognized something special about him and by close observation
I think I recognized that must be an extinct species species we never knew where it came from
Tahiti was suggested as the place of origin but we do not know
the species, the spotted green pigeon, and as the name already suggests it's a greenish pigeon with spots
and the spots are white, the species probably became extinct before 1800
so by finding those feathers and if you can confirm the feathers are indeed from the species
then at least we know the origin and by knowing the origin
we can learn more and more about the species who has already gone for over 200 years.
For the DNA analyzing we will take a very small sample of one of the feathers
which we think is from spotted green pigeon
from this very tiny sample experts can extract DNA and from the DNA
we can tell whether it is the species we think it is
and the only reason we can t ell is because that is a specimen left one specimen in Liverpool and DNA is already taken from that specimen
so if we compare it and we find a match then we know for sure that the feathers found here in this headdress belong indeed to spotted green pigeon.
The most striking thing when you see these kind of costumes now
is the gray white pearl shells and the black feathers of the cloak
and so we think a lot of all these black and white things
in the the mourner's costume of the British Museum we can see all this colorful tapa
and so we are really waiting to know what colors were the original ones, what plants were used to make them just to be sure that what we know now in Tahiti
the different colors we use, how we make the dyes today, is it similar to what was made
at the end of the 18th century.
In images of the costume from the time of collection
a lot of it is really really colorful although this looks slightly brown and slightly faded. You can actually see tantalizing hints of color here
maybe some yellow, maybe some red here.
So it's great that we have the scientists at the Museum on board who
are going to be analyzing some of the pigments and give us more information
about what the true colors of the costume are likely to have been.
There were three main colors which were red, black and yellow.
The red and the black were very easy to spot in many of the costume parts.
The yellow was a little more tricky it underwent a lot of fading
so actually we were able to clearly see the yellow on only when we unfolded
some of the parts of the costume and so where it was protected from the light
we saw this yellow appearance which was expected because there are drawings
showing the costume being bright red and yellow decorated.
There were areas again when it was clear that a yellow color was there
areas that where it was less clear but kind of expected
the first thing that we did, we used a UV light source
so the UV light would have the possibility to excite the yellow dyes which would emit
these possibly characteristic luminescence and this was the case
as soon as we switched the UV light on a bright yellow green fluorescent appeared
and so the fact that this yellow underwent a lot of fading
and the fact that it showed this typical yellow-green luminescence
pointed towards one candidate being highly likely and this is turmeric another quite common source of yellow in this part of the world
and we took a sample at the point and it is what the sample looked like under the microscope
another indication of turmeric could be obtained because these yellow particles
on the fibers are very consistent with what turmeric looks like under the microscope
it's a direct dye, which means that it sticks directly on the fibers without the need of a mordant and this is what what it usually looks like but ultimately
the presence of the turmeric was confirmed by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry.
Today there are complete costumes in London, in Oxford and Goettingen in Germany, in Hawaii and in Exeter
but there aren't that many that are as complete
as the amazing, dramatic costume that we have here at the British Museum
and it's got so many different elements to it that add to this bulk, this height, this splendour
that the redisplay of it here in the exhibition I think will really be an impressive spectacle for visitors.