OBJECT history Misattributed: A Nuu-chah-nulth Treasure Comes Home 106 On James Cook’s third and final voyage to the Pacific, the famed explorer sailed the HMS Resolution and Discovery to Hawaii (1776–1777) and then became the first European to set foot on the Northwest Coast when he arrived at the small village of Yuquot (Friendly Cove) on British Columbia’s Nootka Sound on March 28, 1778. Though there is no specific record, he unquestionably collected the object shown on these pages—a weapon generally referred to as a halibut club—during this part of his journey. After sailing north in a fruitless search for the Northwest Passage, Cook returned to Hawaii, where he was killed in 1779. His expedition and the artifacts it had collected returned to England under the leadership of Charles Clerke and then James Gore and James King in late October of 1780. Like much of Cook’s personal collection, the club found its way from his family into London’s private Holophusicon, also known as the Leverian Museum after its founder, Ashton Lever. This collection was unusually well documented for the time through a catalog dating from 1784 and through the watercolor “sketch books” of the Leverian collection by artist By Sebastian Miller Sarah Stone. The club appears in volume two of the latter, completed in 1783. Sadly, this museum of curiosities was not as financially savvy as it was skilled at documentation, and its collection was dispersed at auction in 1806, also with a remarkably complete catalog in which the club again appears. This launched the object—by then believed to be a “curious war instrument” from the “Sandwich Isles” (Hawaii)—on a two-century journey through collections, auctions, and dealers in Britain and the United States. Recently purchased through a dealer in New York and valued in excess of one million dollars, it was the last remaining Northwest Coast object from Cook’s personal collection not housed in a public museum. This status changed last year thanks to the philanthropic Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, which acquired the club for donation to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology. It is now on display in the museum’s Multiversity Galleries, which house more than 10,000 objects from around the world. Of course, it takes only a glance at the object for our twenty-first-century eyes to recognize that this object is not of Hawaiian origin. Given what we know of FIG. 1: Perspective View of Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum Leicester Square, London, March 30, 1785. By Sarah Stone (c. 1760–1844). Watercolor on paper. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ML 1230. FIG. 2: Portrait of James Cook by Francesco Bartolozzi, after James Webber’s 1776 painting. Stipple engraved ink on paper. H: 11.5 cm. Private collection. Photo: B. Carlson.
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