FIJIAN ART 111 FIG. 9 (below): Composite headrest, kali. Fiji. Early–mid 19th century. Composed of three wooden sections bound with coir; the bar inlaid with 57 discs of whale ivory. L: 46 cm. Ex James Hooper Collection, no. 810. Private collection. traders and taken to Fiji in large quantities. There they could be exchanged for substantial quantities of sandalwood, which then could be taken to China, where it was highly valued, and converted into silks, porcelain, and tea, which fetched high prices back in Europe. The value of all these things, whether whale teeth, sandalwood, silk, or money, was culturally determined, and traders exploiting these differences could make huge profi ts—if their ships and cargoes survived. It might be thought that Fijians got a poor deal out of this, taking worthless teeth for valuable sandalwood, but this ignores the Fijian perspective that whale teeth were of the greatest value in their cultural system. As the early trader Richard Siddons put it in about 1810, whale teeth were “more valued there than gold” (Siddons 1925: 169), so from a Fijian point of view it was the traders who were the ones duped, taking worthless sandalwood for valuable teeth. The arrival of hundreds of whale teeth—and even Indian elephant (fi g. 10) and walrus tusks—combined with the acquisition of metal tools from Europeans, led to an explosion of artistic creativity from the end of the fi rst decade of the nineteenth century until the 1860s. Now plentiful and with sharp tools to aid their carving, teeth were sawn into plates and fi tted together to form ivory versions (civa tabua) of the earlier pearl shell plates (civa). Some, such as an exceptional example in the Fiji Museum (fi g. 5), even have carved into them a hinge resembling that on a pearl shell valve. These allivory breastplates are likely to have been made early in the manufacturing period up until the 1830s, but evidence of a temporal sequence for the development of breastplates is hard to establish. It is likely that differences in the form and style of breastplates in the surviving corpus of more than 120 examples can be attributed both to developmental changes in particular workshops and to variations between workshops in different regions in Fiji. What we do know is that by the 1830s composite breastplates (civa vonovono) of whale ivory and pearl shell were being made and worn by eminent chiefs, and in 1840 Alfred Agate of the United States Exploring Expedition made a drawing of Ratu Tanoa, vunivalu (paramount chief) of Bau, wearing a splendid composite breastplate that he had donned especially to meet the American “chief,” Captain Charles Wilkes, on board the Vincennes (fi g. 2). The breastplate was not collected then—Fiji was in a phase of importing ivory, not exporting it—but some thirty-fi ve years later it was acquired by Fiji’s fi rst resident colonial governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, almost certainly from Ratu Tanoa’s son, Ratu Cakobau, as a diplomatic gift to Gordon as the personal
T81E
To see the actual publication please follow the link above