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31 until November 8, 1868. Upon the ship’s return to
Valparaiso, its offi cers received a visit in December
1868 from Emile Miot, an offi cer of the French navy
frigate Astrée. He photographed the monumental
stone moai that has since been the pride of the British
Museum2 on the deck of the British ship along
with a panoply of other objects against a temporary
background (fi g. 1). To date, only fi ve of the thirtyfi
ve pieces seen in this photograph have been identifi
ed in public and private collections. The collection
dates for most Easter Island objects are unknown. In
her meticulous 2003 study,3 Adrienne Kaeppler could
attribute a pre-1860 date to only twenty-three of the
approximately 100 kavakava known before 1870.
The kavakava that is the subject of this article (fi g. 2)
belongs to this very limited corpus.
A KAVAKAVA pHoTogRApHED iN 1873
DiSAppEARS AND THEN REAppEARS
On August 23, 1873, Mrs. Susan Hoare took a remarkable
photograph in a courtyard at the archbishopric
of Tahiti of a group of Easter Islanders with wooden
sculptures (fi g. 3), including the aforementioned kavakava.
This statuette, which is the subject of another
photograph by Hoare preserved in the SS.CC archives,
is also in the group of sculptures (fi g. 4) seen on page
77 of Florentin-Étienne “Tepano” Jaussen’s L’Empire
Maori et l’écriture de l’île de Pâques, the manuscript of
which he completed in 1886 after he resigned from the
bishopric. However, this kavakava is absent from the
plate of SS.CC objects published in Father Alazard’s
work of 1926, because by this time it had come into
the possession of the family of the Viscount Benoist
d’Azy (1829–1890). He served as a naval offi cer and
then director of the colonies for the Ministry of the
Navy from 1872 to 1878. Did the SS.CC fathers give
this kavakava to this colonial administrator during his
tenure there? Father André Mark, former archivist for
the SS.CC, whom I wish to thank here, found no connection
between the congregation and d’Azy. Just how
he obtained it remains unknown.
The d’Azy kavakava reappeared at the Hôtel Drouot
in Paris in a sale by auctioneer Claude Aguttes held
on April 17, 2009, with Marie Catherine Daffos and
Jean Luc Estournel serving as consulting experts (fi g.
5). He had found it in the attic of the home of Benoist
d’Azy’s descendants. One of the pictures the experts
published (fi g. 5b) clearly shows that this kavakava is
the one in Hoare’s photograph (fi g. 5a). An inscription
on the back of her photo states the fi gure’s approxi-