Collection Evaluation: Pitt Rivers Museum, The Cook Voyage Collections

Student ID: 170018015

MO4968: Curiosity, Science and Empire in the Eighteenth Century

January 29th, 2021

Word Count: 1057

 The Pitt Rivers Museum is a pioneering institution in the field of ethnography.
Founded by the University of Oxford in 1884, the museum’s content has grown from an
initial 17,000 objects, donated by Lieutenant-General Pitt Rivers, to an incredible 600,000
objects, photographs and manuscripts from diverse cultures and locales. 1 The museum’s
goal, declared in its most recent strategic plan, is to celebrate human creativity and
diversity, while facilitating the cross-disciplinary study of humanity through material
culture.2

Among its special exhibitions, the Cook Voyage Collections provide an invaluable
body of knowledge for both anthropologists interested in Pacific cultures, and historians
concerned with eighteenth century exploration and collecting practices. It consists of a wide
range of objects, from ornaments and clothing to weapons and musical instruments,
retrieved from the indigenous populations of a number of Pacific islands, including Tahiti,
Tonga and New Zealand, during captain James Cook’s second expedition between 1772 and
1775.3 The majority of the objects was collected by the ethnographer Reinhold Forster and
his son, George, who accompanied Cook on his voyage. Initially donated to Oxford’s
Ashmolean museum, Forster’s collection was only transferred to the Pitt Rivers museum in
1886.4 The value of this collection was amplified by the rediscovery of Forster’s manuscript –
the Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford – by curator Adrienne Kaeppler in 1969. 5 The
resurfacing of this crucial source of original documentation about the provenance and use
of the objects caused a revival of interest in the Cook voyages, and contributed to the
creation in 1970 of a special exhibition dedicated to the Forster collection: From the Islands
of the South Seas, 1773-4. Originally intended as a temporary collection, its popularity

1
‘History of the Museum’, Pitt Rivers Museum, https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/history-museum [Accessed: January
18th, 2021].
2
‘Strategic Plan 2017 to 2022’, Pitt Rivers Museum, p.3.
https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/prm_strategicplan2017-22-foronlineuse-singlepages-ilovepdf-
compressed.pdf [Accessed: January 19th 2021].
3
Jeremy Coote and Jeremy Uden, ‘The Collections’, The Cook-Voyage Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum,
November 2013 http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/cookvoyages/index.php/en/index.html [Accessed: January 21st,
2021].
4
Jeremy Coote, ‘Computerizing the Forster (‘Cook’), Arawe, and Founding Collections at the Pitt Rivers
Museum’, Pacific Arts, no. 19/20 (July 1999), pp. 48-80, p.51.
5
Jeremy Coote, ‘’From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773-4’: Peter Gethercole’s special exhibition at the Pitt
Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 17 (2005), pp.8-31, p.9.
secured it a permanent place in the museum’s lower gallery, where it is displayed to this
day.6

The main differences between the Cook Voyage Collections and the rest of the Pitt
Rivers Museum are its display criteria; whereas the majority of the museum consists of
objects exhibited typologically in a ‘democracy of things’ arranged according to their
functions, the Forster collection is presented as a self-contained, geographically and
culturally specific body of objects. 7 On the one hand, it can be argued that this limits the
potential for drawing constructive parallels between eighteenth-century Pacific
communities and other cultures and time periods. On the other, preserving the integrity of
the original collection can be seen as advantageous for more focused research projects.
Moreover, researchers can benefit from seeing the objects displayed alongside one another,
providing a holistic impression of the collection and highlighting the connections between
its constitutive objects, which can prove complementary to their research value as individual
artefacts.

Apart from this important point of divergence, the Cook Voyage Collections have
adopted many of the museum’s defining characteristics. For example, Alison Petch’s
comment that ‘the ethnographic records at the Pitt Rivers Museum are second to none,
worldwide’, can also be applied more specifically to the special collection, which has
benefited from meticulous documentation since its inception. 8 Researchers can gain access
to each object’s full accession records, which include its maker, collector, source,
provenance, description, classification and accession number. 9 This is supplemented by a
remarkably extensive body of further information, including a listed publication history and
original research notes. This documentation is available both on site, in a research room
containing all existing accession files, and online, in a digitalised database. The
computerisation of the collection, a project initiated by Jeremy Coote in the 1990s, has been
an important attribute for researchers, providing easy access to a wealth of useful material
on Forster’s collection. To historians concerned with the topic of eighteenth-century
6
Coote, ‘Computerizing the Forster’, p.54.
7
‘About’, The Pitt Rivers Museum https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/about-us-0 [Accessed: January 18th, 2021].
8
Alison Petch, ‘Collecting Immortality: the Field Collectors who Contributed to the Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (2004), pp.127-139, p.127.
9
Coote, ‘Computerizing the Forster’, p.55.
collecting, Reinhold Forster’s documentation in his Catalogue of Curiosities – one of the only
undisputed original texts on the provenance and purpose of the objects collected during
Cook’s Pacific voyages – is an invaluable resource. 10 In addition, the chronological
presentation of subsequent attempts to catalogue the collection provides a useful timeline
for historians interested in the development of British curatorial techniques.

One potential disadvantage of the Cook Voyage Collections is its disproportionate

focus on the second voyage, and the comparative under-representation of the objects
collected by Joseph Banks during Cook’s first expedition on the HMS Endeavour (1768-
1771). The Museum does contain twenty-seven artefacts from this first voyage, but they
remain somewhat overshadowed by the more sizeable Forster collection. This does not
detract from the value of the Banks collection; rediscovered as recently as 2002, it is one of
only two attested collections in the world from Cook’s initial expedition. 11 Nevertheless, the
quantitative imbalance between the two collections does raise the possibility that
researchers might overfocus on Forster’s one – a challenge to bear in mind for scholars
aiming to draw conclusions from a comparative study of the Cook voyages.

Overall, the Cook Voyage Collections offer an important set of resources, both for
anthropologists interested in indigenous Pacific cultures and for historians seeking to shed
light on eighteenth-century explorers and collectors. Through extensive and meticulous
cataloguing in both physical and digital formats, the collection’s curators have provided
access to an incredible quantity of information that could lead to further research. In the
historical field, this material could fuel research into the processes of British empire-building
through the acquisition of material culture. It could also be used to explore the colonial
power dynamics concealed in the cataloguing of exotic artefacts. These are but some of the
fruitful lines of enquiry that have the potential to grow from future scholarly engagement
with this excellent collection.

10
Ibid., p.56.
11
Jeremy Coote and Jeremy Uden, ‘The Collections’.
Bibliography

Published Sources

Coote, Jeremy, ‘Computerizing the Forster (‘Cook’), Arawe, and Founding Collections at the
Pitt Rivers Museum’, Pacific Arts, no. 19/20 (July 1999), pp. 48-80.

Coote, Jeremy, ‘’From the Islands of the South Seas, 1773-4’: Peter Gethercole’s special
exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 17 (2005), pp.8-
31.

Petch, Alison, ‘Collecting Immortality: the Field Collectors who Contributed to the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (2004), pp.127-139.

Online Sources

Coote, Jeremy and Uden, Jeremy, The Cook-Voyage Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum,
November 2013 http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/cookvoyages/index.php/en/index.html [Accessed:
January 21-24, 2021].

The Pitt Rivers Museum, https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/ [Accessed: January 18-24, 2021].