Further Information about the Catalogue of Curiosities

The 'Catalogue' is preserved in the manuscript collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum. It consists of four sheets of double foolscap paper (335 mm high by 430 mm wide, i.e. 13 inches by 17 inches) folded in half so as to form a 'booklet' of sixteen, unnumbered foolscap pages (13 inches by 8.5 inches), four of which are blank. The front cover is inscribed in a large and ornate hand 'Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford'. At some time, presumably when it was sent to Oxford, the 'booklet' was folded again twice; the words 'For Mr Sheffield Musæum' inscribed on the outside back cover fit perfectly into what would have been one of the outside faces of the whole 'booklet' once it had been so double-folded.

The 'Catalogue' contains 179 entries (1 to 177 plus 55a and 101a) divided geographically—'Otaheitee [Tahiti] and the Society Isles', 'The Friendly Isles [Tonga]', 'New Zeeland', 'Easter Island [Rapa Nui]', 'Marquesas', 'Mallicollo [Malakula, Vanuatu]', 'Tanna [Vanuatu]', 'New Caledonia', 'Terra del Fuego'—and then ordered (and occasionally sub-divided) by type of object. Each entry covers a single object or a group of objects and describes them pithily, though sometimes frustratingly briefly. A few of the entries are informative—for example in the Tongan section, '93. a wooden hook to be fixed to the top of the house, to which they hang baskets with [word or words obliterated] provision, so that the board prevents the rats from coming at the meat'; while others are frustratingly vague—thus, '48. another parcel of Otaheitee cloth'.

The 'Catalogue' itself is unsigned, but from comparison with other extant manuscripts, the hand has been identified confidently as that of George Forster. It is certainly not in Reinhold's comparatively clumsy hand. George had studied penmanship at St Petersburg and at the Dissenters' Academy in Warrington and was thus perfectly capable of the ornate style of the title page and the neat handwriting of the catalogue itself. The manuscript is also undated. However, while we still do not know its exact date, we do know that the collection itself—or at least the bulk of it—was sent to Oxford in late January 1776 and it seems most likely that the 'Catalogue' was compiled and sent to Oxford at the same time.

The later history of the 'Catalogue of Curiosities' is curious, for no record of or reference to it appears to have been made by anyone—at the Ashmolean, the Pitt Rivers, or elsewhere—until it was 'rediscovered' by Adrienne Kaeppler in 1969. Certainly, it was not made use of, or referred to, by those at the Ashmolean—Philip Bury Duncan, George Augustus Rowell, and Edward Evans—who attempted to catalogue the Ashmolean's collections. Nor was it made use of at the Pitt Rivers Museum until Kaeppler found it in a pocket in the back of the Museum's accession book for the material transferred from the Ashmolean. Its whereabouts between 1776 and 1969 thus remain a mystery. It is not as if the collection was regarded as unimportant. From everything that we now know about its history, it is clear that everyone responsible for its care recognized its importance. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive that anyone happening on the 'Catalogue' would not have recognized what it was and realized its significance. Yet that is what seems to have happened. Some time after 1944, when T. K. Penniman, then Curator of the Museum, compiled the accessions book for the material transferred from the Ashmolean in 1886 and had it bound, someone in the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Ashmolean, or (conceivably) somewhere else happened on the 'Catalogue' and either put it in the back pocket of the accessions book for safe-keeping, or gave it to someone else who put it there. Who this was and why the manuscript was not immediately made use of remain complete mysteries.

On its 'rediscovery' in 1969, the importance of the 'Catalogue' was immediately realized and steps were taken to put to good use the information it contains. Its existence was first made public by Peter Gathercole who included it in the 1970 exhibition and discussed it in the 'Short Guide'. An account of the 'Catalogue' and its significance was also given by its 'rediscoverer' in an article on the vital importance of documentary evidence for studying collections from Cook's voyages. Kaeppler argued that the Forster manuscript established the collection 'as the best documented second-voyage collection, and as the only ethnographic collection made on Cook's voyages with undisputed original documentation of provenance and use'. She went on to emphasize how it had made possible the positive identification as 'Forster objects' of a far larger number of pieces at Oxford than had previously been recognized and stressed its importance for the identification of pieces in other collections: 'On the basis of the specimens identified at the Pitt Rivers Museum, similar...objects in other collections can be identified. Particularly valuable is the fact that Tongan materials can be separated from Tahitian, which in most collections have been all but hopelessly mixed'.

No attempt has been made here to correct, make consistent, or update the spelling, punctuation, or use of capital letters. A number of entries are bracketed together in the original. For simplicity's sake, these are indicated here by lists of numbers (e.g. 21, 22; 38, 39). Insertions, all of which seem to be in the same hand and probably more or less immediate, are indicated by the parenthetical use of straight vertical lines (i.e., |inserted word or words|) and deletions by the words being struck through (i.e., ~~word or words~~ deleted). A few words are completely obliterated, again it seems by the author and immediately: these have been indicated in square brackets, as have a very few minor editorial annotations.

Further Information

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