Page 283 - The Secret Museum

‘WE HAVE OVER 600,000 CATALOGUE records – 75,000 of those are ethnographic

specimens collected from living people – then there are several million
archaeological artefacts, so working out how many objects we have in the collection
sort of depends on how you count,’ said the Peabody Museum’s curator, Susan
Haskell, as she led me up the stairs to the storage rooms in the roof of the museum
building. As the air conditioning hummed, she turned off the alarm that protects the
archives, unlocked a low, brown door with a ‘watch your head’ sign above it and

showed me into the first room, which was lined with white shelves and ethnographic
objects.

We headed for the Hawai’ian area, to a box that contains a beautiful, rare
Hawai’ian feather helmet made in the eighteenth century. It’s in mint condition, all
three types of red, black and yellow feathers still carefully preserved on the crested
helmet. It lives in storage, where few people ever see it. Susan told me its story.

Columbia, under Captain Gray (1755–1806), was the first American ship to
circumnavigate the globe. On its journey, it stopped in Hawai’i in 1789, where the
ship’s crew met the royal family. The ship continued on across the Pacific, before
returning home to Boston. This was a big deal. Before the Revolutionary War (1775–

83), the British did not allow Americans to trade in the Pacific. So, the minute the
war was over, the Americans had set off from Salem and Boston and all the ports
along the East Coast and headed for the Pacific. The Columbia was the first to make
it there and back.

On the way home, Captain Gray and the Columbia picked up the crown prince of
Owyhee (now Hawai’i) and sailed with him to Boston. When they arrived there, a
big parade was held in the streets of the city. The crown prince marched up the street,
with Captain Gray at his side, and the crew of the Columbia behind them, to meet the

Governor of Boston. The crown prince was wearing this feather helmet, and a
beautiful feather cape.

Two years later, his costume was presented to President Washington by the
‘gentlemen adventurers’ of the voyage. He, in turn, gave it to Rembrandt Peale
(1778–1860), founder of the Peale Museum in Baltimore, for safekeeping. The
helmet was the first deposit in the museum. Years later, the helmet was given as a gift
to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, where it has been carefully stored and
preserved. It was once on exhibition, but now it is considered too fragile to display.

It is exquisite. The helmet was made to fit the crown prince perfectly. It is made of

a basket woven from bark fibre and encased by a net, into which the feathers have
been pressed. The crest swoops over the top of the head of the helmet, like a
Mohican. It looks heavy, but since it is made out of bark and feathers, it is very light.

Around 10,000 tiny feathers decorate the helmet. They were collected from the
three different types of bird by specialist bird catchers. Several hundred people
probably collected them – unless they were made from feathers collected over
several generations and stored until needed. The red feathers probably come from the