Fabric of time

Tapa cloth samples collected from Polynesian nations on Cook's voyages have made their way into our museums and libraries.

- PAUL LITTLE

It's a catalogue of actual tapa cloth samples. It's an irreplaceable record of craft practices from centuries ago, frozen in time. It's a Pacific curio pored over by 18th-century English cognoscenti. It's a concrete relic of James Cook's Pacific voyages and a collaboration that involved probably hundreds of people. Published in 1787, its short title is A catalogue of the different specimens of cloth collected in three voyages of Captain Cook. (There goes Cook again, getting credit for things he didn't have much to do with the specimens were actually collected by others on his voyages.)

Commonly referred to as "the Shaw tapa book" (after entrepreneur Alexander Shaw), the volumes consists of upwards of 39 samples of tapa, or bark cloth, most collected by Cook's shipmate James King and other crew in Tonga, Tahiti and the Hawaiian islands.

Shaw stuck the specimens onto pages, in keeping with a fashion in the late-18th and early-19th centuries for cataloguing "artificial curiosities" from the Pacific in "snippet books". The taste for tapa drove compeitition between collectors and generated an active market for the sheets brought home by Cook's men.

Editions of Shaw's book are now among the most unusual and valuable items in several of our libraries. Because every sample of cloth was snipped separately, no two copies can be the same. Each book is effectively a one-off.

Appropriately for something that is the result of so many voyages, the books have come into the libraries' collections by various routes and at various price points. Auckland Central Library's copy was acquired as part of the bequest of patron James Mackelvie, who died in 1885. Auckland War Memorial Museum got its copy in the early 20th century thanks to the generosity of businessman and donor Edward Earle Vaile.