Bark shield

From Botany Bay, New South Wales, Australia
Before AD 1770

This bark shield has been identified, reasonably convincingly, as having been collected in 1770 on Captain Cook's First Voyage in HMS Endeavour (1768-71). It is, to date, the only Australian artefact in the British Museum that has been ascribed to the voyages.

The shield has very few distinguishing features, but these do seem to tally with a contemporary illustration and description. The naturalist Sir Joseph Banks wrote in his journal: 'Defensive weapons we saw only in Sting-Rays [Botany] bay and there only a single instance - a man who attempted to oppose our Landing came down to the Beach with a shield of an oblong shape about 3 feet long and 1½ broad made of the bark of a tree; this he left behind when he ran away and we found upon taking it up that it plainly had been pierced through with a single pointed lance near the centre.'

Such a hole, close to the handle, is visible on this shield. There is also a sketch by John Frederick Miller dated 1771, after the sketch by Sydney Parkinson, the Endeavour's official artist, which depicts a shield with a hole in it, just like this one.

J.C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Endeavour Journal of Sir J, vol. II, 2nd ed. (Sydney, Public Library of New South Wales in association with Angus & Robertson, 1963)

J.V.S. Megaw, 'Something old, Something new: further notes on the aborigines of the Sydney District as represented by their surviving artefacts, and as depicted in some early European representations' in F.D McCarthy, commemorative pa, Records of the Australian Museum: supplement 17 (Sydney, Australian Museum, 1993)

A.L. Kaeppler, Artificial Curiosities: being (Honolulu, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1978)