Marine - A Story in Eight Objects

Wayne BurrowsNottingham Castle 2013

MARINEa story in eight objects

Wayne BurrowsNottingham Castle 2013

MARINEa story in eight objects

“The oceans are a great swirl of changeable currents. In this element, where serendipity governs all, nothing can be guaranteed or truly possessed for more than an instant. Rules are installed by force to bring certainties to the volatile flows of trade; laws are carried to new lands so that an investor can consider his paper certificates absolute proof of ownership of some place he has never seen, or some mountain of goods he will never use, only buy and sell then buy again. In a walnut bureau near Fleet Street or St Paul’s, all the opium of Bengal, the coffee of Jamaica, the tobacco harvests of Virginia, might still be held captive by an ivory lock and brass key any child could break. Stocks and monopolies, gunships, conscripts and lawyers: these direct the circulation of all things in the interests of that mysterious substance, money, which is itself alike to an ocean, though an ocean that neither exists, nor truly serves any man subject to its brute operations in the world. Despite all this, and sooner than we think, all our histories, all our symbols and artefacts, must slide inexorably into footnotes then disappear, like sea-molluscs from the smooth chambers of their shells.”

Sir Henry Whitehorn: Journals (1836)

Marine takes its narrative cues from eight objects displayed in the Every Object Tells a Story gallery of decorative arts and crafts at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery. Sometimes, the objects themselves appear. More often, the places, times and historical forces that made them guide the material. Sometimes, the text is fiction: sometimes it is non-fiction. The central thread, concerning the deaths of King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamâmalu of Hawaii in London in 1824, and the voyage of HMS Blonde to take their bodies home under the captaincy of George Anson Byron, successor to the title of Lord Byron from the poet himself, are genuine historical events. The various incidents preceding, surrounding and following this voyage, are also true: Maria Graham’s books exist; the old ways of the Hawaiian islands were changed by the characters named; Andrew Bloxam was a real botanist. Which is to say, the facts are mostly genuine, but their re-telling should not be taken as entirely reliable. The connections made between this voyage and other storylines are invented, or matters of speculation, even when rooted in truth. There was, for example, a small industry of French prisoners-of-war making bone objects and gambling themselves into penury at Norman Cross internment camp near Peterborough between 1800 and 1815, but there’s no evidence that the Castle’s example of this craft came from there, that its anonymous maker met George Anson Byron, or that he ever gambled. A Victorian porcelain plate may have nothing to do with Andrew Bloxam, but it was the work of men like him that created a taste for the very particular style of scientifically accurate decoration it represents. It’s also fairly certain that Nottingham Castle’s 16th Century Italian majolica dish representing the macabre story of Perillus of Athens was not on the table when the South Sea Islander known as Omai dined with Dr Samuel Johnson, as he genuinely did sometime during 1775, but it could have been, if we choose to imagine it was. Instead of historical truth, then, what tie all these things together are images of circulation: of winds, ocean currents and traded goods; of blood and breath in a human body; of repeating patterns and events in time. Marine tries to approach the past by piecing together disconnected objects with stories, glimpses and intuitive leaps. What ultimately joins these objects is the sea and the circulation of goods and people around its surface; knowing this, we can also imagine that the inequality, deregulation, social conflict, instability, progress and globalisation of our own age is far from unprecedented. If the history we think is carved in stone, like an epitaph on a gravestone, proves instead to be a fiction that can be rewritten, nothing in our present or future is fixed either. I like to believe there’s something liberating in this.

Wayne Burrows (July 2013)

Robert Holcombe: Marine (1955) Collage on paper, 8” x 10” Private Collection

(i) The Geology of Hawaii

In the very centre of the Pacific Ocean, the largest single feature on the Earth’s surface, eight islands – O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, Maui, Kaua‘i, Moloka‘i, L‘na‘i, Ni‘ihau, Kaho’olawe – rise from the sea-floor to a peak height of 32, 024 feet, approximately equal to the cruising altitude of a passenger aircraft. These volcanoes built themselves, one eruption after another over millions of years, each adding another thin sheet of rock to an

infinitely patient ascent. They broke the surface, kept growing, faster now, freed from the water’s weight, until plates and fissures shifted beneath them, choked their flows of lava and left them cold. Seeds

took root. Migrating birds flew to their forests and slopes. Boats found their shores. Fishing villages grew into cities. These mountains now erode, each tide reducing them a fraction more. It happens so slowly that whole lives pass without the slightest change being noticed. Our

species knows these islands as butterflies know changing seasons when they alight on oak leaves in summer. The ocean, miles deep, hides the truth: that whoever inhabits these islands clings to the very tips of an immense and volatile mountain range while their whole land slowly

returns to the blue salt-water.

(iii) The Bull of Perillus, 1550

A stone lacks permanence. It is transformed by water, wind and hu-man touch. It erodes, diminishing in size from a boulder to a beach pebble to a grain of sand. A metallurgist pours a liquid metal ingot

from the iron or bronze that a fire of sufficient intensity smelts from the crushed remains of a stone. A blacksmith, whose hands shape

and manipulate this ingot, hammers it into some new form, so unlike a stone that its true origin appears less plausible than magic: a stone becomes an axe, a sword, a hollow bronze bull. One such brazen bull was commissioned from Perillus of Athens to become the favourite instrument of torture and execution of the Sicilian ruler, Phalaris of Acragas. The tyrant planned to seal his enemies inside its belly and

light a fire beneath it, an ingenious acoustic mechanism allowing him to imagine, as they roasted alive, that his victims’ screams were the bellows of a bronze animal magically brought to life. When the bull was delivered to Phalaris, it is said that Perillus himself, the mecha-nism’s inventor, became the first victim of the terrible device he had brought into the world. Flesh becomes fire and ash. A stone becomes

bronze. Breath becomes water. Condensation blurs the reflection in a mirror.

(ii) The Immaterial Stone of Dr Samuel Johnson, 1763

It is reported in the pages of James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson that his subject once thought himself to have decisively

countered the Irish philosopher George Berkeley. Berkeley’s ‘im-materialist’ theories argued that the world and its objects, the things we see, taste and lean our weight against, the bodies we desire, the salts we sweat from our skins, the sensations we process in our own nerves and brains and call reality, are merely the products of our own consciousness. Johnson, hearing of Berkeley’s theory, kicked out at a large stone and declared: “I refute it thus”. Johnson was

wrong. He had refuted nothing. Berkeley allowed for the sensations of pain, pleasure and physical presence as we perceive them in our everyday experience of drizzle, hunger and heartache. He simply insisted – like the physicists who passed through the looking glass

of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics into sub-atomic realms where matter is energy and follows its own rules – that, however our toes bleed and bones ache after we kick a lump of granite, we can still

have no absolute certainty that it exists outside our perception of it.

(v) The Principles of Geology, 1822

The story of this strange journey to Hawaii is told in Voyage of the HMS Blonde to the Sandwich Islands in the Years 1824 - 1825, an account written by a young woman named Maria Graham to mark

the Blonde’s return to England. Graham, who in her later years became Lady Callcott with the knighthood of her second husband

in 1837, had achieved recognition with accounts of her early travels. In Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822, she had described her life in the nine months that followed her first hus-

band’s death of a fever aboard the ship under his command, during a voyage to protect British mercantile interests along the Pacific coast

of South America. Arriving in Chile unexpectedly widowed, Gra-ham had abandoned the English colony to live among the Chileans themselves, witnessing devastation and new land rising from the sea during a severe earthquake that autumn. Her notes on this, made at first hand among the ruins of Valparaíso, were later cited in The

Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell’s study of the processes by which land-masses are continually reshaped by the pressures of the earth’s core and the movements of its crust across a ‘geological time’ so deep

that temporal vertigo strikes when we even begin to try and conceive of it.

(iv) The Voyage, 1824

King Kamehameha II of the Sandwich Islands, the central Pacific archipelago now known by the name of its largest island, Hawaii, and his Queen, Kamâmalu, visited Drury Lane theatre with their retinue

during a State Visit to London on June 4, 1824. Both contracted measles – most probably, it is thought, during an official tour of the Royal Military Asylum the next afternoon – and since both lacked

immunity to the virus died six days apart, Kamâmalu on July 8, the King following, grief-stricken, on July 14. George Anson Byron, a cousin of the celebrated Romantic poet George Gordon Byron

and the successor to his titles, was assigned the captaincy of HMS Blonde and the task of transporting the bodies of Kamehameha II, also known by his birth name of Liholiho, and Kamâmalu home, setting sail from Spithead, England, on 28 September 1824. The

Blonde would make its way back to Polynesia by way of Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, Valparaíso and the Galapagos Islands, finally landing in Honolulu to reunite the King and Kamâmalu with their native soil on May 6, 1825. There, they were laid to temporary rest in a coral house styled after a European tomb in the grounds of Hale‘Ali ‘i on

the island of O‘ahu, and later reinterred among their ancestors in the Royal Mausoleum at Mauna‘Ala.

(vii) The Circulation of the Blood, 1628

The English physician William Harvey published Du Motu Cordis, a work better known as On the Motion of the Heart and Blood, in

Frankfurt, laying out in its pages the principles by which the heart’s contractions move blood around the body. Arteries collect oxygen

from the lungs; oxygenated corpuscles circulate the body then return depleted along the veins, only to be once again oxygenated in the

lungs as the cycle begins again, running uninterrupted from the first breath-gasp to the final death rattle of every human or animal exis-tence. Harvey had studied the process of circulation in rabbits, eels and pigeons, snails and shrimp, un-hatched chicks and every variety of fish. This was no esoteric specialism. The letting of blood was as much the preserve of barbers as physicians in Harvey’s day, since only they had comparable skill with hot water, razors and scalpels

and offered it at a cost affordable to those of limited means. The old barbers’ business of clean bloodletting, removal of growths, tooth ex-tractions and surgical interventions, all carried out alongside shaves and haircuts, maintains a subliminal presence in modern city streets, where the jovial red stripes marked along the length of a traditional painted barber’s shop pole still suggest the blood-stained bandage at

the root of its design.

(vi) An Ocean of Information, 2013

I am looking at a map of the world. Or, to be more precise, I am looking into a desktop computer screen at a digital copy of a six-

teenth century navigational aid, scanned to a high resolution from a parchment preserved in the archives of a museum somewhere in Canada. The algorithms that revealed this map to me, barely a fraction of a second after I typed its name, are precise, logical and indiscriminate as a tide, bringing many other things to my atten-

tion in its wake: maps of unreal worlds traversed only in computer games; a drinks cabinet concealed inside a fake seventeenth cen-tury globe; pictures of asteroids and cocktail bars; a view of white

blossom against blue sky; a collection of Japanese anime film stills; photographic documentation of a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The map on my screen shows continents, clusters of land separated by

great stretches of flat blue sea. There are islands holding their places in these oceans. Sea-monsters occasionally break the surface. When I search for information, any fact or image I find becomes a single

island in a further electronic ocean; one stone pebble washed up and lost among other pebbles, covered in seaweed, driftwood and

broken shells.

(ix) The Lineage, 1824

George Anson Byron, the seventh of his line, inherited his title on the death of the poet, George Gordon Byron, author of Don Juan and – most famous of all his works – a short life that furnished his age with so many controversies that even his most notorious con-

temporaries were scandalised and fascinated. His successor was of a very different, even opposite, temperament. He had begun his career

as a lowly naval volunteer during the Napoleonic Wars in 1800 and retired from a life marked almost entirely by its reliability and discretion with the rank of Admiral in 1862. He had inherited the

titles from his cousin in April 1824, only a few months before he set sail on HMS Blonde that September. The shared grandparent of both

men was John Byron, a man who had circumnavigated the globe twice and earned his nickname, ‘Foul-Weather Jack’, by a strange

mixed luck in encountering but always surviving storms at sea. He also unwittingly laid the ground for a reversal of history in late

twentieth century England when he charted and took possession of a bleak cluster of South Atlantic islands, inhabited mainly by birds: it was the grandfather of George Anson Byron, captain of HMS Blonde in September 1824, and George Gordon Byron, the celebrated poet who died at Missolonghi in April 1824, who had first claimed the Falkland Islands on behalf of the English Crown in the year 1765.

(viii) The O ‘ahu Thrush, 1824

In Voyage of the HMS Blonde to the Sandwich Islands in the Years 1824 – 1825, Maria Graham reports that a young naturalist had

joined the expedition, having obtained Admiralty sponsorship for his passage through the influence of his older brother, Rowland Bloxam, the ship’s Chaplain. Andrew Bloxam’s lack of method and aptitude are a recurring theme in the journal of James Macrae, the ship’s

official horticulturalist, but Graham’s portrayal of his contribution is more generous, no doubt in part because her account drew on

records and notes kept not by Macrae, but by Rowland and Andrew Bloxam themselves. Whatever her reasons, Graham is complimentary about Bloxam’s ornithological work, which despite his inexperience added several species to the scientific knowledge of the day, among

them the now-extinct Âmaui or O ‘ahu Thrush, a small brown bird he noted as common, its calls distinct for being those of the only song-bird on the island. He thought Hawaiian honey-creepers more finch than hummingbird, an observation confirmed by later science, and his aptitude at the preparation of specimens, of which he returned

many in excellent condition, proved exemplary. The specimens prepared by Andrew Bloxam during this voyage are now the only

evidence, beyond a few painted studies and written descriptions, that livingĀÂmaui ever existed in the wilds of O‘ahu.

(xi) A French Prisoner, 1825

George Anson Byron stands on the deck of HMS Blonde. It is eve-ning, perhaps on the return leg of his voyage, recent memories of Hawaii and Galapagos, of Valparaíso and his sighting of the guano

atoll of Starbuck Island – named after his great friend, Captain Valentine Starbuck, an American whaler –all still fresh in his mind.

The water is still, or as still as the ocean ever is, with no land in sight, and the moon is high above the water, contemplating its own wavering reflection. The air is warm. Flying fish spark occasionally

among the glittering waves. He does not know why, but Byron recalls a Frenchman only a little older than himself, a prisoner aboard his ship many years ago, who had spoken to him about the estranged

cousin he always felt obliged to pretend he had no interest in beyond their shared lineage. For the Frenchman, to be close to that cousin’s

renowned blood offered a small excitement on a tedious journey. Now, remembering the encounter, Byron wonders if his own descen-dants will one day encounter men as thrilled to meet them, because of their association with him, as this Frenchman had once seemed inspired by his own association with this man who, it was said, was

already a hero in Greece, having died to defend her ancient legacy at the head of an army mustered at his own expense.

(x) A Mourning Tattoo, 1823

The visit of Kamehameha II and Kamâmalu to London took place soon after the death, in 1823, of Keâpâolani, the King’s mother and his father’s highest-ranking and second favourite wife. Kamâmalu is known to have loved this mother-in-law, whose body bore the

prostration tattoo, a sign so powerful that all who saw it must imme-diately bow low before the skin it adorned. Kamâmalu expiated her grief at this loss by undertaking to have an elaborate tattoo made on her own tongue, an operation observed by the American missionary

William Ellis. When he asked about the pain it must cause, Kamâma-lu replied: “He eha nui no, he nui roa ra ku‘u aroha” (“great pain, but greater affection”). The tattoo’s power and its specific associa-

tion with sailors is thought to have its origin among those who spent time in Polynesia; who saw these patterns on the skins of islanders,

learned the art and began to apply their own designs, often featuring erotic, maritime and gambling themes. The ritual of the seaman’s

tattoo – its proof of resistance to pain, means of killing long hours at sea, its marking of indelible tribal affiliations, symbolic protections

and private histories – finds its way across the Pacific to the port cit-ies of Europe and America, nestled among spices and saltpetre, raw

sugars and oils.

(xiii) A Mermaid Tattoo, 1810

Just before dawn, in the winter of 1810, the Frenchman is awake,

listening to the massed breathing of his fellow prisoners, so loud that the barracks might be mistaken for a ship’s cabin and the fields of

Cambridgeshire for an ocean. His eyes, well-adjusted to the darkness, make out the shapes of the men sleeping men around him, their

weights creaking in their hammocks, tarred cords straining against the walls and low beams of their quarters. An older man he has come to imagine his best companion here is snoring heavily, the scales of the long tail of his Mermaid tattoo just visible under a sleeve on the dark wrist he lays across the great expanse of his round belly. The

Frenchman had once asked this comrade about Mermaids and other marine wonders, the Sea-Serpents and Kraken, the living islands and

siren songs he knew from stories, but the man, who had spent his youth on the seas of Tahiti and Martinique, just laughed at him and spoke of Dugongs, Whales and Giant Squid, the way wind sounded on the ropes of raised sails and those strange fevers that drove men

to hallucinate lush green fields where the ocean stretched away unbroken in all directions. The Frenchman could never decide if

that laughter and these explanations should be taken as a denial or confirmation that such marvels were indeed real.

(xii) The Coronation of Kamehameha II, 1819

On the death of Kamehameha I his eldest son was still known by his birth-name, Liholiho, and thought by his father to be indulged, perhaps not the strongest material from which to consolidate a new dynasty. So it was decided that the role of Kuhina Nui, or co-ruler, should be created, and its responsibilities invested in Ka‘ahumanu,

the old King’s favourite among all his wives. It is said that when Liholiho returned to his father’s court at Kailua-Kona expecting to

rule alone, he was instead greeted by Ka‘ahumanu dressed in a royal feathered cape, who announced the decision of Kamehameha to the people gathered at the shore. Liholiho was given no choice but to

accept his ceremonial role as though the decision had been his own, leaving the islands under the administrative control of Ka‘ahumanu herself. His loss of face would soon be rectified, even though the ar-rangement was not to change. Liholiho’s coronation as King Kame-hameha II was marked with a procession, his own wife, Kamâmalu, at its heart, seated in a whaleboat whose bows were draped in a vast

expanse of richly-patterned tapa cloth carried by a retinue of seventy warriors. Kamâmalu wore a scarlet pa‘cape of silk and feathers and sat beneath a tasselled Chinese umbrella of red damask trimmed

with gold, which was held above her head by a high-ranking Chief-tain. On either side of this Chieftain stood the Prime Minister and

the official Orator of the islands in their own richly plumed helmets, each bearing a kahili, the feathered staff of state.

(xv) Comanche, Sioux, Wichita, 1890

Trade circulates by the routes known to maps. Objects are carried on winds and ocean currents; horsepower, railway tracks, interstate highways and the tunnels dynamited through mountain ranges re-

draw landscapes, open new circuits for the extraction of wealth from the world as its boundaries expand. Spanish horses transform the

lives of Comanche and Sioux, as railroads change the ways of settlers encroaching into their ancient territories. Bison pass from resource to liability, delaying locomotives in any place where herds mass for

shelter from harsh winds in the raw cuttings gouged across the Great Plains. In Washington State and Kansas, free-roaming bison are

slowly eradicated, much as volcanic seamounts erode and become encrusted with coral; the Wichita, Cheyenne and Lakota are pressed into reservations where stones and feathers, trophy bear-claws and the woven cloths of medicine bundles can be traded for liquor and gaming chips. These strike the roots of the casinos these tribes will later build, as Mormons once seeded the ground of Las Vegas, that neon hallucination in the Nevada desert, where contrived chance

and artifice reign supreme; Las Vegas, where great fortunes hang on the casual roll of bone-hard plastic dice made from the fossil liquid

residues of forests, seaweed and dinosaurs: this mirage will become a template for the world.

(xiv) Trade Winds, 1820

When trade routes are mapped, we trace them onto the ocean’s cur-rents and the known wind patterns. They move between England, Canada and the Caribbean; Indonesia, Bengal and Japan; Portugal and Brazil; Spain and the ports of Mexico and Venezuela. Then, all

these courses round together at the Southern tip of the Americas and the Cape Horn of Africa, exactly as all blood finds its way through the lungs and the heart’s chambers. These routes once more sweep

outward and diverge, cross the Pacific from Valparaíso to Galapagos, Tahiti to Hawaii, Samoa to New Zealand; they circle back again to the coasts of Indonesia, Japan and China before returning to Eng-land, Spain and Portugal. The same patterns of circulation, visibly

replicated by these trade routes on the oceans, can be found in microcosm, tattooed inside the engraved outline of a human body in the pages of William Harvey’s Du Motu Cordis. Sometimes, we imagine that the sound heard when a conch shell is pressed to an

ear might be the rush of our own blood, amplified and echoed back as our bodies remind the shell of the ocean that made it, only to set it singing of tidal swells and the pink noise of breaking surf at

night. What we really hear is only the pressure of sound-waves, the resonance of air vibrating in spiral chambers where the soft body of a salt-water mollusc once fitted so comfortably that all trace of its

existence vanished.

(xvii) Bone Dice, 1811

In the barracks at Norman Cross the Frenchman breaks the tedium of his long days by gaming for tobacco rations and coins and, like others here, applies his skills to scrimshaw, whittling dominoes,

cards and dice from any bones that come into his hands. Others here make delicate model guillotines with working blades or fully-rigged clippers with tissue-paper sails on commission for English officers, but the Frenchman knows what can be traded, what he can sell at the markets in the prison ground; how even small trinkets can be turned to ready money at the prison gate. The bones come mostly

from meals, though he knows some men, who work faster than him, will follow pigs in the prison gardens where they truffle up shallow graves, dig shoulder-blades, ribs and femurs from the cold soil and lay them out to bleach in the sun. A pen-knife transforms mutton

ivory and ox-bone, a human shin, to this resilient and delicate mate-rial, a porcelain so malleable in a skilled hand that any object, from a shoehorn to a letter-knife, a tooth-pick to a toy cart, a cube-dice to a snuff box, can be carved from it to kill the hours of waking among

cramped hammocks in the cabbage-sweat of a long confinement.

(xvi) Steel Guitars, 1973

On the outer edge of a small town in the North West of Wyoming or Montana, Dakota or Colorado, it doesn’t much matter exactly where, a black Ford pick-up casts its flickering shadow across the

deserted road while a small fire burns in a metal waste-paper basket, illuminating a patch of scrub grass behind the looming back wall of an abandoned cement factory. The pick-up’s black doors are slung

open, its windows wound down; its radio is tuned to a frequency where hard luck and trouble are the currencies of choice. A young man kneels before the flames, his shoulders hunched against the

night chill, a can of beer in one hand as the other idly feeds photo-graphs into the fire, taking them one at a time from a small pile on the ground. Steel guitars unite the endless sung variations on shift work and divorce, truck driving and gambling debts, neon-lit bars,

whisky chasers and women dancing with other guys; betrayed wives, thrift-store dresses and, our old friends, these shattered dreams. The sound of an imaginary paradise, whose beach-huts stand open and hammocks sway under palm trees on a warm night breeze, shapes

itself to fit this new template, a purgatory of open roads, dime-stores and broken hearts, where photographs flare blue and green in the

darkness, erased to ashes one after another.

(xix) The Breaking of the Kapu, 1819

The priests at this table are uncertain, their eyes searching among the gathered company for reassurance, but Ka‘ahumanu and

Keôpûolani are united in their purpose and the new King, Liholiho, the son of Kamehameha, is with them. There has been licence in

the mourning for his father, copulation and sacrifices unmade, but this forbidden meal is now spread before them, the men invited not

merely to witness this taboo’s breaking but, by their presence, to break it further still. If male and female eat together great spirits

will surely stir into vengeance at the violation! But Ka‘ahumanu and Keôpûolani united are more powerful than the priests or the King,

who when he changes his mind about this night will prove incapable of re-imposing the old ways. He will set himself adrift in a canoe

before returning to eat dog, like a woman. Ka‘ahumanu and Keôpûo-lani are more terrifying than the old gods when they eat the men’s food, lifting bananas and pork to their mouths while the men eat

with them, silently. When this feast ends the ‘Ai kapu will be truly broken. The priests will watch for signs of retribution but no earth-quake, no eruption, no storm or great wave will come. The gods of the Heiau, the temples, will be abandoned. Few will return to them.

(xviii) The Creation of Hawaii

Kumulipo is ‘a place of darkness and origin’, a symbolic night in-vested with all the powers of creation. It is a Hawaiian chant whose

opening lines run as follows:

At the time of change and turning the sun went out. The moon’s light was then released like fire.

From the deepest blackening of the sun shone forth the darkness where night was born…

The religious beliefs of Hawaii evolved on the archipelago between around 600 and 1300AD, when waves of settlers from Tahiti mingled

there with those arriving from other Pacific islands. Hawaii’s gods are many, invested in beings and objects: insects, birds and fish;

waves, weather and volcanoes; stones, forests and sky. In the geneal-ogy and creation myth of the Kumulipo a single cosmic night, exist-ing outside ordinary time, brings forth in succession the sea urchin

and land-fern; seventy-three kinds of fish; the sea birds and the caterpillar; the turtle, the lobster and the jellyfish; the flea and the rat. Only when all these are in the world can the four divinities ap-

pear: La‘ila‘i, the female; Ki ‘i, the male; Kâne the god; and Kanaloa, the octopus. La‘ila‘i, bears a child with Ki ‘i before Kâne has his own chance to father children, a happenstance that ensures Ki ‘i ’s line is

established first and holds seniority over the gods’ line established by Kâne. By this device, ancient Hawaiians were not ruled by their gods

but acted as their gods’ keepers.

(xxi) The Burning of Nottingham Castle, 1831

The Miners’ Guild of Saxony, Germany, was sufficiently endowed in the year 1718 to commission a ceremonial medieval-style long-axe

of a reddish brown wood, inlaid with bone panels etched with pagan and Christian symbols: flowers and musicians to evoke fertility and pleasure, a crucifixion scored onto one panel, and cut again into

the sharp blade, to remind its holders of the necessity for sacrifice. There are primal roots to these objects. By the 1830s, miners in

Nottinghamshire were moving towards Chartist revolt, threatened with Transportation to the penal colonies of the New World for their

efforts. Sacrifices to the Dukes of Newcastle are suspended, the land-owners’ kapu broken, when Henry Pelham-Clinton, the Fourth

Duke, opposes reforms to Parliament in 1831. His palace is razed in a single night, giving the sandstone mount of Castle Rock the ap-pearance of a volcano lighting the night sky with a furious eruption. “Nottingham was in a shocking state & the rioters had set fire to Not-tingham Castle”, the Duke had written in London that night. “The mobs were outrageous & impelled by the worst spirit…” He never

said what spirit had impelled this mob, nor did he ever refurbish or live in the Castle again, leaving it to stand blackened as a vengeful

rebuke to the city. But the rebuke was to men like him, his old gods and their demands for sacrifice: a reminder of the fragility of any

authority in the face of an organized people possessed by the spirit to move against it.

(xx) Propaganda Against the Chartists, 1866

Maria Graham published her children’s book, Little Arthur’s His-tory of England, in 1835. It ran to many editions, though material

added to copies published after Graham’s death in 1842 is the work of anonymous authors expressing their own opinions rather than

Graham expressing hers. If accounts of Abolition and the Great Irish Famine added to the revised edition of 1866 are any indication,

these ghosts were unconvincing propagandists. The Chartist move-ment of the 1840s, which had attempted to secure reforms to reduce

corruption among the land-owners and aristocrats who had long made parliament the blunt instrument of their own private interests,

is recounted for the benefit of small children in these words:

“The Chartists, misled by some designing persons who fancied they might make a French revolution in old England, thought this would be a good time

to try and frighten the Queen of England into granting their foolish and dangerous wishes, so they collected a very large multitude, intending to go

in a body to the House of Commons and demand what they wanted. But the people of England loved the Queen too well, and were too well satisfied with the government of their country, to let the Chartists do any mischief; so, at the command of the Duke of Wellington, soldiers were placed in various parts of

London, to be in readiness; and citizens undertook to guard the City…”

Yet even the most transparent and doomed effort to transform mem-ory takes some possession of future possibilities, offers an incantation

to the gods of the Heiau, the temples we have yet to abandon.

(xxiii) Two Wooden Fish, 1610

William Harvey, it was said, suffered insomnia and loved dark-ness. In darkness he could enter his thoughts most clearly and he is rumoured to have purposefully secluded himself in caves at times.

He observed birds in their natural habitats, and who could say that it was not the motion of beating wings that inspired him to understand

the workings of valves and muscles in the living heart? Perhaps, glancing down through his own reflection in a slow-moving river current, Harvey noticed the gills of stickle-backs and trout pulsing against the weight of water, then afterwards stared into his house

fire, without intent, merely noticing two decorative fish carved on the wooden cabinet above his hearth. The fish seem to stand in the water

among reeds and flowers. For a moment, Harvey is fascinated by the patterns these warm shadows cast over that primal carved water,

animating these creatures into a flickering illusion of life. Smoke lifts around the new log he has pushed into glowing embers. A blue flame spurts, like blood from the opened artery of some living thing, whistles for an instant, dies back when dry bark peels into red fire. There is a pattern in the smoke as it curls upon itself, stirs its own white plume against the black soot in the chimney, then vanishes

quickly, snatched up by the cold air outside.

(xxii) Lambeth Delft, 1812

During his stay at Norman Cross the Frenchman is told of two pre-decessors, legends among inmates, who rather than scrimshaw rough ox-scapulae and mutton-ribs like the rest, had in 1804 made finely etched plates and a sturdy press by who knew what sublime art to

manufacture their own English banknotes. These ingenious charac-ters, named Nicholas Deschamps and Jean Roubillard, were discov-

ered, tried for forgery and jailed at Huntingdon, where they had remained in captivity to the day he learned of them, six years later. The Frenchman supposed that their swerve of the gallows was for-tunate, theirs being a capital crime. Yet in other instances it seemed forgery was not forbidden, the arts of its perpetrators well-rewarded rather than punished. The city of Delft had built its great fortune on vases, tiles and other ceramic goods in a tin-glazed ‘Moorish’ style,

but a cluster of potteries at Southwark and Lambeth made their own fortunes, entirely respectably, by the manufacture of copies. Delft

pitchers, platters, puzzle jugs, bleeding bowls, cups and hearth-tiles, all themselves contrived in imitation of vessels that had made their way to Italy from Spain, to Spain from India, to India from Persia and Baghdad, simply multiplied in abundance, as though no true

source were any longer visible or wanted.

(xxv) A Bear Claw Bag, 1952

In 1952 the museum built inside the ruin of the Duke of Newcastle’s abandoned house is gifted a bag sewn from bison hide and deco-

rated with blue glass beads, these overlaid with translucent marine shell-pieces, red woven fabric cut into triangles and two equal rows of five sharply curved bear-claws. The pouch, made in the 1890s for

carrying tobacco pipes, appears to be an authentic fabrication, an object made in imitation of a Plains Indian artefact by Plains Indians themselves. It is an object with an unsettling presence, like a fur-cov-ered tea-cup or a lover’s scarlet fingernails, designed to evoke some notion of ‘the primitive’ in those its makers knew sought such proofs while being just as nimbly conceived and targeted as a fashionable

clutch-bag. It will not be the first or final time such things are done. By the time of Hawaii’s 1959 incorporation into the United States, a great wave of bamboo screens, glazed ceramic idols, floral garlands,

taboo-themed cocktails, palm-tree patterned shirts and grass parasols had crashed over every American city at once, filling the air with marine percussion, steel guitar and high, ethereal voices. Eisen-

hower’s America claimed Hawaii, but Hawaii surfaced in America’s unconscious as a fever dream of red feathers and plastic volcanoes; a

new land rising from the waters of the Pacific.

(xxiv) A Pacific Islander Dines with Dr Samuel Johnson, 1775

No-one ever says his name correctly, always calling the young man from Ra’iatea Omai rather than his true name, Mai, but it hardly matters. There are other questions troubling Mai’s thoughts as he sits opposite this red-faced man with a small cap of powdered hair perched on the very top of his head above a corpulent body that seems at perpetual war with its clothes. Mai travelled here with

Cook’s ship and finds himself in London on a whim, the first of his kind to arrive here and a great novelty. He spends days in paint-

ers’ studios, evenings with the friends of Mr Joseph Banks; all find his ways amusing, even as he puzzles to tell the things these men

deem civilised and savage apart. The women of England dine with the men, but kapu is observed at the meal’s end, when all depart for another room. He sees stone pillars not wooden carvings from

his carriage window when clattering along Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate, but surely these are temples, though called Banks, where the men once cast out by their own professed Lord now

demolish churches to extend their trading floors. And how many skeleton-thin men in the streets are needed to supply the fat of just one at this table? But Mai has learned not to speak of these matters

and listens instead to Johnson’s talk, tapping out a quiet rhythm with a silver spoon on the outer edge of a large, colourful plate painted with an image of a bronze bull, a blue sky and a stone temple that

looks just like the Bank of England.

(xxvii) Glendale, California, 1960

“I got a little exotic back there for a while”, said Les Baxter of the days when Capitol’s studios filled with tribal drums and massed

voices singing imaginary war chants. “People ask where it came from, if I’d been to Brazil, Cuba or Africa. But back then I never got further out than Glendale...” In 1947 Baxter had conjured Music Out of the Moon with the help of Samuel Hoffman, a chiropodist who played

theremin on his days off. He scored a Tahitian romance, Tanga Tika in 1953, sought Ports of Pleasure in 1957, found Jewels of the Sea in 1961. Exotica could be anything: sound as perfume, untamed emo-

tions in a 10” box, sacrificial rites of a tribe who existed nowhere ex-cept on these records. The market was US conscripts returning from wartime postings in the South Pacific, who wanted to settle down but

needed this otherworld of white sand, bird-calls, primitive dances, forbidden idols and hot lava flows. Exotica meant it could all be had with a cocktail and a frozen chicken dinner. This was the background music of gamblers huddled over plastic chips in the neon volcanoes of Las Vegas; the subliminal underscore in candlelit bars and shell-lounges where the tables were trimmed with real bamboo. Exotica

was there for those romantic evenings in suburban houses where the smell of new carpet and fresh timber still lingered and open windows couldn’t keep out the noise of the neighbours’ lawnmowers and TVs. The only authentic thing about any of this was the desire it engen-dered; its determination to suspend reality, one LP side at a time.

(xxvi) The Transportation of the Idols, 1825

George Anson Byron is walking through the dry grass that has over-taken the sacred grounds of the old temple, leading his men into a

compound overlooked by carved figures, towering and severe primi-tive forms that unnerve him, even as he knows they are only carved wood and can harm no-one. Perhaps it is the recollection of hearing the story of James Cook’s final days, when he returned Omai to his own land, travelled here, then tried to remove wood from this place for his fire. Cook’s life was ended at the hands of warriors for that

sacrilege. Now Byron is here, with the dispensation of Ka‘ahumanu and the new King, those warriors’ descendants chattering with a

gaggle of missionaries, their clothes and manners barely distinguish-able. They prise the idols from their places, lifting them from the wooden joints that have held them so long. His men work slowly,

though whether from some respect for this formerly sacred ground or in admiration of the native carpentry he cannot tell. The idols will be packed and returned to London to satisfy the curiosity of schol-ars. Byron idly fancies that, just as the Christian God has found His way to O‘ahu, foreswearing these natives from liquor, idolatry and fornication, so these few among this island’s many gods are now to

embark upon a long voyage to England.

(xxix) Roses, Brambles and an Etched Bone, 1873

Andrew Bloxam is not so nimble or quick at walking among the cart-ruts and stones as he once was, but he takes pleasure in the lanes, amid the brambles and dog-roses, the butterflies and moths; the

fungi that bear his name in the woods hereabouts and all the beetles that live among them. The weather has been poor since Bagnall’s

visit, when the two enjoyed the sun’s warmth. Today, a drizzling mist hangs over the hedges between cold downpours. Bloxam is distracted by a sudden strong memory of days spent among exotic plants, net-ting small birds for study, passing long evenings by a sea-wood fire while dozing under Pacific stars. Now, stumbling on a clod of raised earth, he observes a thin femur protruding from the drenched grass; leans to draw it clear, like an elderly Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone. The soil is displaced and he sees, among a slither of red-

brown leaves, a cluster of Greville’s Larch Bolete, then another bone. It is a yellow oxen’s shoulder-blade, flushed with algae, a fine green

mist of fur he rubs away to expose the incised image of a rigged ship, signed in ornate letters: On Departure. England. 1815. The work is skilful. The patterns of herring-bone and diamonds remind him of

the tapa cloths and bark papers packed away in a trunk at his house. He holds the bone by a rounded joint and imagines its balanced

weight to be very like that of a small axe.

(xxviii) The Gamblers, 1812

The Frenchman is dealing the cards he’s made, shuffling them in his fingertips since they’re too tiny to fit his whole hand, hearing them clatter like sea-shells or small stones. He deals these light and deli-cate bone-slices, their etched and coloured Aces, Queens and Kings,

while the men around his tea-chest focus their gazes on the flat yellow backs he already knows so well that, even though there are

no cheat’s marks inscribed, the mere grain tells him what the figure on each face must be. This one, with its slight kink in curvature, is the Queen of Diamonds; that, with its cut node and corner slightly

chipped, is the Three of Clubs. As they lift the cards, fitting all invis-ibly into the snug of one palm, he feels a slight chill, imagines skel-etons playing bones for coins, rolling carved dice over ocean waves to trade the bones of men for land and stones. He knows too that

however the English officers mock their gambling, wondering at how these French so readily invite penury for a card game’s sake, this is

the only place in the world where old hierarchies crumble to dust. A King is made worthless by a Two of Spades, a Prince defeated by the combined forces of a hand of Threes, a great Queen laid low by a Six

of Clubs. If only within the closed circle of this game, all is briefly subject to chance, a force beyond the control of even the highest Judge, the greatest Admiral, even the Emperor both must serve.

(xxxi) The Red Trail, 1976

A black Ford pick-up swerves across a thin dirt-track on a vast red field somewhere in the central United States, perhaps near Wyoming

or Montana, Dakota or Colorado, the exact place doesn’t matter, only that it has expansive horizons and a red sun that is setting with crimson light streaking white clouds as blood daubs the cotton swabs in a surgeon’s basin. When the pick-up stops, braking into a swirl of fine dust, the faint sound of steel guitars drifts out on the still air and there’s a flash of light in the window of the cab door as it’s opened

and slammed. A tall figure with long black hair walks around the hot chrome grille, touches it, winces, then tests the wind before scraping a small square of ochre earth clear of grass with his foot. He pulls a

bundle of sticks from the back of the truck, pitches it like a small tipi in the prepared spot, sparks a fire inside it, then kneels, blowing into its upward curling plumes of smoke, its red flames, coaxing them into life. He unrolls a sleeping bag, opens a green canvas hold-all and lifts out a blue tin box. It rattles with sea-shells and sharks’ teeth, bear-claws and bone dice, folded skins and blood-red beads. He lifts the

lid, tips the whole lot onto the ground in front of him. Then he stares into the scattered fragments, as though trying to read their patterns before the whole red ocean of this Great Plain sinks into darkness.

(xxx) An Epidemic, 1850

King Kamehameha III, the successor to Liholiho, found himself trapped in the years following his late brother’s return. Ka‘ahumanu,

clutching a Bible translated into Hawaiian at her own request, her name inscribed on its red-leather in gold leaf, was already fading

when he took the throne. Kauikeaouli, the given name of this third King in Kamehameha’s dynasty, was said to translate: One set among

dark clouds. This he was, held between the new ways of the mis-sionaries and the old ways of the islands like a man beneath a palm watching thunderstorms. His people were eroding like a seamount

receding into the water, reducing year by year even before the measles swept the islands and left barely half of even those reduced numbers behind. A great wave had cleared the land, making room

for ever more American traders, ever more missionaries. Their numbers and power left him no choice but sign their agreements, throw his islands open to their Free Trade, subject his laws to their commerce. He looks fondly back at the youthful rebellions he once disowned, for Ka‘ahumanu’s sake; remembers drink and laughter among the men of Hulumanu, the bright Bird-Feather, as their

small group sought pleasure in the old ways while even the power of Ka‘ahumanu herself sank irrevocably into Puritan drabs.

LIST OF OBJECTS REFERENCED IN THE EVERY OBJECT TELLS A STORY GALLERY:

1: HH-X 733. Packet of bark cloth pieces, marked: “Hawaii. Samples brought back by

H.M.S. Blonde by A. Bloxam, 1825”. Made in Hawaii, c.1800 – 1820

2: HH-X 1485. Gift in 1879. Long handled axe in red-brown wood. Wood is inlaid

with bone circles and rectangles bearing images of flowers and musicians. The reverse

has an image of Christ on the cross and the letters I.N.R.L. Axe head is elaborate with

a rounded crucifix in the centre. Database describes it as miners’ guild axe, possibly

originating in Saxony area of Germany. Made c.1718.

3: NCM 1986-216. Gift in 1986. Carved and pierced bone box on 4 legs (2 broken or

missing). Painted ox-bone playing cards and dominoes in carved and pierced ox-bone

games box. Made by a French prisoner of War in England, c.1795 – 1815.

4: NCM 1886-39. Gift in 1886. A large Italian sixteenth century majolica shallow dish

with flange. Painted over entire upper surface with narrative mythological scene (from

the Bull of Perillus, source Ancient Greece/Rome). Dish decorated in blues, yellows,

greens and browns with archway, figures, brazen bull. Chipped at edge. c.1500 - 1599.

5: NCM 1953-110. Purchased 1954. An eighteenth century English Lambeth delftware

tin-glazed earthenware barber’s bleeding-bowl. Painted all over upper surface with

objects connected with a barber’s trade in cobalt blue, eg: razors, scissors, surgical

instruments. Unmarked.

6: NCM 1975-365. Gift in 1952. Pipe bag. Natural coloured hide, soft leather bison or

deer skin, fringed with blue glass beads, all applied with bear’s claws and mother-of-

pearl/haliotis shell pieces with another fringe of thin red woven fabric cut into triangles.

The claws and shell are thought to have been traded from the NW Coast. Two rows of

five claws. 1 row of 3 shell pieces. Plains Indian, North America, c. 1880 – 1900.

7: NCM 1915-56. Purchase (date unknown). A wide rectangular oak panel in two

pieces carved with design of two fishes in water with grasses and flowers. Panel is nar-

row from top to bottom. Unmarked. Made c.1600 – 1699.

8: NCM 1890-1279. Bequeathed 1890. A nineteenth century porcelain plate. Circular,

decorated with transfer printed butterflies, moths, beetles and other insects in naturalis-

tic colours. White ground. Unmarked. c.1800 – 1899.

“The Patagonian Conure is a species of wild parrot with dull slate-green feathers on its upper body but bright orange, red and yellow feathers underneath. It is now known to ornithologists as Cyanoliseus patagonus bloxami, named in honour of Andrew Bloxam, who returned a specimen to England from Chile in 1825. They are easily domesticated birds, widely traded as pets.”

The Patagonian Conure (1995)

Make Believe: Re-Imagining History and Landscape

20 July – 29 September 2013Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery