Producer unknown to us
Oceania, Polynesia, Tahiti/Society Islands (Moorea, Huahine, Raiatea, Taha'a)
Before 1781
Mother-of-pearl (Pinctada margaritifera), coconut fiber
Acquired in 1773–74 or 1777 on Captain James Cook’s second or third expedition in the Pacific. It is yet unknown by whom the object was acquired.
Brought from Great Britain to Germany by Benjamin La Trobe, a Moravian working in London.
Inv. no. 68671
Some 250 years ago, Captain Cook encountered shimmering mother-of-pearl made into jewelry on many Polynesian islands. In 1773, Georg Forster, the German naturalist on Cook’s second voyage around the globe, noted in the Tonga archipelago: “The men use a mother-of-pearl bowl as an ornament, which is fastened with a string around the neck and hung down on the chest.” On the island of Tahuata in the Marquesas, where Cook sailed in 1774, Georg Forster also noticed mother-of-pearl jewelry, but this time as a kind of diadem on the head: “On the outside of which several round pieces of mother of pearl, some of them 5 inches in diameter, were fixed,” he noted in his chronicle “Voyages Around the World”.
The arrangement of three large mother-of-pearl discs, as seen on the necklace at Herrnhut, is rarely found in the travel accounts of Cook’s expeditions. However, Sir Joseph Banks, the chief naturalist on Cook’s first voyage around the world, reported the arrangement of three mother-of-pearl disks (te ufi) on a Tahitian mourning garment that he was allowed to “try on” at a funeral ceremony in Matavai Bay to participate in banishing angry, deadly ancestors according to Tahitian custom. This arrangement of three shiny shell interiors also applies to the Herrnhut necklace, but its mother-of-pearl disks are not attached to bark bast as in the mourning garment, but are attached to coconut fibers in such a way that they could serve as a necklace. However, the Herrnhut necklace might once also have been part of a slightly modified Tahitian mourning garment.