Producer unknown to us
Oceania, Polynesia, Tonga Archipelago (Tongatapu, 'Eua, Nomuka or Lifuka/Ha'apai group)
Before 1781
Coconut fiber weave, tortoiseshell, shell slices, snails, red feathers
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. 68364
Only the Tuʻi Tonga – the highest leader of the Tongan archipelago in the 18th century, comparable to a king – and the highest ranking district chiefs were allowed to wear a sisi fale, a rare fragment of which is present in the Herrnhut Cook collection. Originally, the garment, naively called a “dance apron” by the British arrivals, usually consisted of 12 such fragments tied around the waist during ceremonies. Snails, coconut and seashells, as well as tortoiseshell, were intricately worked into the loops of a sisi fale's coconut weave. They served to accentuate the sacred red feathers that covered the regalia, mobilizing divine energy – mana. At the same time, in the abstract formal language of Polynesia, the jigsaw pieces as a whole created a mythical narrative of the ancestral gods to whom the wearer of the regalia traced his divine origins.
During their first encounters with the Tongans, Captain Cook and his scientific companions were unable to fathom the high spiritual significance and enormous status value of such ornaments due to their lack of language skills. They did notice, however, that the many small pieces made an effective “composition.” As James Cook noted, they were “a number of small pieces sewed together in such a manner as to form stars, half Moons, little squars….” In The Chronicle “Journey around the World,” written by Cook’s scientific draftsman on the second expedition, the German Georg Forster considered the “knee apron...with star-shaped figures” to be “the most peculiar thing we have seen of them.”