That there was no particular public disapproval attached to 

 the use by individuals of pieces cut from large tapas is proven by a 

 touching incident: Mrs. Cook, expecting Captain Cook's return 

 to England from his third voyage and anticipating his appearance 

 at Court, ws embroidering paired pieces of decorated bark cloth 

 for a waistcoat when the news of his death reached her. The pieces 

 have been preserved— the embroidery never finished (Kaeppler, 

 1978, Fig. 221). 



Accession number 8443: 



Flat case 409 



Bark cloth beater (ike and variant spellings). Overall length, 14" 

 (35y 4 cm), four-sided; three grooved sides (8 or 9 grooves each), 

 one smooth side; handle rounded, slightly flared at bottom; dif- 

 fering from a great number of beaters examined at museums and 

 reviewed in the literature, it has a pyramidal top arising from its 

 four beating surfaces, instead of the usual squared off, flat end. 

 In a case of artifacts from Fiji at Harvard's Peabody Museum, 

 there is a four-sided beater collected 1897-1898 by Alexander 

 Agassiz (overall length 1 3" (35 cm), which has a shallowly pyrami- 

 dal top with three small, hemispherical indentations midway of 

 each side and one at the apex. 



In reply to a query, Paul Tolstoy, who has made an exhaustive 

 study of beaters, sent (pers. comm. 12/3/82) sketches of five 

 quadrangular, grooved beaters with pyramidal tops, two of which 

 are Samoan and three Fijian. One from Samoa has a "cup" at its 

 apex. Tolstoy, quoting from his notes, states that of some fifty- 

 nine beaters from Fiji of which he has a record, "about one third 

 have these tops to some degree." He adds that they seem to be 

 most common in Fiji. His examples are all from the American 

 Museum of Natural History, New York. This is interesting in 

 view of the apparent absence of such beaters at either Harvard's 

 Peabody Museum (except one specimen) or the Peabody 

 Museum in Salem. Photographs in Kooijman ( 1 972) and Brigham 

 ( 1 976) sometimes show beaters with faintly rounded heads amid a 

 majority of flat heads. A Tahitian beater (Kooijman 1972; Fig. 2) 

 presents an interesting detail: on a flat top there is carved in low 

 relief a four-sided shape, the four sides of which are directed to the 



74 



