At the American Museum 
Patterns of Paradise 
“ I [s] hall now describe their method of 
makeing cloth, which in my opinion is 
the only curious manufacture they have, 
all their cloth is I beleive made from the 
bark of trees, the finest is made from a 
plan[t] which they cultivate for no 
other purpose. . . . They let this plant 
grow till it is about six or eight feet high 
the stem is than about as thick as ones 
thum or thicker, after this they cut it 
down and lay it a certain time in water, 
this makes the bark strip easy off the out 
side of which is than scraped off with a 
rough shell, after this is done it looks like 
long strips of raged linnen. These they 
lay together, by means of a fine paste 
made of some sort of a root, to the 
breadth of a yard more or less and in 
length Six, Eight or ten yards or more 
according to the use it is for, after it is 
thus put together it is beat out to its 
proper breadth and fineness upon a long 
square piece of wood with wooden beat- 
ers the cloth being kept wet all the time; 
the beaters are made of hard wood with 
four square sides and about a foot long 
including the handle which is round, 
each of the square sides are about 3 or 4 
inches broad and cut into grooves of 
different fineness this make the Cloth 
look at first sight as if it was wove with 
threed. . . . The finest sort when 
bleached is very white and corns nearest 
to fine Cotton. Thick cloth especialy 
fine is made by pasting two or more 
thickness’s of thin cloth made for that 
purpose together.” 
The Journals of Capt. James Cook: 
The Voyage of the Endeavour 
1768-1771 
Wherever James Cook met indig- 
enous tribes on his voyages in the South 
Painted hark cloth is stretched over 
a rattan frame in this night-dance 
mask from Papua New Guinea. 
Seas, he found the “curious manufac- 
ture” of bark cloth in use — for clothing, 
bedding, swaddling, bandaging, burials, 
and for buying and selling. He collected 
all kinds of bark cloth products, includ- 
ing magnificent cloaks from Hawaii, 
rolls of fine white linenlike cloth, effigies 
and masks, and thick mats decorated 
with colorful geometric patterns. To the 
British of Cook’s day, the South Pacific 
was an exotic paradise, inhabited by 
natives “wearing nothing but the bark of 
trees.” Interest in bark cloth was great 
enough that some of Cook’s specimens 
were cut up for a catalog — a bark sam- 
pler if you will— with the somewhat 
extended title: “A Catalogue of the Dif- 
ferent Specimens of Cloth Collected in 
the Three Voyages of Captain Cook to 
the Southern Hemisphere, with a Par- 
ticular Account of the Manner of the 
Manufacturing the Same in the Various 
Islands of the South Seas, Partly Ex- 
tracted From Mr. Anderson’s and Rein- 
hold Forster’s Observations, and the 
Verbal Account of some of the most 
knowing of the Navigators with Some 
Anecdotes that Happended to them 
Among the Natives.” 
Cook’s catalog and 125 other fine 
specimens of bark cloth (properly called 
tapa) will be on display in “Patterns of 
Ron Testa Field Museum of Natural History 
104 
