Ron Testa /Field Museum of Natural History 
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Cruise Darwin’s “enchanted island” by 
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Paradise,” a new exhibition opening at 
the American Museum of Natural His- 
tory on Wednesday, November 18. The 
exhibition comes from the Field Mu- 
seum of Natural History in Chicago, 
which has one of the best collections of 
Oceanian art in the United States. 
The making of tapa is an ancient 
craft, and anthropologists think it may 
date back to 2,000 b.c. or earlier. By 
1 ,000 b.c. tapa making was widespread 
in Asia and Indonesia, where the mate- 
rial was used for much the same pur- 
poses as woven cloth elsewhere. In the 
eighteenth century. Pacific islanders 
wearing “nothing but bark” were actu- 
ally handsomely attired in dresses, 
robes, blouses, and skirts with intricately 
painted patterns, often embellished, 
among the ruling classes, with feathers 
and other decorations. In Hawaii, skirts, 
called pa’u, were made of as many as 
ten layers of tapa, each up to six or seven 
feet long. Kamamalu, the wife of King 
Kamehameha II, who ruled Hawaii in 
the first part of the nineteenth century, 
was said to have worn a ten-layered pa’u 
that was so long and unwieldy that she 
had to lie down to have it put on. When 
Cook was killed in the Hawaiian Islands 
in 1779, his body was buried in the 
traditional tapa shroud. 
There are a number of tropical plants 
with a pliable inner bark suitable for 
making cloth, and in most places where 
these plants grow — Africa, South 
America, Asia, the Pacific — bark cloth 
is made. The paper mulberry is the 
favored plant in the Pacific; the island- j 
ers still make tapa in much the same 
way that Cook described — by stripping 
off the bark and then removing its outer 
layer to expose the soft inner skin. Often 
the bark is soaked before it is beaten. 
Most tapa beaters have a ribbed or 
textured surface; beating is done with I Q 
increasingly finer textured beaters, until 
finally either a beater with a smooth aa 
face or one with a carved pattern to be 
imprinted on the finished cloth is used. 
The beating of tapa — women’s work — is I \; 
traditionally a very public and social 
106 
