Untitled

OA Public Domain

Place MadeSouth Sea Islands --Solomon Islands

Object number1926.18.8

Institutional Credit LineCourtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum

DescriptionA brown patterned sash from the South Sea Islands.ProvenanceMemo from: Michael Dyer
Re:1926.18
September 29, 2023

Western contact with the island group named “New Hebrides,” by Captain James Cook, known today as Vanuatu in the vicinity of 16° 0' S and 167° 0' E, dates to the early seventeenth century when Portuguese Catholic explorer Pedro Fernandes de Queirós (1563–1614) visited the group in the service of Spain while searching for the great Southern Continent. Further Western influence was slow to reach the islands until the voyages of French explorer Louis-Antoine Bougainville (1729-1811) between 1766-1769. There was little American contact with the region until American whalers, beche-de-mer, and sandalwood traders, began visiting the islands in the mid-1820s. Missionaries were slow to penetrate the region not taking a firm hold until the early 1850s. Although considerable sperm whaling was done in the region (the Solomon Islands Grounds), only a handful of American whalers visited these island groups actually going ashore between 1822-1871.
Several pieces in the NBWM collection including clubs, arrows, spears, tapa cloth, fans, mats, a sash, and a “cannibal belt” from Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, and elsewhere in the region (including Tonga), came into the museum as gifts of both José G. Correia and his wife Virginia, in 1926. This collection is 1926.18, and consists of at least 18 separate pieces but there is doubtless more, as one entry in the Gift Book reads “clubs, etc., from New Hebrides.” The “etc.” implies that either more items may be unlisted, or that it refers to all of the subsequent materials.
José Goncalves Correia (1867-1954) appears to have been born in the Azores, possibly St. Miguel. He married a woman named Virginia, although their marriage and other vital statistics are uncertain. He appears in the historical record as a cooper onboard the brig Daisy of New Bedford, Benjamin Cleveland, master, 1912-1913, a sperm whaling and elephant seal voyage to the Antarctic. AMNH Ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy (1887-1973), sailed on this voyage collecting birds from South Georgia and elsewhere in the Southern Ocean. Correia’s development as a collector and specimen preparator is described in Murphy’s obituary, published in the Polar Record, Vol. 17, No. 106 (1974):
During this voyage Murphy taught José G. Correia, the Daisy’s cooper to collect and prepare bird skins. In 1914 Murphy arranged for him to return to South Georgia to collect more specimens for the American Museum of Natural History. Correia subsequently took part in many other ornithological collecting expeditions initiated by Murphy.
One such expedition was the Whitney South Sea Expedition (1920-1941):
The Whitney South Sea Expedition was hailed as the longest ornithological voyage in history, and the botanical specimens collected were vital to understanding bird habitation patterns. In 1920, the American Museum of Natural History, with the financial aid of Harry Payne Whitney, funded this expedition to islands in the South Pacific. Dr. Leonard C. Sanford—a trustee for the American Natural History Museum—hired Rollo Beck to complete field work with Naturalists Ernst H. Quayle and Charles Curtis. Together they gathered approximately 40,000 birds, plants, and other faunal specimens from over 600 islands. Many articles written about the expedition have shown that “with the exception of certain specimens given to [the Smithsonian Institution and Bishop Museum]…all the specimens collected by the expedition were sent to the American Museum.” Beck, Quayle, Curtis, and the expedition team set sail for the Tahitian island Papeete to establish a base that would enable easier travel to the islands of Eastern Polynesia. Along the way, the naturalists mainly focused on collecting birds. However, after observing that the populations of native people and wildlife were dying off on certain islands, they began studying the flora in hopes of discovering an environmental pattern that could potentially lead them to the cause. No definite connection was found, but an incredible amount of plant specimens were collected. The success of the Whitney expedition provided the American Museum with the largest ornithological collection in the country. Whitney even donated an additional $750,000 to build a separate wing for the museum to house the collection. Beck’s overzealous collecting, however, led to the extinction of several species of birds. The botanical specimens did not create as much controversy as the ornithological specimens, but did provide future botanists with significant new information about the plants of the South Pacific. (Smithsonian Institutional Archives, https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/auth_exp_fbr_eace0034 )

It was on this expedition that the Correia’s collected the Melanesian and other South Seas materials that they donated to the NBWM. In Oceanic Birds of South America (New York, 1936, Robert Cushman Murphy wrote:
The Museum [AMNH] then sent out J.G. Correia, a Portuguese-American collector, and his wife. After four years working through the Samoan, Fijian and Tongan Archipelagoes, we entered the New Hebrides and were all attacked by Malaria which finally, together with other causes, impelled Correia to return to a more healthful country.
Given the known provenance of the stuffed penquin[s] in the collection (1930.3), coming from Benjamin Cleveland’s wife, Emma A. Fish Cleveland, obtained on the 1912 voyage of the Daisy, it is not unlikely that Correia himself prepared the specimens. Only one specimen remains in the collection today.
In the database records for 1926.18 there is mention of a collection file and a 1927 Standard Times article about the collection and its gifting to the NBWM. Neither the file, nor the article have been located as of September 2023. There is no mention of Correia in the library Scrapbook Index.

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