Ship's Bell

The missionary William Colenso met Māori near Whangārei using this bell in about 1841 as a kōhua (iron pot) to cook potatoes. It is bronze, thirteen centimetres long and nine centimetres deep, and has a Tamil inscription.

Colenso was told that the bell had been found after a heavy gale had blown down a large tree; it was uncovered from the tree roots. Its owners believed that the bell had been in the possession of the iwi (tribe) for several generations.

Colenso swapped an iron pot for the bell. After his death he bequeathed the bell to the Colonial Museum, forbear to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The bell produced a lot of interest when it was exhibited, and discussions and theories abounded about its origins.

The inscription on the bell has been translated as meaning ‘the bell of the ship of Mohaideen Bakhsh’. Alternative spellings have been suggested, including Mohideen Baksh, Mohideen Bux and Muhaidin Baksh.

For his 1975 article ‘The Story of the Tamil Bell,’ Brett Hilder consulted experts on Tamil script who suggested that the bell could be about 500 years old, and Hilder placed the date of casting at c.1450. A more recent palaeographic reading by scholars in Tamil Nadu dated the inscription to the 17th or 18th century. 

How the bell came to be in New Zealand remains an unsolved mystery.