Overview
Throughout the Pacific personal ornaments, often shaped from bone and shell, have been popular. One of the most esteemed is the rei niho, a single tooth, in this case from a sperm whale. Since whales were not actually hunted, supply depended on whale strandings, giving the teeth a high rarity value. Information about this taonga, or treasure, is in tantalisingly short supply. All we know is that it was collected from Ruapuke Island in Foveaux Strait by Captain Bollons.
It is similar to ornaments found in early occupation sites throughout New Zealand. One site is Wairau Bar, where many activities of the moa-hunter period of Māori life were uncovered in the 1940s and 1950s. Imitation whaletooth forms, often made of bone, have been found in some of the earliest sites. Necklaces were sometimes made from reels of bone (usually moa bone), ivory or stone, strung like beads on a cord. Two of the necklaces found at Wairau Bar had a central whale tooth pendant and one had an imitation whale tooth pendant in serpentine.
During Captain Cook’s first visit to Aotearoa rei niho caught the eye of his botanist Joseph Banks (1743-1820). Banks described them as ‘the tooth of a whale cut slantwards so something as to resemble a tongue, & furnish’d with two eyes; these they wore about their necks & seem’d to value almost above every thing else’. (1) Sydney Parkinson, the artist who accompanied Cook on this voyage, recorded them in his drawings. This type of rei niho is shaped in a fashion apparently unknown to the people of early sites such as the Wairau Bar. A related but more ornate item of personal decoration is the hei parāoa (chevron pendant), also worked from whale ivory.
The rei niho, or whale tooth pendant, resembles the Fijian tabua. However, the tabua is not worn but is presented ceremonially as a gift. The tooth is pierced at each end and attached to a sennit cord braided from fibres of coconut husk. Another related form is the Hawaiian lei niho palaoa, a shaped ivory pendant with a cord of finely braided human hair.
References
(1) Banks, Joseph. (1980). The journal of Joseph Banks in the Endeavour, with a commentary by A.M. Lysaght. Guildford and Adelaide: Genesis Publications and Rigby, vol. 2, p. 186
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database.