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Isaac Brower, a surgeon from rural Indiana, spent much of the mid-19th century in Fiji, promoting American interests in the region in some vague capacity, running cotton plantations, and hoovering up local artifacts. But he never set foot in what is now the island nation of Kiribati, some 1,300 miles from Fiji, according to Stéphanie Leclerc-Caffarel, a researcher at Paris’s Musée du quai Branly who is writing a book about Brower. |
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So no one’s sure how he acquired the te barantauti, a type of helmet seemingly unique to that island chain, made of a dried, inflated puffer fish (or porcupine fish) with a lining woven from coconut fiber and human hair, that he donated to the Smithsonian in 1876. All we know is that these helmets were a hot item for Western interlopers—government officials, merchants, whalers, birders, missionaries, natural scientists, military ship crews, private adventurers, and more—who passed through Oceania in the period and beyond. “They were iconic Pacific objects,” says Smithsonian curator Joshua Bell, “prestige items—unique, technically exquisite, and visually stunning—for their cabinets of curiosities.” |
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