This book explores a complex relational assemblage, a collection of 1481 Pacific artefacts brought together by Captain Edward Henry Meggs Davis, during the three voyages of HMS Royalist between 1890-1893. The collection is indicative not just of a period of colonial collecting in the Pacific, but also the development of ethnographic collections in the UK and Europe. This period of history remains present in the social and cultural lives of many Pacific Islanders today.

Using the collections as...

In 2012, a chance encounter between a curator and a century-old expedition journal occurred in the archives of a Cambridge museum. The journal was written by a young anthropologist, Paul Denys Montague, and recorded his travels in the South Pacific Islands of New Caledonia in 1914, where he became fascinated with the culture of the local Kanak people. Returning to Cambridge at the outbreak of World War One, Montague deposited his journal and a collection of Kanak objects in the Museum of Arch...