Sidestep: The Tamil Bell

This artefact was found in a Maori village near Whangarei in the upper North Island and was used for cooking. Those at the village said they had used it for several generations. That would be about 150 years they had been using this artefact. It was found in 1836 so we can therefore assume that Maori found it around 1680-1690.

Colenso was a missionary and he found Maori using this bell as a pot to cook Kumara. He was told it had been found under the roots of a large tree blown over by a storm and Colenso had them agree to swap the bell for an iron cooking pot. Now if it was at the base of a tree that is significant, especially if you have read the post about the Korotangi. Maori hide sacred things things by burying them, under Pa posts, trees, or by planting a tree upon it once buried. This is the principle of protecting the Mauri of an object. A bit like hiding a sacred talisman. Now this item was found under a tree, a great tree as described, which could make the object as arriving in NZ in the fourteen hundreds. Maori told Colenso that this object was hidden in the same manner the Korotangi. I think that is the single most important feature about this bell most people seem to have missed. It was a sacred item...why? Who knows. But it was hidden by some and when revealed by the storm, no one had prior memory of it becuase it was not something in their arrival history. Being of Metal the item would have been seen as holy/sacred/tapu in the 1400's.

The bell was eventually photographed and the script identified as an archaic form of Tamil, this suggested the bell could be 500 years old, even in the 1890's. That would make it as being produced between 1330-1450 some would say.

So did some Asian explorers get washed up here? Possibly, but that cannot be proved, yet here we have an artefact. We do know that Abel Tasman found NZ in 1642 but he only sighted NZ, and attempted to land at Golden Bay in the upper South Island only to have men killed. As such there never was a successful landing by Tasman. Therefore the first proven European to land in NZ was Cook. On no voyage did Cook come near Tamil territory before reaching NZ so we can rule out Cook bringing the bell to NZ. In 1769, the French explorer Jean François Marie de Surville reached NZ and in 1772 Marc Joseph Marion du Fresne spent more than two months in the Bay of Islands while undertaking extensive repairs. Did du Fresne gift it to the Maori? That is unlikely. There is no specific evidence of ships from China or India or Spain ever reaching NZ which doesn't mean they haven't, it means there is no tangible evidence. As we say, "the absence of evidence is not automatically evidence of absence".

We know Cook arrived here, but let's say for arguments sake that Cook's ship Endeavour was lost at sea in a storm on the way home and therefore no one knew he found this country. In that scenario there would be no physical evidence of his first arrival, yet we now that he did in fact arrive. However, a Spanish helmet and a Tamil bell have been found in NZ. That is still no proof they weren’t carried here by someone else, but in the light of the argument about Cook...quite feasible that they could have been brought here by those from other countries before everyone else. It’s not absolute proof mind you, but is still possible in the same manner that there is no physical evidence in NZ of Cooks first arrival. There is of the second voyage (the Resolution and the Adventure) in the way of bronze medallions, but there is nothing from the first voyage. A second voyage only occurred because he arrived home to tell the tale instead of being killed or lost at sea. Academics quickly dismiss the Tamil Bell as a genuine relic, yet silently accept the Korotangi, the item Maori say they brought with them from 'Hawaiiki'.

(As a sidenote - In the coastal city of La Corunna in Spain there is an old pöhutukawa tree. This tree is native to NZ. It was estimated to be 400-500 years old by a visiting NZ botanist. There are also NZ cabbage trees and NZ flaxes in this region.)

The Tamils are people from SE India and Ceylon and are rumoured to have made landfall in Australia in the 14th Century. If that is so, finding NZ is also possible from a lost ship that never returned. Tamil influence 800 years ago stretched to the coasts of western Australia and up into Melanesia and China. Ocean currents would easily made a damaged and drifting ship head our direction. (Some ancient petroglyphs in the Fiji Islands have been thought to be early Indian or Chinese scripts, but they have not been identified or deciphered, nor has any explanation been found for them. No Indian relics except the bell have been found in New Zealand, so the problem remains unique and unsolved.)

The bell is not complete. The waist and lower rim is all missing. The whole bell (Tamil bells were slightly elongated) may have been 400mm from crown to lip. You can see from the attached photos that the lip area has been completely broken off and only the solid shoulder and head withstood the constant heat from cooking. One it cracked it is possible the Maori smashed the lip off with rocks and you can see where this would have occurred.

So it could have been gifted, taken ashore after a shipwreck by Tamil survivors, or it could have arrived here in a drifting ship, its crew long since dead from starvation. No one really knows. But even if that was the case, it meant that ships could have got here earlier. Remember that thousands of explorers from all nations and many millennia have been los with no explanation to whether they were lost as sea, or continued to live out their lives in a new land after being shipwrecked.

Click on the photos for a clearer view. The example on the right shows the approxmate length before the waist was broken off.