Object Status:
Unlocated
Accession Date:
August 28, 1792
Primary Source Reference:
Dunlap's American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), 28 Aug 1792
Additional Source Text:
"Made of feathers and very elegant. Being a present to the President of the United States, by some gentlemen of Boston, adventurers in the first voyage made from thence to Nootka Sound, and the Otahitian Islands, now deposited in this Museum for preservation and safe-keeping for the President."
Notes:
Capt. Robert Gray, in the Columbia, returned to Boston in August 1790 after a three-year voyage around the world (the first circumnavigation by an American vessel). He was greeted by a parade up State Street, and was accompanied by the "Crown Prince of Owhyee" in a flowing feather cloak and tall feather helmet. The Museum apparently misidentified these items as Otahitian rather than Hawaiian.
The Peale Museum had received another set of feathered cloak and headdress in 1789 and a third cloak in 1791. The Museum also received caps in Sep 1814 from Stockton Boudinot (see the entry "Feather Cap from Otahite") and in Oct 1816 from Samuel Wetherill, Jr. (see the entry "A Feather Cap, worn by a Warrior of the Sandwich Islands").
The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, Harvard University, acquired many cultural items in 1899 from Moses Kimball's Boston Museum. Kimball and P. T. Barnum jointly purchased many of the Peale collections when they were sold about 1849. This donation cannot be positively identified with a particular extant "cloak and cap," but they may be those pictured here now at the Peabody (Object numbers 99-12-70/53562 and 99-12-70/53559). In this painting by Rembrandt Peale, the sitter wearing the clothing may have been Moses Williams.
