Fishing Tackle Box, Tokelau

Bonhams, London, June 17, 1991, lot 145

Peter Adler, London, acquired at the above auction

Acquired from the above

This is a large and especially fine example of the type of box known as tuluma, made on one of the three coral atolls of Atafu, Nukunonu, and Fakaofo, which together form the nation of Tokelau.

A tuluma such as this would have been the possession of a tautai, or master fisherman. In it, he would have kept his precious pearl-shell fishing lures and other fishing tackle. Tuluma were customarily made from the wood of the Sea trumpet tree (Cordia subcordata), known in Tokelau as kānava. Kānava is noted for being very resistant to salt water, and it was used both for tuluma and for the canoes in which they were carried out to sea. The lid fits very tightly to the box itself, creating a join which must have been quite watertight. The finely carved lugs at either side of the box are pierced, and a plaited cord would once have passed through these holes and the corresponding one on the lid to keep it in place. If some misfortune cast the tuluma into the sea, it would remain sealed and could be retrieved.

Of note here is the beautiful pearl-shell decoration, with three bands of lozenge form encircling the box itself and another running around the top of the lid. Judith Huntsman notes that “Tokelau’s most treasured things are tifa ‘pearl-shells’” (Judith Hunstman, “The Treasured Things of Tokelau”, The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol 126, No. 3, September 2017, p. 253). Few tuluma are so finely decorated with this precious material as the present box.

Tuluma were not seen during the fleeting stays of the first European and American visitors to Tokelau, and the scholar Robert Langdon has argued that the making of tuluma began in 1830 when a group of Hawaiian sailors from the brig Kamehameha were cast away on Fakaofo. (Robert Langdon, “Fakaofo’s Hawaiian Castaways of 1830 and the Origin of Its Lidded Boxes Called Tuluma”, The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol. 107, No. 3, September 1998, pp. 287-300).