A mystery wreck and a ship’s bell
A mysterious Tamil bell was discovered in the 1850s, being used as a pot by the people of Ngati Tuwharetoa. It now sits in the Otago Museum. Tom O’connor investigates.
Every once in a while, the dark drapes of antiquity drift aside to give a tantalising and fleeting glimpse of the ancient past, then fall back, covering history from view again.
When staff at the Otago Museum heard that a shipwreck with the supposed name Mohoyd Buk had been found on the coast between Raglan and Aotea harbours, they were puzzled.
The remains of an apparently ancient vessel were discovered in 1877, partly submerged in sand. There were so many wrecks and shipping disasters on the dangerous New Zealand coast at this time that the wreck was first thought to be one of the recent mishaps.
However, once knowledgeable seafarers had seen the vessel, it was realised that it was the remains of a very old ship, probably of Asian origin.
That theory was reinforced when it was reported that a plank of timber inscribed with the name Mohoyd Buk had been taken to Auckland.
Local Ngati Mahanga and Ngati Maniapoto people knew nothing of an ancient ship wreck on that part of the coast. They were seafaring people and very familiar with the coast from the south head of the Manukau Harbour to Taranaki.
There had been several wrecks of European ships on the coast and they had plundered some and rescued distressed sailors from others but they had no knowledge of the wreck in question. However, they had only been in full occupation of the area since the defeat of Ngati Toa and their allies in 1821.
Ngati Toa were by this time established further south on the Kapiti Coast but none of their elders spoken to by researchers knew any legends relating to the wreck, and they and their ancestors had occupied the west coast between Kawhia and Raglan for an estimated 800 years.
About six years before the discovery of the wreck, two very similar words, Mohoyideen Buks, had been translated from characters on an ancient bronze bell of Asian design in the Otago Museum.
The bell, known today as the mysterious Tamil Bell, had been discovered in the 1850s by the missionary and explorer William Colenso at Taupo where the people of Ngati Tuwharetoa were using it as a cooking vessel to boil potatoes.
Colenso was a fluent speaker of Maori and was able to question the people in detail.
They said the bell had been in their possession for many generations, but no one could say with any certainty where it had come from. The bell was eventually deposited in the Otago Museum, where it remained a mystery until 1870, just seven years before the discovery of the wreck, when ethnographer J T Thompson saw it. He had the characters on the bell photographed and copies were sent to various parts of India in the hope that they could be translated into English.
A few months later, two replies were received – one from Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, and the other from the Straits Settlements of Malaysia, now known as Penang.
Both confirmed that the bell was of Tamil origin and the inscription translated simply as ‘‘ship’s bell’’. The characters were, however, in archaic script – a style of Tamil writing that had not been used for several hundred years.
Thompson published his findings in the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute in the following year.
The publication was widely read among the academics of the country.
Rather than solve the mystery of the ancient wreck, however, the origins of the Tamil Bell added to the confusion surrounding the mysterious wreck. It was assumed that someone had deliberately tried to associate the ship with the bell without realising what the words on the name plate, if it ever existed, actually meant.
If the bell had come from the wreck, and it could have, the vessel would most certainly not have been called Ship’s Bell. It was further assumed that this deception could have been the work of someone associated with the then popular theory that the Polynesians who became Maori were in fact the descendants of slaves brought to New Zealand by adventurers from Java or Portugal.
The theory has long since been discounted and the origins of the Tamil Bell, ancient wreck buried on the west coast and the fate of her crew still remain unknown.