The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington is the custodian of a rare and curious artefact that has left experts scratching their heads to this day.
The Tamil Bell, described as “the broken crown of a ship’s bell embossed with Tamil script,” is a mystery that scholars have failed to conclusively explain more than a century after it was discovered by a Christian missionary during his travels in the remote forests of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.
In 1836, William Colenso, a missionary from Cornwall in England, noticed the womenfolk in a Maori village using a strange bronze vessel to cook potatoes. This struck him as odd because the Maori traditionally cooked potatoes (possibly kumara or sweet potato) over heated stones packed tightly in wooden containers.
The missionary was intrigued by the presence of bronze in a village with no history of trade with the outside world.
Colenso’s chronicle describes the object as being roughly 6.5 in high and 6 in across. It had “prominent ridges and an uneven lip, as if part of the pot had broken off. Embossed on the pot were loops and swirls of a language that wasn’t English.”
Colenso concluded it was the top of a ship’s bell.
The Maori villagers told the missionary that their ancestors had found it amidst the roots of a tree uprooted in a storm.
The story goes that the missionary traded the bell for a cast iron pot and later deposited his find in the Otago Museum in Dunedin. The artefact was subsequently bequeathed to the Dominion Museum which would later become the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa situated in Wellington.
In 1870, ethnographer J.F. Thompson sent photos of the inscription to India, hoping to get a translation.
It was established that the Tamil inscription on the bell read: “Bell of the ship of Mohideen Bux.”
This led to speculation that the inscription referred to the ship’s owner, a Tamil Muslim from the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
The Tamil Bell confounded scholars further when it was estimated to be around 400 to 500 years old, which meant it preceded the arrival of English Captain James Cook on the shores of New Zealand in 1769.
The sighting of a shipwreck off the NZ coast in 1877, containing brass plates with Tamil inscriptions on board, fuelled speculation of seafarers from Southeast Asia sailing to New Zealand prior to Cook.
But that speculation lost steam when the evidence discovered on the shipwreck went missing.
Historical records indicate Indian seafarers sailed no further than current-day Indonesia.
But one theory says the 1877 shipwreck found off the NZ coastline originated from Goa where Tamil was widely spoken.
A more audacious theory was floated by Robert Langdon in his book The Lost Caravel, which says the Tamil Bell was brought to NZ by Spanish sailors hundreds of years before Captain Cook’s arrival.
The Sans Lesmes, which bore the Tamil Bell, was one of six ships that set off from Spain in 1524 and headed for the Spice Islands of West New Guinea. The ship ended up in NZ, the book claims.
Then came the “derelict theory” of Brett Hilder which claimed the Tamil Bell was borne by a Tamil merchant ship that was caught in the great Southern Ocean current stretching from NZ to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.
At the core of the diverse speculation over the genesis of the Tamil Bell is the 1877 discovery of the shipwreck. That key historical evidence pointed to the bell having been brought to New Zealand by either Tamil, Portuguese or Spanish seafarers.
But by 1890 the shipwreck itself had disappeared, leaving in its wake wild speculation about the Tamil Bell.
In 2019, Nalini Gopal, a museum curator from Singapore’s Indian Heritage Centre, arrived in Wellington to study the Tamil Bell. She claimed the bell’s crown was too small for cooking potatoes, which raised questions about missionary Colenso’s story.
Gopal dated the Tamil inscription on the bell to the 17th or 18th century.
This contradicted the long-held view that the Tamil inscription on the bell dated back to the 14th or 15th century.
“The older [Tamil] gets, the more difficult it is to read because it’s further removed from how the script is today,” Gopal, a native Tamil speaker from South India, is on record as saying. “I could read the Tamil.”
Further, Gopal proposed that “Mohideen Bux” of the Tamil inscription likely refers to a patron saint revered by Muslim merchant communities in Southeast Asia, rather than to the ship’s owner.
The Tamil Bell is currently in storage at the Te Papa Museum. It is not clear when the artefact will be put back on display, museum staff told the Indian Weekender.