An Object Out Of Place
An English traveller in New Zealand thought he’d figured out the origin of a strangely-shaped object, but even he didn’t realize how deep the mystery went. We now look at the story of the Tamil Bell, a tale filled with fascinating historical possibilities.
An Unusual Discovery
The story of the Tamil Bell goes back to the 1830s when English missionary William Colenso was living and preaching among the Maori people of New Zealand. There he noticed Maori women cooking potatoes in a strangely-shaped pot. On closer inspection he noticed that it was bronze, which seemed weird, as he knew bronze wasn’t in common use by the Maori and they didn’t have any active trade routes for the metal. Curious, he asked where the women had got it.
John Turnbull Thomson, Wikimedia Commons
Where Did They Find It?
The Maori told Colenso they’d found the pot years ago under some tree roots after a storm uprooted the tree. Colenso thought the object looked like a bell more than a cooking pot. Sensing there was more to the pot than meets the eye, he traded a cast iron pot for it.
A Foreign Inscription
Colenso was convinced that the object wasn’t a cooking pot but a ship’s bell. But that wasn’t the only interesting thing about it. Around the bottom outer rim of the bell was an inscription in a language he couldn’t understand. He kept the relic until his last days, at which time the bell was turned over to the New Zealand National Museum. What have researchers learned about the bell since then?
A Hunch Confirmed
The inscription turned out to be written in the Tamil language of southern India and Sri Lanka. The message turned out to read “Mohideen Bux ship’s bell”, confirming William Colenso’s initial hunch. That narrowed down the origin of the object, but when and how did it arrive in far off New Zealand?
Ulrich Lange, Bochum, Germany, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
How Did The Bell Get There?
Tamil scholars and historians believe the inscription dates from the 16 or 1700s, and this idea is strengthened by the name Mohideen Bux, a popular and revered Muslim saint of the time. But though Tamil mariners plied their trade as far off as Madagascar and other Indian Ocean routes, there’s no record of them travelling as far as New Zealand in that period. How else could the bell have arrived there?
Other Theories
Other theories of the Tamil Bell are focused on the chance that a Portuguese ship somehow came into possession of the bell and traded it with the Maori. It’s also possible that Spanish sailors marooned in French Polynesia in the 1500s somehow got hold of the bell and later migrated to New Zealand. Others speculate that an abandoned ship floated into the region from the Indian Ocean, finally wrecking in New Zealand where the bell was later found.
A Cultural Treasure And An Enduring Riddle
Whether we can ever unravel the mystery of the bell’s origin or not, New Zealanders of Tamil origin say that the bell brings them a sense of connection to New Zealand and the tengata whenau, the Maori word for “People of the Land”. The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa maintains the bell, whose origin is still a riddle lost in the winds of time.
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