War canoe of New Zealand
1773

Artist: Unknown engraver after John James Barralet (1747-1815) after Sydney Parkinson (1745-1771)
Title: A War Canoe of New Zealand, with a View of Gable End Foreland
Date: 1773
School: British XVIIIth-century
Medium: engraving
Dimensions: 200 x 550mm (image)
Watermark: none
Inscriptions/marks: numbered in the plate lower right <<N^o 16>>
Condition: fold mark and uneven left edge, small hole centre right, otherwise fair condition
Description: A Maori waka with forty warriors and rowers seen against a landscape depicting Gable End Foreland on the north eastern coast of the North Island of New Zealand, twenty kilometres south of Tolaga Bay. Based on a drawing by Barralet now in the Dixon Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Barralet’s drawing is in turn based on a drawing by Sydney Parkinson, now in the British Library. This engraving by an unknown engraver illustrated John Hawkesorth’s account of the voyage, An Account of the Voyages undertaken by order of His Present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere…. 3 vols., London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1773, III, pl. 16, fp. 462.
Reference: Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, Volume I: The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768-1771, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985, cat. 1.141-1.142B, pp. 199-201
Provenance: Art + Object, Auckland