The Coconut That Came Home from Hawaiʻi

A coconut shell. A pincushion. A shipwreck survivor. A Royal Navy expedition. A Captain Cook monument. And a journey of thousands of miles.

Some museum objects announce their importance immediately. They are large, beautiful, rare or obviously historic. Others are rather more deceptive. Our Object of the Month is one of the latter.

At first glance, it looks like a rather attractive piece of old coconut shell, polished to a warm brown, with the inside adapted to make a pincushion with a piece of green felt. There is nothing particularly grand about it. It certainly doesn't look as though it ought to have travelled halfway around the world, survived for more than 150 years, passed through several generations of one family and eventually found its way to a small museum in Staithes.

But this little object has an extraordinary story.

It takes us to Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaiʻi, to the place where Captain James Cook died in 1779; to the construction of the famous Cook monument nearly a century later; to a British naval vessel carrying an international scientific expedition; and, before any of that, to one of the most catastrophic disasters in the history of the Victorian Royal Navy.

And then, wonderfully, it comes back down to earth again: a sailor brings home a coconut, his wife turns part of it into a useful household object, and a granddaughter keeps it safe for the next century.

That, in miniature, is exactly what we love about museum objects.

Where did the coconut come from?

The coconut was collected at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaiʻi, in 1874 by Henry Grange, who was serving aboard HMS Scout.

According to an article published by the Captain Cook Society, Grange took the coconut from one of the palm trees growing at the site of the new Cook monument. He brought it home to Britain, where he cut it in half and carefully polished the shell.

One half was given to his wife, who worked on it further and turned it into a pincushion.

It then became a family object. After Grange's wife's death, it passed to their daughter and subsequently to their granddaughter, Ethel Hine. Ethel used and treasured the pincushion for many years before beginning to think about what should happen to it in the future.

Eventually, she contacted the Captain Cook Society for advice about finding it a permanent home.

And that is how, after an extraordinary journey through time and geography, it came to Staithes Museum.

The pincushion is now around 152 years old.

But to understand why its story is so interesting, we have to go back to the place where Henry Grange picked it up.

Kealakekua Bay

Kealakekua Bay lies on the western side of Hawaiʻi Island. Long before Captain Cook arrived, it was an important Hawaiian place, with deep cultural, religious and political significance. The State of Hawaiʻi describes the bay as the site of the first extensive contact between Hawaiians and Westerners, when Cook arrived there in 1779.

Cook's arrival in January 1779 took place during the Makahiki season, a period associated with the Hawaiian god Lono. Cook and his crew were initially received with considerable ceremony, but when they returned to the bay a few weeks later, circumstances had changed. On 14 February 1779, Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay.

Before there was an obelisk, there was a coconut tree

When American writer Mark Twain visited Kealakekua Bay in 1866, he went looking for the place associated with Cook's death. What he found was not the great white obelisk that stands there today. Instead, he found what he described as a coconut stump, around four feet high and about a foot in diameter.

The stump had been surrounded with lava rocks to keep it in place and was covered with rough sheets of copper, like the copper used to sheath the bottoms of ships. Visiting British naval vessels had scratched inscriptions into the copper recording their visits to the site.  A local tradition held that it was part of the original coconut tree damaged by a cannon shot during the events surrounding Cook's death

Among the inscriptions Twain recorded were references to HMS Imogene, Sparrowhawk, Carysfort, Cormorant, Vixen and Calypso. One piece of copper recorded that Sparrowhawk had added sheathing to the memorial in 1839 in an attempt to preserve it. Another recorded the visit of HMS Carysfort in 1843.

By  the middle of the nineteenth century a coconut stump had become an established informal memorial at the site, and Royal Navy ships were adding copper plates and inscriptions to it. Our coconut was collected from a coconut palm growing at the site in 1874.It came from the same memorial landscape, at precisely the moment when the rather improvised old memorial was about to be replaced by something much grander.

A new monument for Cook

By 1874, plans were underway for a much more substantial memorial.

The new monument was organised by J. H. Wodehouse, the British Commissioner in Hawaiʻi, with the cooperation of Captain Ralph Cator of HMS Scout. Scout transported the architect, workers and materials across the bay to the site where Cook had died.

The resulting monument was a 27-foot-high obelisk, constructed from concrete and standing on the rocky shore of Kealakekua Bay. It was unveiled on 14 November 1874, in the presence of Wodehouse, Captain Cator, officers of Scout and other visitors and residents.

The inscription on the monument reads:

IN MEMORY OF THE GREAT CIRCUMNAVIGATOR, CAPTAIN JAMES COOK, R.N. WHO DISCOVERED THESE ISLANDS ON THE 18th OF JANUARY, 1778. AND FELL NEAR THIS SPOT ON THE 14th OF FEBRUARY, 1779. THIS MONUMENT WAS ERECTED IN NOVEMBER, A.D. 1874 BY SOME OF HIS FELLOW COUNTRYMEN.

HMS Scout and the voyage to Hawaiʻi

HMS Scout was a wooden screw corvette of the Royal Navy. She had been launched at Woolwich in 1856 and was still in service in 1874. In June of that year, under Captain Ralph Cator, she sailed from Liverpool for Hawaiʻi.

But Scout had not been sent across the world simply to deliver materials for a Cook memorial. She was supporting the British expedition to observe the Transit of Venus.

The Transit of Venus was a rare astronomical event in which Venus appears to pass across the face of the Sun. Astronomers had realised that observations made from widely separated points on the Earth could be used to help calculate the scale of the solar system, particularly the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The 1874 transit was the first such event since 1769, when Captain Cook himself had travelled to Tahiti as part of the earlier international effort to observe a Transit of Venus.

The British expedition was led by astronomer Captain George Lyon Tupman. The expedition established observing stations at several locations in the Hawaiian Islands, including Honolulu, Waimea on Kauaʻi and Kailua-Kona on Hawaiʻi Island. Contemporary and modern records survive from the expedition, including observation diaries, journals and photographs.

The Met Office, for example, preserves a weather diary covering the voyage and the work of the Transit of Venus party. It records observations made aboard HMS Scout on the voyage from Valparaíso to the Hawaiian Islands, as well as meteorological observations made at Honolulu.

The transit itself took place on 8 December 1874. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich still has material relating to the expedition, including the instruments and surviving documentation used by the observers.

It is an extraordinary thought that while astronomers were setting up delicate scientific equipment and preparing to measure the movement of Venus across the Sun, members of the same expedition were also involved in building a monument to an earlier Pacific voyage.

And among all that science, naval activity and memorial building was Henry Grange.

He picked up a coconut.

But Henry Grange had already survived something extraordinary

The really remarkable part of Henry Grange's story is that the 1874 journey was not his first great adventure at sea.

Four years earlier, in 1870, Grange had been aboard another Royal Navy ship: HMS Captain. She was a revolutionary and highly unusual ironclad warship, designed around a system of low-mounted rotating gun turrets. The ship had been intended as an impressive demonstration of British naval engineering.Instead, she became the scene of a catastrophe.

On 7 September 1870, while on her initial trials in the Bay of Biscay, HMS Captain capsized in a severe gale off Cape Finisterre. Nearly 500 officers and men died. Only 18 people survived. Henry Grange was one of them. The survivors' names are recorded at St Ann's Church in Portsmouth, where a memorial to the disaster includes Henry Grange among those who escaped.

Four years later, he was sailing from Britain across the Pacific aboard HMS Scout, as part of a scientific expedition, and standing at Kealakekua Bay as the new monument to Captain Cook was being erected.

From naval expedition to domestic pincushion

We tend to imagine historical objects as though they have spent their entire lives being treated as important. This coconut did not. Henry Grange brought it home because he wanted a souvenir.

He cut it in half. He polished the shell. His wife turned one half into a pincushion. And then it became a household object.

The coconut had started its life as part of a living tree in Hawaiʻi. It became a souvenir of a voyage. Then it became a useful object in someone's home. For decades, someone presumably stuck pins into it without necessarily thinking of the astronomical expedition, the Cook monument, or the disaster of HMS Captain.

That is often what happens to history.

It becomes ordinary. A thing on a mantelpiece. A pincushion in a sewing basket. A photograph in a drawer. A name written in the back of a book. And sometimes, if we're lucky, somebody remembers that the ordinary thing has an extraordinary story.

Ethel Hine and the decision to save the object

Eventually the coconut pincushion passed down through the family to Ethel Hine, Henry Grange's granddaughter.

The Captain Cook Society's account tells us that by the time Ethel was around 90, she was thinking about the future of her grandfather's memento. She wanted to make sure that it would not simply disappear into another private collection or eventually be forgotten.She therefore contacted the Captain Cook Society to ask whether they could help find it an appropriate home.That led to the decision that it should come to Staithes Museum.

It is a lovely example of how museums acquire objects.There was no great excavation. No million pound auction.No expedition sent out to find it.Instead, there was a family, a story, an old object and a decision to pass it on.

And now the chain has continued. Henry Grange took it from Hawaiʻi to Britain. His wife turned it into something useful. Their daughter kept it. Ethel kept it. And now we keep it.

The Cook monument has its own continuing story

Even the monument that Henry Grange helped to create has continued to accumulate history.

After it was built, twelve old 32-pounder cannons were supplied for use in fencing around the monument. They were transported to the site aboard HMS Fantome.

The monument was restored in 1954 by members of the crew of HMS Morecambe Bay, and in 2012 sailors from HMCS Vancouver volunteered to help clean, repair and repaint it.

The monument is therefore not a frozen object from 1874. It has been cared for, visited, repaired and interpreted by successive generations.

The Hawaiian State's records also emphasise that the wider area is much more than simply a "Cook site": Kealakekua Bay includes significant Hawaiian cultural sites, including Hikiau Heiau, and the landscape has a much longer history than the European memorials that now stand there.

That context matters when we look at an object like the coconut. It would be easy to tell this as a straightforward story about Captain Cook and British exploration.

But the coconut actually gives us the opportunity to tell something more complicated and much more human: a story about Hawaiʻi, British naval culture, science, commemoration, family memory and the ways in which objects acquire new meanings over time.

Follow the coconut: a very short timeline

1779 – Captain James Cook is killed at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaiʻi.

1830s–1860s – British naval visitors leave inscriptions and copper sheathing on a coconut-stump memorial at the site.

1866 – Mark Twain visits Kealakekua Bay and describes the coconut-stump memorial.

7 September 1870 – HMS Captain capsizes in the Bay of Biscay. Only 18 people survive, including Henry Grange.

June 1874 – HMS Scout, commanded by Captain Ralph Cator, sails from Britain as part of the British Transit of Venus expedition.

1874 – Scout also assists with transporting the people and materials needed to construct the new Cook monument at Kealakekua Bay.

14 November 1874 – The new Cook monument is unveiled.

8 December 1874 – The Transit of Venus is observed from the Hawaiian expedition stations.

1874 – Henry Grange collects a coconut from a palm growing at the Cook monument site and brings it home.

Later – The coconut is cut in half, polished and made into a pincushion by Grange's wife.

20th century – The object passes through the Grange family to Henry's granddaughter, Ethel Hine.

21st century – Ethel arranges for the object to be preserved in a museum.

Today – Henry Grange's coconut pincushion is in the collections of Staithes Museum.

From the Pacific to Staithes

One of the pleasures of working in a museum is discovering that an apparently ordinary object refuses to stay ordinary.

A coconut can be a coconut.

It can also be evidence of a journey.

It can be a souvenir.

It can be a household object.

It can be an heirloom.

It can be a survivor.

It can connect one person to an extraordinary event.

And, eventually, it can become a museum object — allowing somebody 150 years later to pick up the thread and begin telling the story again.

So next time you visit Staithes Museum, look out for our little coconut pincushion.

It may not be the biggest or grandest object in the building.

But it has travelled an awfully long way to get here.