Hawaiian feathered helmet, mahiole
early nineteenth century
A helmet shaped like a Greek warrior's, with a high crest running from front to back, is covered entirely in tiny feathers, bands of scarlet and yellow so dense that the surface looks like velvet. Only a chief of the highest rank in Hawaii could wear a mahiole like this, together with a feathered cloak, and the two together turned him into a blazing figure on the battlefield or at ceremonies. The colours were not decoration alone: red was the colour of the gods and of chiefly power, and yellow feathers were the rarest and most precious thing on the islands.
Look at how it is made. The foundation is a basketry cap of the aerial roots of the ie ie vine, stiff and light, over which a fine net of olona fibre was stretched. Then thousands of small feathers were tied to the net in overlapping rows, the way scales cover a fish. The yellow feathers came from birds that were mostly black, the oo and the mamo, which carried only a few yellow tufts under the wings or tail; bird catchers snared them, plucked those few feathers and, in the best accounts, released them. A single cloak could require the feathers of tens of thousands of birds, so the finished object represented years of tribute and labour.
The helmet was collected in 1828 by the French naval officer Louis de Goarant de Tromelin during the Pacific voyage of the Bayonnaise, less than fifty years after Captain Cook's landing and at a time when Hawaiian chiefs were giving feather regalia to foreign visitors as diplomatic gifts. Featherwork of this age and quality survives in only a handful of museums worldwide. The museum's Hawaiian feather objects also include a feathered image of a god; whichever pieces are on the plateau when you visit, spend a moment on the colour, which has hardly faded in two centuries.
Did You Know? The yellow feathers came from birds that were almost entirely black, each carrying only a few yellow tufts, which made yellow the rarest colour in the islands.
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