[The head of a New Zealander, with a comb in his hair, an ornament of green stone in his ear, and another of a fish’s hook round his neck.]

Rare and important c.18th engraved portrait of Otegoowgoow or (Otegoongoon), the son of the Maori chief from the Bay of Islands,  New Zealand by Sydney Parkinson (1745-1771).

Parkinson’s portraits of Maori warriors were the first visual record of the physiognomy, tattoo patterning, dress and ornament of Māori to be seen in Europe.

Otegoowgoow was wounded by shot in the fracas with Cook and his party on 29 November 1769. Banks met the man on 3 December, noting;
‘They hung to them by strings many very different thing[s], often chissels or bodkins made of a green talk…. or the tooth of a whale cut slauntwise, so as something to resemble a tongue, and furnished with two eyes; these they wore about their necks and seemed to Value almost above everything else’. (Banks, Journal II, 17.)

From the official British Admiralty sanctioned edition of the accounts of Cook’s first voyage. All other later copies made of this image by other publishers were unauthorised, usually smaller and inferior in quality.