22: Kāro. Fish trap. Baited inside. Made from Loire palm.

8 March 1894, British Museum

There are a number of small, spiky, traps that match this description. Four at the British Museum are tied to rectangular cardboard labels onto which has been printed:

CHRISTY FUND. 

L.M.S. 8. MAR. 94

Added below, in black pen, are a sequence of numbers which, in one example reads ’72. 94-140’. ‘Christy Fund’ suggests the traps were purchased with funds derived from Henry Christy’s bequest, nearly thirty years earlier (Chapter 20), while 94-140 tells us this was the 140th item purchased in 1894.^⁠1

Consulting the Christy register on the relevant page, I found a sketch of one of four ‘Small pyramidal fish traps’ listed together (94-140, 94-141, 94–142 & 94.143). On the opposite page is an alternative description — the short caption above.^⁠2

The number at the beginning of this  description — 72 — was also added in pen to the cardboard label, before the Christy collection number. This refers to the numbered handwritten list from which the description has been taken. Kept in the British Museum archives, its first page has the simple title:

Things from mouth of Fly River^⁠3

The Christy register lists 141 items from what is now Papua New Guinea that were purchased together for £26.10 from Ralph Wardlaw Thompson, Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society since 1881 (Chapter 21).^⁠4  Although Thompson would travel to New Guinea three years later, publishing an account of his journey on the missionary ship, John Williams IV which included a chapter on a trip up the Fly River, he does not seem to have collected these items himself.^⁠5

The London Missionary Society’s New Guinea mission began on 1 July 1871 (still commemorated by an annual festival known as ‘the Coming of the Light’), when a ninety-ton chartered vessel, the Surprise, arrived at Erub (also known as Darnley Island). There Gucheng and Mataika, teachers from Lifou in the Loyalty Islands, now a part of Nouvelle-Calédonie, were landed as evangelists.

An island in the eastern Torres Strait, between the northeast tip of Australia and Papua New Guinea, Erub was chosen ‘in the hope that it might become the Iona of New Guinea’, a reference to the island in Scotland from which the Irish monk Columba began his conversion of the people of Britain during the sixth century AD.^⁠8

Mission work in the Loyalty Islands had begun at Maré in 1841, thirty years earlier. The first person to take the Christian message to Lifou itself was a Pacific Islander, Pao’o from Rarotonga, who went by canoe a few years later. British missionaries only took up residence on Lifou in 1859 and one, Samuel Macfarlane, established an educational institution to train local evangelists.^⁠9

Protestant missionary activity became more difficult after French annexation of the Loyalty Islands in 1864, when conflict with the authorities led to an official demand that Macfarlane leave. It was at this point that the LMS Directors asked Macfarlane to establish a mission to New Guinea, away from French interference. Four pastors and four students were selected from among those who volunteered at the Lifu Training Institution, accompanied by Macfarlane and the Rev. A.W. Murray, a veteran LMS missionary to Samoa.^⁠10

Just over two years later, in November 1873, a further mission station was established at Port Moresby on the New Guinea mainland,  where, in 1874, a frame house from Sydney was erected for the Rev. William Lawes to take up permanent residence. In 1877, the Torres Strait base was moved to Mer (also known as Murray Island) where, in 1879, Macfarlane established the Papuan Gulf Native College. There he hoped to train evangelists who would emulate Columbus in converting the people of New Guinea.^⁠11

Having selected and sent evangelists from Rarotonga to assist the New Guinea mission from 1872 onwards, in 1877 Chalmers was himself sent to assist Macfarlane and Lawes in overseeing work along New Guinea’s south-east coast. Through many visits to the region’s coastal villages, Tamate became well known. This allowed him to play a key role as interpreter and intermediary when the protectorate of British New Guinea was declared at Port Moresby in 1884, in the midst of controversies involving the kidnapping, removal and forced labour of New Guinea residents on the plantations of Queensland, Australia.^⁠12

Chalmers returned to Britain in 1886-7, where his tales of pioneering missionary adventures captivated the crowds. He was associated with a series of popular books published by the Religious Tract Society including Work and Adventure in New Guinea 1877 to 1885 with fellow missionary W. Wyatt Gill published in 1885, Adventures in New Guinea published in 1886 and Pioneering in New Guinea published in 1887. To these volumes, another was added another by Samuel McFarlane in 1888 : Among the Cannibals of New Guinea.

When British New Guinea was formally annexed as a British colony in 1888, Chalmers returned to continue his role as an intermediary in the negotiations between local chiefs and colonial administrators.^⁠13 At the beginning of 1890, Chalmers accompanied the new colony’s Governor, Sir William McGregor, on a tour of inspection in the Government yacht, the Merrie England, including an attempted trip up the Fly River.

At the request of the Directors in London, Chalmers established a base for himself at Saguane, at the southern tip of Kiwai Island during 1892. Towards the end of that year, he purchased a steam launch, the Miro, in which he, somewhat unsuccessfully, attempted to travel up the Fly River. In the first village Tamate visited, he was struck by the men’s beards ‘very long and wound round on the chin to a knot’. Deciding to purchase one, he ‘cut it off myself and folded it away in brown paper’.^⁠15 When he attempted to purchase drums at the next village, ‘not even a [metal] tomahawk would persuade them to do so’.^⁠16

Given the suspicion with which he was met (not surprising in the context of raids that saw many New Guinea people abducted to labour in Australia), and the complexities involved of these negotiations, it seems unlikely that the fish traps and other items sold to the British Museum in March 1894 came from these inland villages. Rather, they seem to have some from the islands at the mouth of the Fly River where Pacific Islander evangelists had been working for some time. In his account of Pioneer Life and Work in New Guinea, 1877-1894, published in 1895 when he was back in Britain, Chalmers stated that only two of the evangelists sent to mouth of the Fly River by Macfarlane had survived, one at Sumai on Kiwai and the other at Parama Island (known as Bampton Island).^⁠17

In 1893, presumably as a result of their work, Chalmers was able to baptise sixteen people at Kiwai and forty at Parama, noting that the men publicly testified their ‘acceptance of the Gospel’ and their ‘faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour’. He also declared that in the ‘same year, we had the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper for the first time in the Fly River district’.^⁠18

It seems likely these events included a ceremonial presentation of gifts, as most important ceremonies still do in this part of the world. Might the items sold to the British Museum the following year have come from collections made during the baptism or communion services mentioned by Chalmers? The first annual collection in aid of the missionary society at Port Moresby in May 1891, two years earlier, included, in addition to £20 in cash:

325 spears; 65 shell armlets; 92 bows; 180 arrows; besides shields, drums, shell necklaces, feather and other ornaments’, valued at £10.^⁠19

An image of this ‘First Collection’ was published in the Chronicle, where it was explained that rather than adding these bulky items to a collection plate, they had been brought to the front of the church when the names of villages being represented were called out. The article explained that ‘the majority of these people have no money, and hence it is necessary to accept any article from them upon which money can be realised’, and that many of the items were ‘highly prized by the natives themselves’, but would be sold as ‘curios’.^⁠20

While there were more converts at Parama, it seems likely that the fish traps came from Kiwai, where Chalmers established his base. In Notes on the Natives of Kiwai Island, Fly River, British New Guinea, published posthumously in 1903, Chalmers noted:

They have for fishing a trap with bait inside, into which the fish go, and are prevented from getting out again by the thorns on the trap, which is made from the spine of the sago palm leaf. The trap, eonea, is held in the hand by a long cane, and is then allowed to float down the river.^⁠21

This description apparently matches the traps sold to the British Museum nine years earlier, even if the local name eonea is different to that given in the 1894 list, Kāro. Nevertheless, the sale of this collection, possibly the first fruits of Christian conversion on the islands at the mouth of the Fly River, illustrates something important about the close connections established between British missionaries and museum curators by the 1890s.

Edward Coode Hore, who gave several items from Central Africa to the Missionary Museum in the early 1880s (Chapter 21), returned in 1889 with a collection of around 30 artefacts that he donated to The British Museum.^⁠22 Even earlier, in 1876, Chalmers’ co-author William Wyatt Gill, LMS missionary to Mangaia in the Cook Islands between 1852 and 1872, sold part of his collection to the British Museum curator A.W. Franks, having given other items to the University Museum of Natural History in Oxford following his return to Britain in 1873.^⁠23 Chalmers himself seems to have also been the source of around twenty items from New Guinea, donated to the British Museum in 1891 by the British Museum curator A.W. Franks.^⁠24

What I have called the ‘Missionary Exhibitionary Complex’ (Chapter 13), developed in evangelical circles during the first half of the nineteenth century, significantly shaped the ways that anthropology was institutionalised at Britain’s public museums during the last three decades of that century. This process involved the transfer of large numbers of missionary collected artefacts into these collections.

Following the Christy bequest, and A.W. Franks’ appointment as Keeper of the British Museum’s Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography in May 1866 (Chapter 20), he  worked extremely hard to build up the collections he was responsible for. The unique material accumulated over the previous five decades at the London Missionary Society museum, less than three miles away, evidently attracted his attention. Was this prompted by his early encounter with the collection at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris?

Extensions to the Mission House in Blomfield Street in 1878 involved relocating the Missionary Museum from ‘the midst of the back land’ to a newly built upper floor of the main building, where, according to the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, it was ‘carefully arranged in the new cases provided for it’. An account of the museum at this time noted that the collection had ‘accumulated during a long course of years by the agents of the Society in all lands’.^⁠25

Attention was drawn to the ‘especially rich’ collection of ‘South Sea Idols, the use of which has long since passed away from that sphere of the Society’s labours’.^⁠26 The collection was increasingly associated with the history of the London Missionary Society, and its irreplaceable nature to its now extremely rare contents, a direct result of successful missionary activity. This seems to have led to a proposal from the Literature Committee in February 1885:

 That the Board sanction the selection of sets of objects of interest from the Society’s Museum for use when required for exhibition at meetings of various kinds.^⁠27

This emphasis on the essentially historical nature of the collections, however, made them especially interesting to an emerging generation of professional museum curators such as A.W. Franks and his assistant at the British Museum, Charles Hercules Read. By March 1890, the Directors of the London Missionary Society, succumbing to their overtures, agreed:

to lend under certain conditions objects of interest from the Society’s Museum for exhibition at the British Museum; they feel that they will thus be made more widely useful in diffusing information concerning and exciting interest in the various countries from which they have been brought.^⁠29

While this arrangement might be regarded as marking the beginning of the end of the LMS museum, it seems unlikely it was understood in this way at the time. The form of words adopted by the Directors makes it clear that the display of ‘objects of interest’ at the British Museum was intended to allow these to be seen by a larger audience than might have visit the recently reduced Missionary Museum.

A report from the LMS literature committee a month earlier had recommended the Directors agree:

to hand over…as a Permanent Loan….such objects from the Society’s Museum as may be mutually agreed upon, on the understanding that every article so lent be distinctly labeled as lent by the London Missionary Society.^⁠30

The Directors adopted this proposal, but only on condition that the words ‘make a permanent loan under certain conditions’ were substituted for ‘to lend under certain conditions’. This is a good example of what Annette Weiner has called ‘keeping-while-giving’, since the Directors were anxious to remain associated with the items.^⁠31 In June 1890, the Literature Committee recommended that in addition to being labeled as ‘Lent by the London Missionary Society’, that ‘the South Sea Island deities & other unique objects’ from the LMS museum ‘be placed together in a separate case’.^⁠32

By clearly marking the display with the Society’s name, and keeping them apart from the rest of the British Museum’s collection, their ongoing association with the London Missionary Sociey would remain clear. At the same time, the Directors appreciated the prestige associated with having their property displayed in Bloomsbury, where the ethnographical collections had recently been rearranged following the removal of Natural History in the early 1880s.

Read, who negotiated the loan for the British Museum, declared shortly afterwards in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute that ‘the most important and valuable section’ of the LMS museum had been ‘transferred to the custody of the Trustees of the British Museum’.^⁠33

His and Franks’ motivations emerge more clearly in internal British Museum documents:

 Mr Franks has the honor to report that the LMS possesses a number of ethnographical specimens which can scarcely be said to be exhibited at their premises in Blomfield Street E.C.

It has long been felt by ethnologists that some portion of this collection should be transferred to the BM and for some years Mr Franks has been in communication with persons connected with the society on this subject.^⁠34

The suggestion that the LMS could ‘scarcely be said to be’ exhibiting the items is as an assertion of professional expertise, positioning the British Museum as a more appropriate home for such a unique and valuable collection. The current British Museum database includes 241 records for items that formed part of this loan, overwhelmingly made up of Polynesian artefacts (234), many categorised as ‘idols’ (60), although the loan also included seven items from other parts of the world.^⁠35

These included two Madagascan spears and a shield (Chapter 19), a club and a rattle from Guiana (Chapter 5), a string of ostrich eggshell beads from southern Africa (Chapter 2), together with the model Tswana house made by Robert Moffat (Chapter 17). The Directors of the LMS, in acquiescing to the loan, seemingly acknowledged a shift in the relationship between missionaries and anthropologists, who had begun to establish a distinct and increasingly professional identity through their engagments with collections of material from other parts of the world.

Read would further emphasise his status as a professional as part of his justification for the transfer of material from the Missionary Museum to the British Museum, writing in the house journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, which included several LMS missionaries among its members, that:

An ethnographical museum… requires constant care for its proper preservation, and this it is only likely to obtain where the custody of the specimens is a principal object of the institution. Obviously the officers of the London Missionary Society have other and more important duties than keeping watch over the condition of the specimens liable to deterioration in their museum, and the museum thus took a distinctly secondary place.^⁠36

Read acknowledged the ongoing value of the collection to the LMS, suggesting that the Directors of the Society ‘not unnaturally hesitated in parting with objects which were, in a sense, landmarks in their history, and connected with the missionary successes of some of their most distinguished workers’ since, according to Read, the part of the collection which formed the bulk of the 1890 loan was ‘that formed by the pioneers of the Society, Ellis, Williams, Tyerman, Bennet, and others, during their residence among the islands of the Eastern Pacific’.^⁠37

At the same time, he was clear that ‘the ethnological importance of these specimens’ did not derive from these connections. Rather, it related ‘in the first place to their intrinsic merits, and in the second to the fact that at the time they were obtained the religions and habits of the natives had been but little disturbed by European influence’.^⁠38 In becoming ethnographic specimens, to be displayed at the British Museum, there was something of a reversal in the way these artefacts was framed.

Rather than their presence in London providing evidence for successful evangelisation, these artefacts, following their transfer to the British Museum, became a way to illustrate life in Polynesia before missionary (as well as other European) influence. It is noteworthy that the selection of artefacts made by the British Museum, like the items sent from New Guinea, showed minimal use of European or industrially manufactured materials. In some ways, this parallels an earlier missionary claim that the Missionary Museum showed ‘what men are without the Gospel’.^⁠39

By contrast, what was of ‘missionary interest’, at least according to Read, were the ways in which specific items related to the Society’s history, particularly through connections to famous missionaries. This emphasis on ‘heroically framed’ European travellers does not seem to have been restricted to the London Missionary Society.

In March 1890, a month after the Directors agreed to lend material to the British Museum, they also agreed to a shorter-term loan of ‘African curiosities’ to the Stanley and African exhibition. The overseeing committee of this included C.H. Read from the British Museum, as well as representatives from a number of missionary societies.^⁠40

The catalogue of the Stanley and African Exhibition suggests it was concerned with ‘the romantic history of the Dark Continent’, emphasising that exhibits in the ‘native section’, apart from:

showing the manner in which the negroes live, have an added interest in having been in a considerable degree collected by well-known travelers and missionaries during famous expeditions.^⁠41

Through their association with high profile London exhibitions, the Directors presumably intended to gain prestige, or at least a recognition for the early role their Society had played in the history of British engagements with other parts of the world, many of which had recently become part of Britain’s formal empire.

It is easy to see why Nonconformist missionaries have been regarded as ‘among the earliest footsoldiers of British colonialism’, but that may be reading history backwards, attributing intentionality and directionality to a process that was not always clear or planned, at least during the earliest moves in the game.^⁠42

The British Empire certainly saw a considerable expansion in its territory during the final decades of the nineteenth century, often in areas where British Nonconformist missionaries had previously operated. These expansions, however, were frequently driven by competition with other expanding global powers, as well as by the discovery of new mineral resources. In some early locations of LMS missionary activity, such as Tahiti and the Loyalty Islands, it was ultimately other empires, such as the French, which incorporated them as colonies.

Signs of a shifting attitude to the society’s collections, however, can be seen in the recommendation made in June 1890 by the Literature Committee: that the Foreign Secretary be authorized ‘to sell for the Society such objects from the Museum as are without any special missionary interest’.^⁠48

At least part of the reason for this were the significant financial pressures generated by recent expansions into Central Africa (Chapter 21) and New Guinea (this chapter). The official history of the London Missionary Society, published in 1899, suggested that the 1880s had been marked by:

A constant growth of work and of opportunity, and at the same time an income not at all expansive in proportion to the steadily increasing demands upon it. The result was a chronic and very large deficit.^⁠49

Significant changes were introduced in 1890, but a fundraising push during 1891 & 1892 could not be sustained, especially when combined with an increase in overseas commitments. The result was a deficit of over £25,000 by 1894. There is little evidence that much was sold from the Society’s museum immediately, but it is in this context that the sale of ‘curios’, such as the fish traps, should probably be understood.

Also part of the attempt to tackle the accumulated deficit, the Home Board agreed to ‘ adopt a more modern shape and get up’ for the Missionary Chronicle in February 1891 ‘with a view to more effective illustration and an enlarged circulation’.^⁠50

As a result, the cover featured a banner dominated by artefacts from overseas between 1892 and 1900. Many are from the Pacific  and several, including a pair of New Guinea shields, appear to have been taken from an image of Port Moreseby’s ‘First Collection’, printed in the same periodical a year earlier.

There are also palm leaves, coconuts, ivory tusks as well as a tiger’s skin, creating the sense of a crowded Victorian parlour, presumably not unlike the Missionary Museum itself. At the centre of this arrangement, however, is an open Bible, illuminated by divine light, around which an inscription reads:

The Entrance of Thy Word Giveth Light

While O’Hanlon points out that senior colonial administrators were sceptical about the practical usefulness of man-catchers, the standard reference point for subsequent descriptions, including by museums, became an account by James Chalmers. According to Chalmers, before the arrival of missionaries the ‘Man-catcher’ had been the ‘constant companion of head-hunters’, who ‘lived only to fight’ with victory ‘celebrated by a cannibal feast’.^⁠52

At the same time, he happily pointed out ‘All these things are changed, or are in the process of change. For several years there have been no cannibal ovens, no desire for skulls…’^⁠53 Nevertheless, the frontispiece of Work and Adventure in New Guinea 1877 to 1885 showed a number of ‘man-catchers’ in use. O’Hanlon notes that the caption for this image, ‘Life in New Guinea’, ‘turns “man-catching” into a metonym for indigenous practice in toto’.^⁠54

O’Hanlon ultimately suggests that Chalmers’ disproportionate concern with headhunting and cannibalism meant he tended to assume that:

every skull he sees is the result of a cannibal raid, and every dark stain within a longhouse to be congealed blood from earlier human meals, every local sign of interest in Chalmers’s own person culinary’.^⁠55

While O’Hanlon considered a number of possibilities to explain the genesis of man-catchers,  he tends towards the idea that missionaries, through their preoccupation with cannibalism and head-hunting, influenced their creation ‘or at least their ubiquity in museum collections’.^⁠56

In arguing this, he draws on Robin Torrence’s work on obsidian-tipped artefacts from the Admiralty Islands. This suggested that ‘only a small proportion of the objects stored in museums are likely to have been manufactured by local people solely for their own use or for exchange within their own cultural context’, a suggestion reinforced by subsequent research on collections from contemporary Central Africa.^⁠57

Whatever function ‘man-catchers’ may, or may not, have had in their original contexts of production, O’Hanlon argues that having been collected, they rapidly acquired a role as ‘ideological props in debates about the people of New Guinea’.^⁠58 This allowed them to stand for Civilization’s “others”. If Life in New Guinea, prior to the civilizing influence of the missionaries, was presented as an endless round of “man-catching” and “cannibal feasts”, this implied that it was the ‘progress of‘civilization’ which enabled the British to behave differently, even if it was acknowledged that their ancestors engaged in similar activities in the distant past.

While not as spectacular as ‘man-catchers’, or the bamboo ‘beheading knives’ that often accompanied them into museum collections, the fish traps from the mouth of the Fly River provide an alternative perspective on late nineteenth century Britain’s nascent and growing market for ethnographic specimens. This is particularly the case since the four fish traps listed in the Christy register in March 1894 do not seem to have been the only ones to have arrived in Britain.

Henry Balfour purchased two similar traps for the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford when the London Missionary Society museum closed in May 1910, and a third was acquired by A.W.F. Fuller at the same time.^⁠59 This suggests that the fish traps were only offered to the British Museum after three had already been selected for the Missionary Museum.

Several others seem to have been acquired by the British Museum as ‘duplicates’, presumably with the intention that they would be available to exchange with other museums and collectors. A cardboard label, originally attached to these, seems to have broken and become detached at some point. Written onto this is the number 72, the number from the original handwritten list, but alongside this there is a red edged sticker on which ‘Dups’, an abbreviation for duplicates, was written.

One trap seems to have been acquired by James Edge Partington, a private collector who volunteered at the British Museum.^⁠60 He drew one of the traps shortly after its arrival for the second series of his Ethnographical Album of the Pacific Islands, published in 1895.^⁠61 In 1925 Edge Partingon donated his fish-trap to the Pitt Rivers Museum, where it seems to have been reunited with and displayed alongside the two that were already there.^⁠62

In 1972, the five ‘duplicate’ fish-traps were discovered at the British Museum, still tied together. They were given a new label with a possible attribution ‘SE ASIA, BORNEO? NEW GUINEA?’ In 1980, these were mistakenly identified as the four that had been listed in the Christy register, while the fifth was allocated a new number.^⁠63

While no similar fish traps seem to have been acquired by the Museum of General and Local Archaeology and of Ethnology (as Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was known at the time), its tenth Annual Report, published in November 1894, reported:

The Accessions Fund has also enabled the Curator to purchase from the London Missionary Society a collection of interesting native objects from British New Guinea, collected by the Rev. W.G. Lawes. The careful labelling of these specimens adds very greatly to the value of the collections.^⁠64

The items are described within the report as coming from the ‘Mouth of the Fly River’ but the following year’s Annual Report included a correction: ‘for Rev. W.G. Lawes, read Rev. J. Chalmers’.^⁠65 This confirms the primary association of the collection with Chalmers, suggesting at least some of the collection that arrived in Britain was sold to Cambridge, as well as to the British Museum.

Five years earlier, James Chalmers had established a relationship with the Cambridge-trained Biologist, Alfred Cort Haddon, during the first Cambridge expedition to the Torres Strait. On 5 January 1889, Chalmers wrote to Haddon, then staying with London Missionary Society missionaries on Mer, telling him that ‘I am sorry with a big, big sorrow that I did not take up Anthropology on my arrival in New Guinea…’^⁠66

Chalmers also thanked Haddon, a fellow member of the Congregational Church, for his interest ‘in us & our work’, before noting ‘I believe they have sold all the curios’.^⁠70 It seems likely that this postdated the purchase of material by the Cambridge Museum, since the letter was written more than five months after the British Museum recorded its purchases from Chalmers’ Fly River collection.

In 1901, when Haddon published an obituary of Chalmers in Nature, acknowledging the assistance he had received from him, he stated:

Mr Chalmers has frequently sent ethnographical specimens to various museums. The bulk of one large consignment was acquired by the British Museum. These objects were carefully labelled and were accompanied by a descriptive catalogue, and many of his labels have been copied by Edge-Partington and Heape in their “Ethnographical Album of the Pacific Islands.” These collections contained many specimens and the descriptions much information that was not previously known; for example the collection included the first bull-roarer obtained on the mainland of British New Guinea.^⁠71

Chalmers had twice noted the ceremonial significance of this item in his 1889 letters to Haddon, and significantly the first item on the British Museum list is:

1. Buruma Matamu. Roaring Bull. When used all women & children & uninitiated young men leave the village & go into the bush. When to be shewn to a young man it will be near yam season, May & June, & then the old men work it. The yams are ready for digging & the young men are shewn The Buruma: Maramu.^⁠72

Chalmers seems to have proudly listed the Bull Roarer, the first to be obtained on the New Guinea mainland according to Haddon, at the top of his list. Even in a list of seemingly scientific ethnographic specimens, which included at least thirteen fairly ordinary fish traps, priority was still given to an important secret item, associated with pre-Christian ceremonies.