James Cook, FRS (1728-79), known to history simply as Captain Cook, was granted a one-hour audience by George III in August 1771 after his return from his first expedition to the Pacific. It was probably at this meeting that Cook presented the King with this precious ornament, which the explorer had received from the natives of Queen Charlotte Sound in South Island, New Zealand, in October 1769. In Maori culture, tiki was the name given to the first created man, and hei means suspended. Carved from the precious nephrite or greenstone known as Pounamu, the heitiki was worn round the neck close to the throat. Embodying the spirits of ancestors, it was a powerful mark of the status of the wearer. W.B. Monkhouse, a member of Cook’s expedition, described one of the natives encountered by the crew of Endeavour as having ‘a piece of green talk [sic] about two & half inches long, and an inch & half broad, flat, and carved into the figure of a most uncooth animal of fancy’.

James Cook’s first voyage, sponsored by the Royal Society and with a substantial personal contribution from the King, had as its declared purpose the observation of the transit of Venus. The second, unspoken objective was the discovery of the ‘Southern Continent’, which was to be secured for British trade. The botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander also took part in the expedition, which set sail from Plymouth in August 1768.

Among the objects that Cook took with him on his second voyage to the Pacific in 1772, as gifts for the natives he would encounter, were numerous ornaments - earrings, bracelets, etc. - made by Boulton and Fothergill as facsimiles of those brought back on earlier voyages. They included ‘1 Green God w’ch is all we can send of them as 3 were done but crack’d in the cooling’ (letter from Boulton and Fothergill to William Matthews, British Museum [Natural History], Banks Archive). This may refer to a bronze tiki, probably cast from George III’s example, which survives in a private collection in New Zealand.