Four views of a remarkable carved teak dug-out slit drum in the form of a naval vessel.  About 120cm long.  Although it has strong ethnographical overtones it is patently of English carving.  I bought it many years ago in the trade and failed to discover the significance of the snake wrapped round the "bows", assuming the St George's shield and trophy of standards to represent the stern.  I sold it to a much-esteemed and knowledgeable friend in the trade, the late and sadly-missed Chris Clarke of Stow-on-the-Wold, and in the days before Google, it was not long before he had unearthed a likely hypothesis for the existence of such a strange combination of cultures.
     When I bought the drum, I had been told that there was a tradition that it had been brought back from Captain Cook's expedition to the South Seas, by one of his crew.  I could find no record of this in the records at the Cook Museum in Whitby.
      Chris discovered that there was an expedition to Northern Australia and New Guinea by an H.M.S Rattlesnake in 1847-48.  On board as assistant surgeon, but in the main capacity of marine naturalist, was Thomas Henry Huxley, (1825-1895), later to be a strongly vocal proponent of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, to the extent that he became known as "Darwin's Bulldog".  Huxley maintained diaries and a sketchbook of the expedition, which include a sketch of a native slit drum.  It is perfectly possible that someone on the ship, perhaps the ship's carpenter, was intrigued by the sound of such a drum and carved himself one during the voyage; it could also have served as his ditty box.
      We may never know the whole story, but is is certainly a remarkable object.