A partial ship’s bell made of bronze and bearing a Tamil inscription, the Tamil Bell, as it is commonly known, was discovered c. 1840 at a Maori village near Whangarei, in the northernmost part of New Zealand. Found with the clapper and the waist, or main shell, missing, only the topmost part of the bell survives. Comprising the bell’s crown and canons, the artefact is 16 centimetres high and 9 centimetres deep, with a 15-centimetre diameter, and weighs 2.6 kilogrammes. The inscription along the outside rim reads, in an archaic Tamil script, ‘Mohideen Baksh udiya kappal udiya mani’, which can be translated as ‘the bell of the ship of Mohideen Baksh’. Appearing in relief rather than engraved into the metal, the inscription is clear and well preserved, presumably protected from wear by the flanges or raised collars running along the crown above and below it. 

William Colenso, a Cornish missionary, discovered the bell when he arrived at the village, reportedly the first European to visit there. He found it being used as a cooking vessel; it caught his attention because the region did not produce bronze at the time and was not yet engaged in foreign trade. The community informed Colenso that the ‘cooking pot’ had been in their possession for generations, having first been found among the roots of a tree uprooted during a storm. After Colenso gave the community an iron pot in exchange for the bell, it remained in his personal possession until his death in 1899. It was then bequeathed to the Colonial Museum (now the Museum of New Zealand or Te Papa Tongarewa) in Wellington. 

Its unknown provenance has brought the Tamil Bell both scholarly attention and public curiosity. Until the bell’s discovery, there had been no records of Tamil trading ships visiting New Zealand, and it is unclear how the bell reached there from its point of origin — presumably a Tamil-speaking region of India, Sri Lanka or Southeast Asia. There has also been much speculation on what the bell’s inscription denotes.