Get a rare peek of the Bishop Museum during a behind-the-scenes tour

Bishop Museum displays only a small percentage of the 25 million-plus biological specimens and cultural and historical treasures from throughout the Pacific in its care. Limited exhibition space is one of the reasons. During the Behind the Scenes Tour, however, small groups can see precious artifacts that are not otherwise accessible to the public because of their age, size, rarity and/or fragile condition.

In the library and archives, for instance, historian DeSoto Brown might bring out the oldest surviving photograph taken in Hawaii — a daguerreotype of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop circa 1847 when she was about 16 years old. Another daguerreotype from the 1840s depicts her husband, Charles Reed Bishop, when he was a young man. It was made in New York before he moved to Hawaii and became a successful businessman (he started the Bishop & Co. bank in 1858, which is now First Hawaiian Bank).

“Five years after Pauahi’s death in 1884, he founded Bishop Museum in her memory,” Brown said. “At that time, it was very expensive to have your picture taken, so the people who did it were primarily the alii (Hawaiian royalty) or those who were wealthy, including missionary descendants.”

Brown might also show one of Queen Lili‘uokalani’s diaries; the museum has nine of them, and the Hawaii State Archives has six. All of her diaries did not survive the passage of time, and the ones that remain date from the 1880s to 1906, 11 years before her death.

“What’s interesting is that although Lili‘uokalani went through a tremendous amount of political turmoil in her later life, her diaries don’t address that very much,” Brown said. “Instead, they are more her personal feelings, reminiscences and experiences, so that you see her not just as a symbol of that turmoil but instead as a person with emotions, friends, pets, hobbies and talents who lived daily life the way all of us do.”

Bishop Museum maintains six large temperature- and humidity­-controlled storage rooms for its collections. Participants might be treated to an up-close look at the “second Joy cloak,” one of two ahuula purchased by the museum from Mrs. Charles Henry Joy of Boston, Mass., in 1913. Made with feathers from the endemic iiwi (scarlet honeycreeper), koae ula (red-tailed tropic bird) and now-­extinct oo (honeyeater), it is the only Hawaiian feather cloak in existence with feathers that curl.

Joseph Barrell, one of the Joy family’s ancestors, owned the ship Columbia Rediviva, which, after circumnavigating the globe, arrived in Boston on Aug. 10, 1790, with Attoo, a prince of Kauai, on board. Attoo gifted the cloak to Barrell, and it was passed down through subsequent generations of the Joy family.

“As with all ahuula, this cloak required the expertise of many different hands,” Assistant Collections Manager Kamalu du Preez said. “First, there were the people who harvested the olona plant, made cordage from its fibers and used it to weave the nae, the cloak’s foundation, which is similar to fine netting. Then there were the people who collected the birds and their feathers, as well as those who made the bundles of four or five feathers to tie onto the nae. Every time you see a knot, there’s a bundle attached to it. If you count each knot and figure there are four or five feathers attached to it, there must be hundreds of thousands of feathers in the cloak.”

Most of the museum’s umeke (bowls) are associated with food. They were made from kou or ­kamani, as those woods do not impart a bitter taste. Larger umeke were used for storing or transporting poi. Every family had at least one big communal poi bowl. They ate from smaller bowls, which were also used to hold condiments such as paakai (salt) and inamona (kukui nut relish).

“What is notable about the umeke, besides the vast range of shapes and sizes, is the repair work that was done, because it speaks to how much they were valued by the people of Hawaii,” said Cultural Advisor Marques Hanalei Marzan. “If a bowl had a crack, it would often be fixed with butterfly patches called pewa. These patches look as though they were intentionally placed as part of a pattern, but they actually served a functional purpose.”

Also remarkable are soft, finely woven mats made from makaloa, an indigenous sedge that grows in brackish water. The mats are called moena pawehe (literally, patterned mats), referring to the colored geometric motifs on their surfaces.

“The colors are natural, not dyes,” Marzan said. “Hawaiians harvested and sorted makaloa at different times of the year to acquire different lengths, widths, colors and thicknesses to make various decorations and styles of mats. Hawaiian plaiting reached a high level of excellence on Niihau; weavers there produced some of the most beautiful and intricate mats in Hawaii.”

Heads up: The Behind the Scenes Tour is pricier than the norm. Even so, those interested in Hawaiian history and culture might consider it a once-in-a-lifetime experience that’s well worth the cost of a ticket.

Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi is a Honolulu-based freelance writer whose travel features for the Star-Advertiser have won several Society of American Travel Writers awards.