(Updated, March 2022) A Micmac (Mi’kmaw) box said to have been collected by Captain James Cook (1728-1779). If this is so, it would have been acquired by him in Halifax or Quebec in 1758 or 1759. It is a round box made of birchbark with a slip-on lid. The outsides of the box and lid are covered with split dyed Black Spruce root, threaded through with flattened white porcupine quills to create chequered patterns. The base of the box is inscribed: 'Brought from Oteheiti by Captain Cook & Presented by him to Mrs Taylor, Circus, Bath.' Mrs Taylor was the ancestor of the donor. John Taylor, her husband, who died in 1806, was a marine and landscape painter living at 22, The Circus, Bath, where he was a neighbour of Gainsborough.

Unfortunately this story is a myth now fully investigated and debunked by Jeremy Coote in 'Captain Cook, Mrs Taylor and a Mi’kmaw quillwork box: an uncorroborated inscription, an unwarranted assertion and an imagined collection' in 'Journal of the History of Collections' (March 2022 : https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhac007).

There is no reason to doubt that the box is a rare example of 18th-century Mi'kmaw work that passed down in Taylor family descent. It was also possibly brought back by one of the other Naval officers called James Cook who had some links to the Halifax station and were near contemporaries of the celebrated navigator. The fact that family myth linked it to him may account for its survival but that apart, and that Cook's early naval career did include surveying work in the area the box was made, it has no connection with him.

The blue ink of the inscription is unlikely to predate the mid-19th century and the style of handrwriting also suggests it is an addition made after that.