A dish carved in miro, tamanu or toa wood. The underside is in the shape of a fish with an inset eye and is signed 'PITCAIRN I JOHN CHRISTIAN'. A wooden handle is attached with metal screws.

The inhabitants of Pitcairn are mainly descended from the escaped mutineers of the 'Bounty' who found refuge there with Tahitian women after seizing the ship in 1789, under the leadership of Fletcher Christian. The population thus established on the previously uninhabited island was only discovered in 1806, living by subsistence agriculture, John Adams then being the last surviving mutineer. They were later moved to Norfolk Island but this was not a success and a number subsequently returned. The two supplementary means of income on Pitcairn have been the sale of handicrafts to the passengers and crew of ships calling at the island and, from 1940, the sale of postage stamps to collectors. Today Pitcairn wood carvings are sold by mail order on the internet but e-mail is undermining the trade in stamps. This carving was made and sold on the island about 1960 and brought to London by its new owner: the maker, John Christian, died in 1984.