Captain Cook, Mrs Taylor and a Mi’kmaw quillwork box: An uncorroborated inscription, an unwarranted assertion and an imagined collection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In 1963 a small box bearing an inscription stating that it had been ‘brought from Otaheite by Captn. Cook and presented by him to Mrs. Taylor Circus Bath’ was donated to the National Maritime Museum in London. That the box is actually an example of Mi’kmaw work from Nova Scotia has led previous scholars to claim that the famous navigator James Cook (1728–1779) made a collection of artefacts while he was on Royal Navy duty in Atlantic Canada in the years 1758 to 1767. An exploration of the evidence leads to two conclusions: that there is nothing to corroborate the inscription’s claim that Cook presented the box to Mrs Taylor; and that the related assertion that Cook made a collection in Atlantic Canada should be set aside.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".