Thanks for these observations and opinions on the label. The former owner's wife had an interesting theory: that William Bligh acquired the sword from (Dutch) Timor during his post-“mutiny on the Bounty” sojourn in Kupang and then in England presented it as a gift to Nelson when he served under him.
I’m getting multispectral images taken of the label today and hopefully that will allow me to decipher some more of the writing, but it’s possible the script may be “…it was a present from the Gov of Timor to Admrl Lord Nelson”.
And a direct descendant of Nelson emigrated to the New South Wales colony in the early 1800s; if there really is a Nelson connection, perhaps this is how it ended up here (again, much of the legwork on this has been done already by the former owner’s wife, who very much enjoyed going down a few rabbit holes over this most interesting theory).
It’s possible of course that someone of this era (perhaps in the early NSW colony) simply wrote this false claim about Nelson to enhance the value of the keris. However, as a colleague pointed out to me, if one were to try and pass off a weapon as having belonged to Lord Nelson it would probably make sense to choose a royal navy sabre or some other type of recognisably English blade that Nelson might reasonably have had in his possession, rather than this fairly obscure type of keris from a remote part of island Southeast Asia.
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