Moro keris/kalis ID

[adamb]

Thank you, everyone, for your extremely valuable observations.

To answer one of the above queries, yes, at some stage the scabbard was daubed, rather roughly, in yellow paint. The yellow paint, I should note, is clearly on top of the edges of the old label bearing the inscription and thus quite evidently post-dates it. There is also a crack in the scabbard that runs through this label. The fibre string binding on the scabbard might pre-date the yellow paint job, though I'm not sure about that; there seems to have been an attempt to glue the binding in place on the scabbard after it had been painted, so perhaps the binding was moved to paint below it and then shifted back into place.

Now to the inscription on the label: it's rather odd. Parts of the writing are not well-preserved and I'm working on taking close-up photographs with the hope I can decipher some or all of it in time. However, the part of the inscription that does seem legible to me and some colleagues (and, I should note, was for the most part already deciphered by the former owner's wife who spent considerable time, and ingenuity, reconstructing the text) is as follows:

"...[it was?] a present from the .... [illegible] Timor to Admrl Lord Nelson".

I am told by a historian colleague that the label "is in a neat English secretarial hand of the 19th century...the same style starts to pop up as early as the 1670s and remains quite similar after that".

I do not know what to make of this inscription at the present time, but it is interesting.

There is more writing in black ink, newer and in a different hand, over the yellow paint on the top of the cross-piece, which is as follows:

"Clayton Co", followed by an "M" below it.

I have attached pics of the label, including one in which I've used an image enhancement program to show the writing more clearly, perhaps not very successfully. (Apologies in advance if any images are rotated 90 degrees, I do not why this happens when I upload images to the system).

NB: The former owner of this keris from whom I acquired it bought it at a gun show in Brisbane, Australia, in the 80s or 90s; I'm told that the person who was selling it at that time casually mentioned the label but did not seem to attach much significance to it.

Any insight much appreciated!