Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/212

154 bonnets in a few minutes, and threw away as soon as the sun became again low in the afternoon. These, however, serve merely for a shade: coverings for their heads they have none except their hair, for these bonnets or shades only fit round their heads, not upon them.

Besides these things, they are very neat in making fishing-nets in the same manner as we do, ropes of about an inch thick, and lines from the poorou, threads with which they sew together their canoes, and also belts from the fibres of the cocoanut, plaited either round or flat. All their twisting work they do upon their thighs in a manner very difficult to describe, and, indeed, unnecessary, as no European can want to learn how to perform an operation which his instruments will do for him so much faster than it can possibly be done by hand. But of all the strings that they make none are so excellent as the fishing-lines, etc., made of the bark of the erowa, a kind of frutescent nettle (Urtica argentea) which grows in the mountains, and is consequently rather scarce. Of this they make the lines which are employed to take the briskest and most active fish, bonitos, albecores, etc. As I never made experiments with it, I can only describe its strength by saying that it was infinitely stronger than the silk lines which I had on board made in the best fishing shops in London, though scarcely more than half as thick.

In every expedient for taking fish they are vastly ingenious; their seine nets for fish to mesh themselves in, etc., are exactly like ours. They strike fish with harpoons made of cane and pointed with hard wood more dexterously than we can do with ours that are headed with iron, for we who fasten lines to ours need only lodge them in the fish to secure it, while they, on the other hand, throwing theirs quite from them, must either mortally wound the fish or lose him. Their hooks, indeed, as they are not made of iron, are necessarily very different from ours in construction. They are of two sorts; the first, witte-witte, is used for towing. Fig. 1 represents this in profile, and Fig. 2 the view of the bottom part. The shank (a) is made of mother-of-pearl,