Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/300

242 say more, but find myself much inferior to the task. I shall therefore content myself with saying that their taste led them into two materially different styles, as I will call them. One was entirely formed of a number of spirals differently connected, the other was in a much more wild taste, and I may truly say was like nothing but itself. The truth with which the lines were drawn was surprising; but even more so was their method of connecting several spirals into one piece, inimitably well, intermingling the ends in so dexterous a manner that it was next to impossible for the eye to trace the connections. The beauty of all their carvings, however, depended entirely on the design, for the execution was so rough that when you came near it was difficult to see any beauty in the things which struck you most at a distance.

After having said so much of their workmanship, it will be necessary to say something of their tools. As they have no metals these are made of stone of different kinds, their hatchets especially of any hard stone they can get, but chiefly of a kind of green talc, which is very hard and at the same time tough. With axes of this stone they cut so clean that it would often puzzle a man to say whether the wood they have shaped was or was not cut with an iron hatchet. These axes they value above all their riches, and would seldom part with them for anything we could offer. Their nicer work, which requires nicer-edged tools, they do with fragments of jasper, which they break and use the sharp edges till they become blunt, after which they throw them away as useless, for it is impossible ever again to sharpen them. I suppose it was with these fragments of jasper that at Tolaga they bored a hole through a piece of glass that we had given them, just large enough to admit a thread in order to convert it into an ornament. I must confess I am quite ignorant of what method they use to cut and polish their weapons, which are made of very hard stone.

Their cloths are made exactly in the same manner as by the inhabitants of South America, some of whose workmanship, procured at Rio de Janeiro, I have on board. The