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A stone made sharp at the edge and a wooden mallet were the only ones we saw that had been formd by art; the use of these we supposd to be in making the notches in the bark of high trees by which they climb them for purposes unknown to us, and for cutting and perhaps driving wedges to take of the bark which they must have in large peices for making Canoes, Sheilds and water buckets and also for covering their houses. Besides these they use shells and corals to scrape the points of their darts, and polish them with the leaves of a kind of wild Fig tree (Ficus Radulo) which bites upon wood almost as keenly as our European shave grass usd by the Joiners. Their fish hooks are made of shell very neatly and some exceedlingly small; their lines are also well twisted and they have them from the size of a half inch rope to almost the fineness of a hair made of some vegetable. Of Netting they seem to be quite ignorant but make their bags, the only thing of the kind we saw among them, by laying the threads loop within loop something in the way of knitting only very coarse and open,
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Voyaging Accounts |  |
© Derived from State Library of NSW Transcription of Banks's Journal page (vol. 2) *293, February 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/-banks_remarks-297.html