i6 



Mai and Basket Wcax'ins^ 



craft have few fans. The use of fans as insignia of rank, so common in southeastern 

 Asia, and seen also in the flabelli of papal display at Rome, does not seem to have had 

 much vogue among the scattered islands of the great ocean. 



The attraction of evolution has led us from baskets to fans, but we must now 

 return to another form of basket made from palm leaf and wholly unconnedled with 

 the "midrib stru(5lure". No. 3346, in Plate I, is a coiled basket of palm from the 



Caroline Ids., looking at first glance like a rattan 

 basket ; but it is from the leaf and not the stem that 

 it is constru6led. To show the coils and the meth- 

 ods of binding these together Mr. L. G. Blackman 

 has drawn for me two figures (19-20) and from 

 these the entire strudlure of the basket may be 

 seen ;— the neatly sewed rim, the knots between 

 each coil, the manA- sticks that compose this 

 coil, and in the second 

 diagram the curious 

 displacement of what 

 seem to be direct ver- 

 tical lines of strip bind- 

 ing the coils. With 

 these the curious reader 

 can follow the con- 

 struction, which cer- 

 tainly differs greatly 

 from that of any basket 

 PIG. 19. CAROLINE iD.s. BASKET. belonging to the Hawaii- 



an group, and it .seems to show traces of a Malay origin, 

 as do so many things and people of the Caroline archipelago. 



Solomon Islands Shields. — There are several plaited 

 shields in the Bishop Museum, but one, No. 1859 (Fig. 21 ) is 

 of very remarkable construdlion. A framework, 33X10.5 in., of rattan, light colored 

 and rather soft but heav}', pared down flat, is covered with a fine weaving of rattan 

 strips, the edges being bound by a braid of the same. Around the curved portions, top 

 and bottom, is a border of pandanus strips about 0.25 in. wide, dyed red, folded over on 

 the inner edge of the front of the shield, and the corners of the fold trimmed off so as 

 to leave enough of the leaf to hold the two parts of the strip together. As shown in the 

 illustration (Fig. 21), there is a decorative figure woven in black strips of the same ma- 

 terial at top and bottom of the shield. Both sides are woven alike, including the black 



FlC. 20. CorRSE OF STRIP.S. 



