154 FISHING. 



Moseley, in his " Notes by a Naturalist," p. 480,. refers to such 

 an event as not of uncommon occurrence in some of the Pacific 

 Islands.^ 



The material, from which the natives of Bougainville Straits 

 manufacture the twine for their fishing-nets and lines, is usually 

 supplied by the delicate fibres lining the bark of the young branches 

 of a stout climber, which is known to the natives as the " awi-sulu." 

 This climber, which is probably a species of Lyonsia, lias a main 

 stem of the size of a man's leg, which embraces a tree, whilst it 

 sends its ofishoots for a distance of some 40 or 50 feet along the 

 •n-ound. It is the delicate fibres lining the inside of the skin of the 

 young procumbent branches that the native selects for his purpose. 

 By scraping the thin bark or skin with the edge of a pearl-shell, 

 the fibres are first cleared of other material : they are then dried in 

 the sun ; and when drj, they are arranged in small strands, three of 

 which are twisted together into a fine line by rolling them with the 

 palm of the hand on the thigh. The natives sometimes obtain the 

 material for their nets and lines from the common littoral tree, the 

 Hibiscus tiliaceus, which tliey name " dakatako." 



In making their nets, our common netting-stitch is employed, 

 the needle being of plain wood, 18 inches long, and forked at each 

 end ; whilst the mesh emplo^'ed is a piece of tortoise-shell, having 

 for a width of an inch a lenorth of 2i inches. Tlie method of netting 

 familiar to ourselves appears to be generally employed amongst the 

 native races of this portion of the globe. We learn from the Rev. 

 Georse Turner that in Samoa the same stitch and the same form of 

 needle are employed which are in use in Europe.- The natives of 

 Port Moresby, in New Guinea, net " so precisely in our mode that 

 the seamen of H.M.S. " Basilisk " took up their shuttles and went on 

 with their work." ^ The needle emplo3^ed at Rcdscar Bay, on the 

 coast of the same island, is more like our own, the mesh being oi 

 tortoise-shell, two to three inches long.'* When Captain Bowen, of 

 the ship " Albemarle," was visited in 1791 by some natives of the 

 Solomon Islands who came ofi" to him in their canoes, he thought he 

 had found in the apparently European workmanship of their nets a 



1 Vide also "Nature," index of vol. XXVIII., for some further correspondence on this 

 subject. 



2 " Nineteen Years in Polynesia " (Loudon, 1861), p. 272. 



3 Moresby's "New. Guinea" (1876), p. 156. 



■• These specimens are in the British Museum Ethnological collection. 



