PIKE^ COOKING, AND VESSELS. 269 



liquor tliey call bland." ^ Beside these animal materials, parts 

 of several plants will answer tlie purpose, as the bark used for 

 kettles in Asia and America, the spathes of palms, in which 

 food is often boiled in South America,^ the split bamboos in 

 which the Dayaks, the Sumatrans, and the Stiens of Cambodia, 

 boil their rice, and cocoa-nut shells, as just mentioned in the 

 Radack group ; Captain Cook saw a cocoa-nut shell used in 

 Tahiti, to dry up the blood of a native dog in, over the fire.^ 

 These facts should be borne in mind in considering the follow- 

 ing theory of the Origin of the Art of Pottery. 



It was, I believe, Goguet who first propounded, in the last 

 century, the notion that the way in which pottery came to be 

 made, was that people daubed such combustible vessels as 

 these with clay, to protect them from the fire, till they found 

 that the clay alone would answer the purpose, and thus the art 

 of pottery came into the world. The idea was not a mere 

 effort of his imagination, for he had met with a description of 

 the plastering of wooden vessels with clay in the Southern 

 Hemisphere. It is related that a certain Captain Gonneville 

 sailed from Honfleur in 1503, doubled the Cape of Good Hope, 

 and came to the Southern Indies. There he found a gentle 

 and joyous people, living by hunting and fishing, and a little 

 agriculture, and he speaks of cloaks of mats and skins, feather 

 work, bows and arrows, beds of mats, villages of thirty to 

 eighty huts of stakes and wattles, etc., " and their household 

 utensils of wood, even their boiling-pots, but plastered with a 

 kind of clay, a good finger thick, which prevents the fire from 

 burning them.""* What to make of this curious story I do not 

 know, but as to the theory of the origin of pottery which Go- 

 guet founded upon it, a quantity of evidence has made its ap- 

 pearance since his time, which all goes in its favour. 



' ' Rerum Scoticarum Historia, auctore Georgio Buchanaiio Scoto ;' (ad ex.) 

 Edinburgh, 1528, p. 7. 



2 Spix and Martins, vol. ii. p. 688. Wallace, p. 508. 



2 St. John, vol. i. p. 137. Marsden, p. 60. Mouhot, vol. ii. p. 245. Cook, 

 Third Voy., vol. ii. p. 35. See Coleman, p. 318 ; Mariner, vol. ii. p. 272. 



'' Goguet, vol. i. p. 77. ' Memoires touchant I'Etablissement d'une Mission 

 Chrestienne dans le troisieme monde, autrement appelle la Terra Australe,' etc. ; 

 Paris, 1663, pp. 10-16. 



