ETHNOLOGY HEDLEY. 



295 



The cushion pillow seems less widely distributed than the 

 wooden head-rest. From Tahiti, Edge-Partington notes a " pillow 

 of plaited leaf."* Of Hawaii: "It is said that wooden pillows 

 were used in olden times, but if so there are none in this collection 

 [the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum]. The Hawaiian pillow is a 

 parallelopipedon of plaited pandanus leaves, stuffed with the same 

 material, capital accompaniment to the Hawaiian mat bed."f 



Fig. 62. 



FLASKS. 



Pottery, strange to any section of the 

 Polynesian people, J was of course absent 

 from the Ellice Group, for not only was the 

 potter's art unknown but his raw material 

 does not even occur there. Neither 

 do gourds (Lagenaria), so serviceable to 

 natives of other Pacific islands, grow in 

 this archipelago. The Ellice Islanders 

 are therefore restricted in the choice of 

 vessels capable of containing fluids to sea- 

 shells, wooden bowls, and coconut shells. 

 The latter, known as " vei'i," are of a 

 handy size and weight, and for convenient 

 portability are often fitted with sinnet 

 casing and handle. Considerable variation 

 exists in the net- work, which in some cases, 

 foreign to the Ellice, is so close as to conceal the surface of the 

 flask. Particularly large nuts are especially valued for flasks, 

 and are prepared by stripping off the fibrous husk down to the 

 hard shell ; the contents are abstracted by breaking in one " eye," 

 placing the nut in salt water till the kernel decays, and rinsing 

 out the shell. A stopper is readily improvised from a rolled strip 

 of banana or pandanus leaf. The original of fig. 62, from Funa- 

 futi, weighs when empty, fifteen ounces, contains three and a half 

 pints, and is eight inches in major diameter and six in minor. 



Flasks are shown on p. 25 receiving toddy. Gill published a 

 sketch of a girl drawing water with one at Vaitupu, as described 

 on p. 60.|| 



* Edge-Partington tec. cit., i., pi. xxxiii., fig. 8. 



f Brigham loc. cit., p. 33. 



J Cook particularly remarked of some earthenware that he saw in 

 Tonga, "that it was the manufacture of some other isle." (Second Voyage, 

 i., 1777, p. 214). 



Gourds, as shown by the frontispiece of Erskine's " Cruise in the 

 Western Pacific," 1853, are likewise sometimes mounted with net- 

 work. 



|| Gill Life in the Southern Isles, 1876, p. 141. 



