Melanesian Bark-cloth. 55 



from wet, would last several months. Though the native cloth worn by the inhabi- 

 tants was made by the women, there were some kinds used in the temples in the 

 service of the idols, which Avere made by men, and which it was necessary, according 

 to the declarations of the priests, should be beaten during the night." ■*" 



With this imperfect gleaning of the past history of Polynesian kapa-making, 

 we may leave this part of our subject for the present and take up the story of the 

 islanders beyond the Polynesian boundary. We shall have occasion to return to some 

 of these histories when we take up, in the annotated list of Kapa, the products in hand 

 from these different islands, and to that catalogue I have reserved such corrections or 

 changes as later information may render needful rather than interrupt the narrative 

 with obtrusive notes. 



Turning westward we find in Micronesia a mixed race, shading from West to 

 East, from the Caroline Islands to the Marshall and Gilbert groups; the Malay 

 influence stronger at the West, the Polynesian at the East. Through this great 

 extent of small island groups, while kapa was made here and there, it was not a suc- 

 cessful competitor with the native loom. Where it was made the materials and pro- 

 cedure were the same as in the eastern islands already described, and the product was 

 never, so far as known, remarkable. To this one exception should be noted from the 

 Marshall Islands where most beautiful mats are made from the leaves of the Pandanus. 

 This is a kapa in the U. S. National Museum, shown in Plate 28, representing the 

 national mat so perfectly, and recalling the line work of the Samoans. 



Melanesian Bark-cloth. 



In the extreme western bounds of our Pacific region, the New Hebrides, Solo- 

 mon Islands, Bismarck Archipelago and New Guinea, we find a rather coarse, but by 

 no means uninteresting kind of kapa. As we approach the route by which the paper- 

 mulberry seems to have entered the Pacific, we find less of it and of its cloth, but 

 this seems explicable when we consider the need of careful cultivation for this shrub, 

 and the comparatively unsettled, warring races we now have to deal with : few traces 

 shall we find of the carefully tended ponds of taro or plantations of waoke. These 

 people of darker skin, hair more or less curled, and lower civilization, could find, in the 

 forests, trees whose bark could be used for cloth, and over whose cultivation they had 

 neither care no control. Hence much of the tapa from the Melanesian region is harsh 

 to the touch and coarsely made from the bark of figs and other trees of much less 

 fineness in bark structure than those we have seen used hitherto. The designs are 

 also quite distinct from the Polynesian, as may be seen in Fig. 20, which is fairly 



*- Polynesian Researches by William Ellis. Ed. London, 1853. 1,178. 



