154 GENERAL ACCOUNT OF SOUTH SEA ISLANDS cu. vir 
bonnets in a few minutes, and threw away as soon as the 
sun became again low in the afternoon. These, however, 
serve merely for a shade: coverings for their heads they 
have none except their hair, for these bonnets or shades only 
fit round their heads, not upon them. 
Besides these things, they are very neat in making fish- 
ing-nets in the same manner as we do, ropes of about an 
inch thick, and lines from the poorou, threads with which 
they sew together their canoes, and also belts from the fibres 
of the cocoanut, plaited either round or flat. All their 
twisting work they do upon their thighs in a manner very 
difficult to describe, and, indeed, unnecessary, as no European 
can want to learn how to perform an operation which his 
instruments will do for him so much faster than it can 
possibly be done by hand. But of all the strings that they 
make none are so excellent as the fishing-lines, etc., made of 
the bark of the erowa,a kind of frutescent nettle (Urtica 
argentea) which grows in the mountains, and is consequently 
rather scarce. Of this they make the lines which are 
employed to take the briskest and most active fish, bonitos, 
albecores, etc. As I never made experiments with it, I can 
only describe its strength by saying that it was infinitely 
stronger than the silk lines which I had on board made in 
the best fishing shops in London, though scarcely more than 
half as thick. 
In every expedient for taking fish they are vastly 
ingenious; their seine nets for fish to mesh themselves in, 
ete., are exactly like ours. They strike fish with harpoons 
made of cane and pointed with hard wood more dexterously 
than we can do with ours that are headed with iron, for we 
who fasten lines to ours need only lodge them in the fish to 
secure it, while they, on the other hand, throwing theirs 
quite from them, must either mortally wound the fish or 
lose him. Their hooks, indeed, as they are not made of iron, 
are necessarily very different from ours in construction. 
They are of two sorts; the first, witte-witte, is used for towing. 
Fig. 1 represents this in profile, and Fig. 2 the view of the 
bottom part. The shank (a) is made of mother-of-pearl, 
