Fig. 25.—Rubbings of both sides of a float for a fishing-net; one-half natural size.
All over this district we find decorative art permeated with the influence of the frigate bird. This beautiful bird is the sacred bird of the West Pacific. I shall allude to it again in a later section. The bird, or its head only, is often carved more or less in the round, especially for the decoration of canoes. It must, however, be remembered that such representations are conventional and not strictly realistic.
The same head is repeated on the handle of a spatula (Fig. [24]), the curved tip of the beak of one bird forming the head of the bird immediately in front of it. From this simple origin the varied and beautiful scroll patterns have been developed. One important factor in the evolution of this pattern has been the confining of the design within narrow bands. When a band happens to be exceptionally broad, one often finds that the pattern becomes erratic. Queer contorted designs also result from the attempt to cover a relatively broad area, as in Fig. [25]. Here there is nothing to guide or restrain the artist, except the boundary of the float; but on canoe carvings and some other objects there are usually structural or vestigial features, round which the design may be said to crystallise, and in these cases the pattern is approximately or entirely symmetrical.
Fig. 26.—Rubbing of upper two-thirds of the decoration of a club, in the Glasgow Museum; one-third natural size.
