The best Amphlett pots owe their high quality to the excellence of their material as well as their workmanship. The clay for them has to be imported into the Islands from Yayawana, a quarry on the Northern shore of Fergusson Island, about a day’s journey from the Amphletts. Only a very inferior clay can be found in the islands of Gumasila and Nabwageta, good enough to make small pots, but quite useless for the big ones.
There is a legend, explaining why the good clay cannot be obtained nowadays in the Amphletts. In olden days, two brothers, Torosipupu and Tolikilaki, lived on one of the summits of Gumasila called Tomonumonu. There was plenty of fine clay there at that time. One day Torosipupu went to fish with a trap. He caught a very fine giant clam-shell. When he came back, Tolikilaki said: “O my shell! I shall eat it!” Torosipupu refused it and answered with a very obscene allusion to the bivalvular mollusc and to the uses he was going to make of it. Tolikilaki asked again; Torosipupu refused. They quarrelled. Tolikilaki then took part of the clay with him, and went to Yayawana on the main island. Torosipupu afterwards took the rest and followed him. What were their further destinies, the legend does not say. But on Gumasila there remained only very poor clay, which is all that can be found there ever since.
Since then, the men have to go about twice yearly to Yayawana in order to bring the clay from which the women afterwards will manufacture the pots. It takes them about a day to reach Yayawana, to which, as it lies to the South-West, they can travel with any of the prevailing winds and return equally well. They remain for a couple of days there, digging the clay, drying it and filling a few vataga baskets with it. I estimate that each canoe carries about two ton weight on its return journey. This will last the women for half a year’s production. The pale, straw-coloured clay is kept under the houses in big troughs made of sides of discarded canoes.
In olden days, before the white man’s advent, the conditions were a little more complicated. Only one island, Kwatouto, being on friendly terms with the natives had the freedom of the Northern shore. Whether the other islands used also to fetch the clay from there, doing so armed and ready for attack; or whether they used to acquire the clay by barter from Kwatouto, I could not definitely establish. The information one receives in the Amphletts is exceedingly unsatisfactory, and my several informants gave contradictory accounts on this point. The fact seems clear, in my case, that Kwatouto, then as now, was the source of the best pottery, but that both Gumasila and Nabwageta also always manufactured pots, though perhaps inferior ones. The fourth island, Domdom, never participated in this trade, and up to the present there is not a single woman in Domdom who can shape a pot.
Plate XLIV
Technology of Pot Making (I.)
Top picture: the clumps of clay have been put in a circle and joined up, forming thick, circular roll. Bottom picture: the roll is being worked upwards, caving in all round. (See [Div. III].)
Plate XLV