Another considerable manufacture is matting of various kinds; some of which is finer, and better, in every respect, than any we have in Europe: the coarser sort serves them to sleep upon, and the finer to wear in wet weather. With the fine, of which there are also two sorts, much pains is taken, especially with that made of the bark of the Poerou, the _Hibiscus tiliaceus_ of Linnæus, some of which is as fine as a coarse cloth; the other sort, which is still more beautiful, they call _Vanne_; it is white, glossy, and shining, and is made of the leaves of their _Wharrou_, a species of the _Pandanus_, of which we had no opportunity to see either the flowers or fruit: they have other matts, or as they call them _Moeas_, to sit or to sleep upon, which are formed of a great variety of rushes and grass, and which they make, as they do every thing else that is plaited, with amazing facility and dispatch. They are also very dexterous in making basket and wicker work; their baskets are of a thousand different patterns, many of them exceedingly neat; and the making them is an art that every one practises, both men and women: they make occasional baskets and panniers of the cocoa-nut leaf in a few minutes, and the women who visited us early in a morning used to send, as soon as the sun was high, for a few of the leaves, of which they made little bonnets to shade their faces, at so small an expence of time and trouble, that, when the sun was again low in the evening, they used to throw them away. These bonnets, however, did not cover the head, but consisted only of a band that went round it, and a shade that projected from the forehead. Of the bark of the Poerou, they make ropes and lines, from the thickness of an inch to the size of a small packthread: with these they make nets for fishing: of the fibres of the cocoa-nut they make thread, for fastening together the several parts of their canoes, and belts, either round or flat, twisted or plaited; and of the bark of the _Erowa_, a kind of nettle which grows in the mountains, and is therefore rather scarce, they make the best fishing lines in the world: with these they hold the strongest and most active fish, such as Bonetas and Albicores, which would snap our strongest silk lines in a minute, though they are twice as thick. They make also a kind of seine, of a coarse broad grass, the blades of which are like flags; these they twist and tie together in a loose manner, till the net, which is about as wide as a large sack, is from sixty to eighty fathom long: this they haul in shoal smooth water, and its own weight keeps it so close to the ground that scarcely a single fish can escape.