Antoni Judit: Tapa, a fakéreg művészete. Válogatás Ignácz Ferenc gyűjteményéből. (Távoli világok emberközelben I. Gödöllői Városi Múzeum, 2006)

The making of tapa Cook held tapa making to be the most important branch of Tahiti craftsmanship, therefore he dwelt on the procedure in much details. Since it did not change at all until today - though there are slight differences in the minute details - the fundamental steps are valid for the entire archipelago and for the three raw materials. The following quotation is not from him, however, but is taken from a description meant for tourists to popularize modern tapa making. "Tapa is made from the inner bark of the papermulberry tree, cultivated for tapa making and induced to grow straight. When 6 to 8 feet tall, it is cut off at the base. A small incision is made and the bark is peeled off. The bark is then rolled up, soaked until softened and scraped with a shell to remove remaining pieces of outer bark. The strips of inner bark are then beaten with a flat-faced wooden club against a resonant length of hardwood. The beat of the tapa-makers and the work songs they sing is still a fascinating sound heared today. The first beating expands the material some 6 to 8 times its former width and reduces it to tissuepaper thickness. Sheets of this material are carefully folded, wetted, unfolded and placed one over the other. The double or triple thickness is then beaten again to "felt" it and make one sheet. In a similar way, these sheets are joined to other sheets to make a large piece of tapa. The painting of the tapa is the most difficult part of the whole process and the style varies from island to island. Only natural pigments are used and designs are traditional to each tapa maker of each island." Most often, the envil was provided by the hardwooded Neonauclea forsteri, of which they gladly carved also drums becase of its good resonating quality. Closely related to the envil is the tapa beater prepared in the past and even today from another wood species, the horsetail-leaf casuarina (Casuarina equisetifolia). The habitat of the tree growing up to a hight of 25 m and resembling mostly Himalayan pine is Australia and South-Asia and is very frequent also in the Pacific islands. Its leaves are of whorled arrangement; therefore they have a look similar to those of the various species of horsetail: the softly whispering wind goes to and fro among the thin and long filaments hanging from the branches. Its Polynesian names (aito in Tahiti and toa in Marquesas) mean warrior and bravery; in times of old they were the epithets of warchiefs, and the tree itself was the symbol of Oro, the god of war, whose statues were carved from this kind of wood. As the legend goes, this plant was born from the fallen warriors' blood, and besides making the above god statues, weapons (war club, spear) were prepared from its extraordinarily hard wood resisting also to insects. So, from this wood, they carved also the beater used in tapa making. The English and French names of the tree, iron tree, bois de fer, refer to the above qualities. It was the warriors' blood, i.e. the red sap of the wood that provided one of the pigments (brown) used for the decoration of tapa. When the bast material is ready, they decorate it by dyeing, stamping and by stereotyped patterns. The pigments (red, yellow, brown, very dark brown) derive mainly from plants. Red is mixed from the saps of two plants. The mati (Ficus tinctoria), a tree with cylindrical trunk, grows in pits and in wet, hazy valleys clinging to the rocks with its roots. Its leaves are bigger than those of the banyan; the wood of this one is also yellow and like the former, it is rich in milky saps. Its fruit, the "fig" contains a greenish liquid, and if it is mixed with the fresh leaves of tou ("ti"in Cook's log-book), Cordia subcordata by its Latin name, a beautiful, red colour will result. The South-East Asian tou (kou in Hawaii, tauanave in Samoa) is a small-built tree with a short, grey, crinkled trunk: it bears itself the best on the seashore. Its leaves are fairly big and heart-shaped; a round fruit grows from its orange flowers with a small oleaginous edible seed inside. Drums, bowls were prepared from its very hard, beautifully streaked wood of brown colour; and even today it is very much favoured by the local carpenters. The mo'u belongs to the family of sedges (Cyperaceae): many of its species were used as filter when preparing the kava, the coconut milk or the juices pressed from medical herbs - and as we saw it before, it was used also for the preparation of pigments. They cleave long strips from the triangular, very elastic and resistant stalks, then they soak them in running water to crush them in order for the fibres to get released. By putting the netlike fibres simply crosswise onto each other, the filter is ready. The different nuances of red can be prepared from the following three plants: Solanum centifolium, from the kinship of potato, rather of a shrublike form. The Toumefortia argentea is a tree of smaller size and is the most characteristic tree of the coral islands - every part of it is covered with silvery fluffs. The third is Convulvus brasiliensis, called eurhe in Tahiti is a variety of the rambling plant honeysuckle widespread in Europe. In addition to red, yellow was also a widely used colour. Cook gives a report of it, too, noticing that