Baling, the whirling fishing-rod rig

baling / berbaling

Source term: baling

Malay baling / berbaling, 'to whirl, revolve' — the name the expedition recorded at both Pattani and Jalor.

In the market town of Pattani, on the Malay coast of lower Siam, the naturalists Nelson Annandale and Herbert Robinson picked up a whirling rig built like a fishing rod: a sword-shaped blade a quarter-metre long, corded to a stick that runs past a metre. Its maker was a Patani boatman, the same man who had made W. W. Skeat the pair of "bamboo spears" that gave mainland Asia its first recorded bull-roarer. The Malay name, baling or berbaling, is the word for whirling round; inland at Jalor the same expedition found its small twin driving elephants out of the plantations.

Particulars

Object

A wooden blade of sword shape, 256 x 25 mm, on a cord tied to a 1.2 m stick — the complete rig, collected 1901-02 (PRM 1902.88.99).

Function

Not recorded.