SAILOR or PRISONER-OF-WAR Wood Folk Carving

SAILOR or PRISONER-OF-WAR WOOD FOLK CARVING, with two Andaman Islands type Standing Figures (strongly resembling natives photographed by Maurice Vidal Portman [1860-1935])----ref, KELIWA, a Woman of the Ta-keda Tribe, Andaman Islands, in The Magazine Antiques, March, 2010, p 60.

Overall Length of the carved wood is 24” x 2-1/4” wide x 3/8” thick – all measurements approximate – due to age and hand-made nature it is not precisely symmetrical.
Low-relief carved with geometric figures above and below the standing figures, in natural and contrast-darkened wood; center of the long rectangle is further carved with plus and minus signs. Edges of the stick are canted and darkened. Two holes for attachment are drilled near each end.

The ELL. We think this long narrow flat plaque may have been designed as an “ELL” stick, posted in the 19th century by families engaged in weaving or textile manufacture.
An ancient unit of measurement used in England, Europe and North America before standardization, the Ell was used as late as the 1880's. The Ell varied in length – locally and over time – from as little as 21” to as much as 46”.
Traveling agents carried a canelike ell wand for inspecting or buying; shops or home weavers had an ell-stick of flat form attached to a counter or wall, where they used it to check bolt width and for measuring lengths to cut.

The ANDAMAN ISLANDS, in the Indian Ocean between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, were briefly colonized by the British from 1789 to 1796, and more permanently from 1858 until the Japanese invasion in World War II. The British used the Islands as an isolated prison for members of the Indian independence movement. The capitol city, Port Blair, was known as the “Siberia” of British India.
A native of the Andaman Islands plays a role in one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.

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