I dont know if they have any meaning or not....but the acanthus leaf pattern that I posted was the closest match I could find. Perhaps there is great meaning to them....I hope so. I have also seen a similar pattern before and cant place it. I think it was here on t net. I've been searching for it with no luck.
we might wait for a scan/x-ray whatever before we work ourselves into believing something curling up from the bowl
the palmetto was generally a symbol of victory and shown in many stylized manners
the branches at the feet of that Dutch ceramic tile figure I posted earlier are one of the many forms of portraying a palm - google
and the acanthus leaf pattern could be just as likely
hey... might take a bit to load,,, this might be interesting to you.
Its taken me awhile to go through some of this... I keep getting side tracked and reading on some... perhaps you can help look for what MAY be something on our "palmetto".
The more I look at that bell the more the story that Capt. Bill relayed to me comes to mind. Capt. Bill owns a dive ship in the Turks and Caicos Islands. One evening sitting at the dinner table he relayed a story to me about Jacque Cousteau hiring his ship and chartering a dive off the reef entrance to west Caicos and Sapodilla Bay, Providenciales. On the rocks there are carved names of shipwrecked sailors and dates. On the north side of the cut Jacque found bronze Cannons embedded into the reef. The site has never been properly documented or salvaged. The Molasses Reef wreck is less than 10 miles away and a short distance from where two notorious female pirates kept their ships. Also there is a old Spanish wreck with Cannons just off shore and inside the reef in front of Jimmy Buffett's private Island to the east (on Nautical Charts). The entrance through the reef to Sapodilla Bay can get rough and when conditions are like that I head south and go in on the Big Sand road channel.
Was it not Father Kino who had bells made for his missions, he even Cast some because the orders were lost at sea? Still the Bell could be of the ship that almost captured Drake.