The Island of Stone Money

The Island of Stone Money

William Henry Furness recounts a stay of nearly two months on Uap, or Uāāp, in the Caroline Islands, where he arrives after a dangerous fog-bound approach through reefs and is welcomed by resident traders, especially Herr Friedlander of Dulukan. From Friedlander’s copra station he observes a gentle, curious people living in scattered houses among coconut groves, connected by coral paths rather than village streets. Their houses stand on stone platforms and are built with mortised timbers and coconut-fibre lashings; much social life occurs in the swept yards outside, while private interiors remain dark, smoky, and sparsely furnished. The narrator’s first close friendship is with Pooguroo, a fearless little girl who follows him along a path and introduces herself. He describes children as freely moving among households, cared for broadly rather than confined to a single family. Boys increasingly live in the men’s houses, called failu on the coast and pabai inland. These large club-houses are centers of male councils, songs, dances, and communal affairs. During fishing seasons, fishermen are subject to stringent taboo: after exhausting voyages they must remain secluded in the failu, cannot see women, return home, or mingle freely with other men. Fish are apportioned and paid for with shell money or stone money, which becomes communal wealth for canoes, nets, and other needs. Each failu or pabai keeps one or sometimes two women called mispil, companions shared by the men of the house. A mispil is taken from another district, often through arrangements with local chiefs and with compensation paid in shells or stone money. The narrator records Gamiau’s account of the capture of Lemet, who is carried away while asleep and later settles into life at Dulukan. Although the custom is treated as ordinary within Uap society, a mispil occupies an ambiguous position: respected by men, excluded by local married women, supplied with food and luxuries, and free to visit her family. If she becomes pregnant, one man must take her as wife and establish a separate household. Furness describes dress, ornament, tattooing, betel chewing, and distinctions between freemen and the Pimlingai slave class. Men wear combs as badges of freedom, along with shell ornaments and prized red-shell thauei necklaces. These necklaces are often loaned in exchange for labor rather than sold outright. The narrator’s discarded cinematograph film becomes a coveted decoration because of its yellow color, scent, and movement in the wind. Women wear broad skirts of leaves and grasses, decorative crotons, and the obligatory black marafá cord when outdoors; their ears are pierced and stretched with prepared leaves. His phonograph first fails to impress listeners when it plays English music, but it astonishes them when it reproduces a Uap voice speaking their own language. The “talking tom-tom” becomes famous, bringing crowds of men and separate audiences of women. He records songs whose archaic language, said to belong to ancient Palalagab, is largely unintelligible even to the singers. He also witnesses dances prepared through days of rehearsal: a seated tsuru fit for women to watch, and a more vigorous standing dance from which women are officially excluded, though some secretly observe. The work’s central subject is Uap stone money, fei: large limestone wheels brought from Babelthuap in the Pelao Islands. Their value depends on size, whiteness, quality, and the labor of obtaining them. Fei may stand outside houses or before failu as public signs of wealth, and ownership can change without moving the stone or marking it. Furness tells of a family whose wealth includes a great fei lost at sea generations earlier but still accepted as valid property because its existence and history are acknowledged. German officials compel road repairs by marking valuable fei with black crosses as fines; once the work is completed, the marks are erased and the people regain their wealth. Shell strings, large pearl shells, sacred umbul mats, red-shell necklaces, and coconuts also serve as media of exchange. Furness befriends Fatumak, a deformed mach-mach, or soothsayer, who preserves legends, interprets omens through knotted palm leaves, sells charms, and keeps accounts in a personal pictographic cipher. Fatumak tells a creation story in which a woman and her daughter emerge from a barnacle beneath floating driftwood; Yalafath, ruler of Falraman, restores the daughter after demons kill her, and sand scattered over the sea becomes high lands and coral islands. Uap belief holds that a person’s thinking-part, the tafenai, goes after death to Falraman, may later return invisibly as an athegith, and can cause sickness if neglected. Gods and demons govern weather, crops, war, dance, illness, and misfortune, while mach-mach men conduct cures, divinations, and naming ceremonies. The narrator observes the long illness, death, and burial of Mafel. Mafel’s daughter Gyeiga nurses him devotedly and then mourns beside his body. Friends bring shells and fei as ceremonial gifts, largely expected to be returned. Pimlingai undertakers remove the body through the wall rather than a doorway, carry it by a circuitous route to the graveyard, and bury it with shells for the journey to Falraman. A sprouting coconut is planted at the grave to provide food and oil, and stones protect the body. When Furness departs Dulukan for Tomil Bay, Migiul, Lemet, Lian, Tomak, Gamiau, Pooguroo, Fatumak, and even the estranged Kakofel see him off. He leaves with the sincere courtesy, “goan e gup,” meaning that he is going but shall return.

By William Henry Furness · First published 1910 · Genre: Ethnography, Anthropology, Travel Literature · 12 chapters · 34,669 words

First lines

Although old-time Pacific whalers and missionaries, both of them, let us hope, from kindly motives of rendering the islanders happy, introduced two unfortunate attendants of western civilization -- alcohol and diversity of faiths -- nevertheless the natives of The Caroline Islands have retained the greater part of their original primitive beliefs, and recently, under admirable German rule, have perforce abandoned alcohol. Wherefore they are become an exceedingly pleasant and gentle folk to visit; this is especially true of the natives of the island of Uap or Yap, the most westerly of the group. Like all other primitive people (it hurts one's feelings to call them savages or even uncivilized, -- one is too broad and the other too narrow) they are shy at first, either through mistrust or awe, but, let acquaintance and confidence be once established, and they are good company and benignantly ready to tolerate, even to foster condescendingly, the incomprehensible peculiarities and demented foibles of the white-faced visitor.

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

early 20th-century travel writing · ethnographic travelogue · Yap (Uap) · Caroline Islands · Micronesia · German colonial rule · Pacific Island society · stone money · rai stone currency · indigenous exchange systems · copra trade · coral reefs and lagoons

What this Textopian page supports

The Island of Stone Money is listed on Textopian as an article by William Henry Furness, dated 1910 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Contents

More by William Henry Furness