NA TURE 



433 



THURSDAY, MARCH 13, 1890. 



GERMAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ETHNOLOGY. 



!-.thnographische Beitrdge zur Kenntniss des Karolinen 

 Archipeh. Von J. S. Kubary. i Heft, mit 15 Tafeln. 

 (Leyden : P. W. M. Trap, 1889.) 



SINCE 1868, when Herr Kubary first entered upon a 

 course of inquiry among the Polynesians, which he 

 had undertaken for the Godeffroy Museum in Hamburg, 

 to which institution he was then officially attached, he 

 has made the archipelago of the Carolines the chief seat 

 and object of his observations. These islands, lying 

 between 5° and 10° N. lat., midway between the Ladrones 

 and New Guinea, and stretching from 138^-160^ E. long., 

 have been visited by few white men excepting the traders 

 who occasionally touch there for purposes of barter, or 

 with the object of securing workmen for some more or 

 Jess remote labour-market on terms of hire which are 

 usually misunderstood by the natives themselves. To 

 this drain on the numbers of able-bodied men, and to 

 continual tribal wars among the different members of the 

 group, the rapid diminution of the population of the 

 Carolines is probably mainly due. In some of the 

 islands the author found that the once numerous families 

 of the kings or chiefs had either wholly died out in 

 recent years, or were only represented by a single male 

 descendant, who, in the absence of any other woman of 

 pure native race, would have to take a half-sister for his 

 wife, if he would avoid the alternative of making a 

 prohibited exogamic marriage. 



The probably imminent extermination of these Northern 

 Polynesians gives more than common interest to Herr 

 Kubary's narrative of his long sojourn in the island Yap, 

 and in the Pelew group, or Western Carolines, where he 

 had the good fortune to obtain previously-unknown in- 

 formation regarding the various indigenous moneys in 

 use, and thus to establish the hitherto unsuspected fact 

 that among these people a carefully-adjusted and rigidly- 

 prescribed monetary system has been long in force. 

 Thus in the island of Yap he found that each distinct 

 kind of money could only be used for specially-defined 

 purposes, the form known as gau, which consists of 

 strings of equally-sized polished disks of the spondylus, 

 constituting what we may term the gold of the district. 

 This is not current among the general public, but is 

 carefully accumulated by the chiefs, who keep it in reserve 

 to be exchanged with other chiefs for canoes or weapons 

 of all kinds, to be used when they are preparing to make, 

 or to resist, a hostile attack. This spondylus currency has 

 considerable ethnological interest, for we find that the 

 shell can only be procured to the east or the north of 

 Yap, and that it is traditionally the most ancient form of 

 money in use in that and some of the neighbouring 

 islands, while its discovery in old graves of chiefs in the 

 Ladrones seems to point to a common origin of the 

 natives of the latter group and those of the Carolines. 

 Next in value is the palan, which consists of round 

 disks of arragonite of various degrees of thickness, which 

 is obtained by the people of Yap at considerable risk and 

 with much labour from certain islands of limestone- 

 formation in the Pelew group. The supply of this money 

 Vol. xli.— No. 1063. 



in Yap is mainly dependent on the enterprise of the 

 young men of the villages, who, from time to time com- 

 bine together to procure a canoe, in which, with the con- 

 sent of their chief, they repair to the arragonite rocks to 

 extract as much of the stone as their boat will hold. On 

 returning to their native village, they are bound to pre- 

 sent their chief with all the larger blocks, after which 

 they dispose of the remainder to the villagers at the rate 

 of the market value of the stone, which is estimated 

 according to its width. Thus, while a fragment measur- 

 ing an inch or two in diameter is the recognized price of 

 a basket of taro, consisting of a definite number of roots, 

 the scale of values rises gradually until it requires a mass 

 six feet in width to purchase a good-sized canoe, or a 

 gaii-hQXi adorned with two whale's teeth, which ranks 

 in the eyes of a Yap dandy as the most precious of all 

 personal ornaments. The arrival of a cargo in which 

 there are several of these exceptionally large blocks, is 

 generally soon followed by the breaking out of hostilities 

 between the village chief and his neighbours, as the 

 former seldom loses a chance of making speedy use of 

 these sinews of war ; and hence perhaps palan is popu- 

 larly known as " men's money." Next in value to it comes 

 yar, which consists of small threaded nacreous shells that 

 serve as small change, and are known as "women's 

 money." 



In the Pelew Islands, another form of money, known 

 as audoicth, is current, whose origin and history are un- 

 known, although the traditions regarding it suggest that it 

 may have been obtained through early trading relations 

 between these islands and remote eastern and western 

 nations. Audouth is divided into numerous groups, con- 

 sisting of coloured or enamelled beads or disks, some of 

 which present a vitreous or earthy character, recalling 

 objects of Chinese or Japanese art ; while others, to judge 

 by the coloured illustrations in Herr Kubary's work, are 

 almost identical with the glass beads still largely manu- 

 factured in Venice. Each variety of bead has a fixed 

 place on the scale of values, which, beginning from the 

 /'rt^t'-basket unit, gradually rises, until it finally reaches 

 so large an amount that each of the still existing forty or 

 fifty beads, which rank as the highest in the series, and 

 which are all accumulated in the hands of one or two of 

 the kings, actually represents a sum equal to ten or twelve 

 pounds sterling. The extremely limited number of the 

 audotith-hesidis, and the obligation of making payments 

 with only specially prescribed forms of these coins, have 

 led to the establishment of a regularly organized system 

 of loans. By the rules of this system, a man who re- 

 quires to make a payment in a coin of which he is not 

 possessed, and who has to borrow it from his chief, or 

 some neighbour, is compelled to give in pledge certain 

 definite objects, only redeemable by repayments at fixed 

 periods and rates of interest, while he is, moreover, 

 obliged to refund his debt in the same coin which he 

 originally borrowed. 



In his comments on the singular fact that the un- 

 clothed, tattooed natives of a remote Polynesian archi- 

 pelago should possess well-organized systems, based on 

 fixed principles, not only for regulating loans, but also 

 for conducting exchange and barter on equitable terms, 

 Herr Kubary adduces apparently good grounds for as- 

 suming that the people have derived these methods, 



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