Native Ownership and Husbandry 15 



a rule, a couple of dozen coco- nut trees to his 

 name. Perhaps through marriage or inheri- 

 tance the family he is head and patriarch of 

 have brought some more into the store/ and then 

 the family is well off. The surplus of the nuts 

 is made into copra, and, sun-dried or fire- 

 dried, is bartered away at his own door, or 

 taken with the lot of a neighbour to the nearest 

 trade depot. Each man may have but a few : 

 pounds or hundredweights, but out of a little ^ 

 gathered together grows much. The multitude 

 makes the quantity, and the puny supplies 

 coming in from all sides in a constant stream 

 eventually fill the storehouses of the trader 

 and the holds of the ships which sail away 

 with the product. Even here there is a 

 gradual piling up ; first comes the tiny native 

 prahu with a Chinaman or Arab as owner. 

 They go from house to house, as it were, and 

 collect their little cargo of twenty to a hundred 

 bags of copra. These tongkangs take the 

 produce to the nearest port where the coasting 

 steamer calls, from whence the buyer collects 

 and consigns the bulked lot, which he has pur- 

 chased from many native vessels, to the big 

 emporium at Singapore, Batavia, or other large 

 centres, and from these ports sail the ocean 

 freighters with the cargoes of many coasters 

 swallowed up in their enormous maws. This 

 manifold inter-trading method of handling the 

 copra will probably never change in thousands 

 of little inlets and creeks, and nooks and 



