196 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 



allowance ; and I remarked, what I had heard of, but 

 had not seen before, that grains of cacao circulated 

 among the Indians as money. Every merchant or 

 vender of eatables, the most of whom were women, 

 had on the table a pile of these grains, which they 

 were constantly counting and exchanging with the 

 Indians. There is no copper money in Yucatan, 

 nor any coin whatever under a medio, or six and a 

 quarter cents, and this deficiency is supplied by these 

 grains of cacao. The medio is divided into twenty 

 parts, generally of five grains each, but the number 

 is increased or decreased according to the quantity 

 of the article in the market, and its real value. As 

 the earnings of the Indians are small, and the arti- 

 cles they purchase are the mere necessaries of life, 

 which are very cheap, these grains of cacao, or frac- 

 tional parts of a medio, are the coin in most common 

 use among them. The currency has always a real 

 value, and is regulated by the quantity of cacao in 

 the market, and the only inconvenience, economi- 

 cally speaking, that it has, is the loss of a certain 

 public wealth by the destruction of the cacao, as in 

 the case of bank notes. But these grains had an 

 interest independent of all questions of political 

 economy, for they indicate or illustrate a page in 

 the history of this unknown and mysterious people. 

 When the Spaniards first made their way into the 

 interior of Yucatan, they found no circulating me- 

 dium, either of gold, or silver, or any other species 

 of metal, but only grains of cacao ; and it seemed a 



