QUARRIED WEALTH

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 October 1932, Page 4

QUARRIED WEALTH

THE FINANCES OF YAP When France or the United States acquires a few more tons of gold it is stored away out of sight in a vault, and guarded by all sorts of devices. It is neither useful nor ornamental, and the owners have not even the pleasure of displaying their wealth. When the late Government Savings Bank of New South Wales put £2,000,000 into stones and mortar, it had to furnish the building and fill it with an expensive staff, writes T. Dunbabin in the Sydney “Daily Telegraph.’’ They handle these currency matters better in the island of Yap, in the Caroline Group. There plutocrats, who have tons of money, stand it up outside their houses or the village hall so that everyone can see it. When they give a cheque the cash is there to show that there is no deception. To be “rocky” in Yap. (which has not a single politician, in spite of its name) is to be affluent. A man who owned enough rocks to build the Government Savings Bank would be a multi-millionaire in* Yap. He would not waste his wealth in a building, with all its cost of upkeep. He would just stack the stones and let them lie there.

The islanders of Yap have a stone currency which is unique in the world. All the same, it has some curious points of likeness to the gold standard as used in some highly-civilised countries. The Carolines, of which Yap is one, are almost next-door neighbours of ours. They are only a few hundred miles to the north and northwest of the-Hermit Group and other outlying islands of the New Guinea Territory. The inhabitants are a Micronesian race, allied to the Chamorros, of the Ladrone Islands, and more or less akin to the Polynesians. Fiercer and less tractable than the Chamorros, they have been, until recently, little influenced by Western civilisation (now represented there by the Japanese).

At some period in the remote past the people of Yap evolved their amazing stone currency. Their “coins” are wheel-like discs of calcite or limestone, ranging from six inches to 12 feet in diameter. The largest of these weigh five tons.

The stone of which these are made is not found in Yap. It is brought from the Pelew Islands 250 miles away to the south-west. The largest of stones were too big to be carried in the Yap canoes. . They were put on raft and towed across the ocean to Yap.' The shape of these stones and the hole in the middle are explained by their origin. The shape made them easier to handle from the quarries in the Pelew Islands to the canoes, and also at the Yap end. A pole was put through the hole in the “coin,” and the stone was wheeled along. In the course of ages hundreds upon hundreds of these stones iwere quarried on the Pelews and freighted to Yap. Many more no doubt were lost in transit. For small change the islanders used shells. The stones were treated as fixed deposits, and in time a credit system was built up round them. SIGN OF WEALTH They had no actual value; they were not even ornamental like the shells. They were, however, an evidence of wealth. A chief or a community with a few score tons of stone currency could raise somethingon the strength of it.

According to a recent visitor, Mr. Walter B. Harris, this credit system has been extended further. The material was of no actual value. What gave the stone worth was the effort expended in getting it. Much capital and labour was expended,, and in many cases the voyagers came back without the stone, which had sunk or been cut adrift in a storm.

So it was decided that evidence of the voyage, of the cutting of the stone, of its shipment, and of its loss at sea was enough. The islanders who had lost the stone were credited with its possession. As there was no form of writing the Yap chiefs, verbally registered the accepted claims, which were handed on orally from generation to generation. To some extent Yap has gone off the stone standard in these days. It is too easy to get stone from the Pelews when a steamer makes the voyage in a day or two, and while men’s tools are available for the cutting. So no more stones arc brought from the Pelews.' The Japanese authorities have brought in- coined money, but this is little used, except in the areas immediately under Japanese influence.

The old stone coins still lean up against the walls in the villages, and are used as currency to some extent. Cutting off the supply has prevented the inflation which would otherwise have followed from the ease with which new money could have been put into circulation.

It is to be feared, however, that the Stone Age in Yap finance is nearly over. If the currency lingers on, some inflationist will sooner or later bring up a few shiploads of grindstones from the Pelews, and any coin over a couple of hundredweight will become a drug in the market.

Since Japan took over the mandate in the Carolines (which were German when the war began), contracts must be registered. It is alleged that on one occasion the authorities were called on to inscribe in their official register the dowry given to his daughter by a Yap chief.

It was the credit of a stone that had been lost at sea by an ancestor several generations back. After the marriage the credit of the long-lost stone was again transferred as the price of a coconut plantation, bought by the daughter and her husband.' Finally it must be pointed out that there is an advanced rockbottom party in Yap which urges a release of credits on the basis of plenty of rocks for everyone. This party points out that it is the innate conservatism, timidity and greed of the bankers which makes them try to base the standard on the Pelew stone when there is abundance of coral rock and basalt in Yap.