BANKING

 

ON

 

STONE

 

 

MONEY

 

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For the Yapese of Micronesia,

a disk of sculpted limestone could buy just about anything.

 

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by SCOTT M. FITZPATRICK

 

 

 

THE SALT SPRAY SPLASHED across the bow and clung to my face as our boat slid across the smooth surface of the sea. My companions from the Palau Bureau of Arts and Culture cut the engine and the boat drifted slowly through the shallow turquoise water toward a stone dock at the base of a steep hillside. We were visiting one of the hundreds of "Rock Islands," as the locals call them, scattered over eighteen miles of water in the western Pacific Ocean, making up the majority of the archipelago known as the Republic of Palau. The islands are located roughly midway between New Guinea to the south and the Philippines to the west.We secured the boat and began climbing a path of broken coral bits and limestone gravel leading to the island's interior. The clamor of buzzing insects and screeching birds filled the air as we made our way through the steamy jungle. It was 1997, and I had come to see the famous stone "money" disks carved by people from the Micronesian island of Yap three hundred miles away. Braving unpredictable seas, the Yapese quarried limestone from the caves and rock shelters scat­tered among these islands. I was not disappointed; soon a Palauan col­league cried, "Balang ra Beluulechabl" (Yapese money!) as we reached a broken circular limestone disk with a neat hole drilled through the center that lay precariously across a large fissure in the rock. At ten feet in diameter, more than one and a half feet thick at the center, and weighing eight tons, it was indeed the stone money, or rai, of the


 

 

 

 

 

Yapese-one of the largest objects ever carved to be moved across open ocean by native Pacific Islanders. This rai had probably broken during an attempt to move it to the shore, rendering it worthless, so the Yapese had left it behind.

I didn't know it at the time, but the stone money of Yap-used for a variety of social "transactions," from mar­

riage gifts to political payoffs-would occupy my thoughts and research for the next six years. I traveled across the Pacific, often twice a year, to excavate the caves and valleys of Palau for clues to how the Yapese carved and moved these massive megaliths back to Yap over a period of perhaps five hundred years.

                          Digging in the northern part of the Rock

Islands, our excavation team discovered rock debris, tools, food remains, unfinished stone

                          disks, a retaining wall, and a coral and lime.

Philippines

Yap

Palau (Belau)

Miles

stone dock. The Yapese were ingenious carvers and engi­neers. Using tools at first made of shell and stone and later of iron, they skillfully chipped away towering walls of lime­stone. They built stone pathways to move the tremendously heavy disks from their quarries over the steep, rugged ter­rain down to the docks, where they were secured onto

canoes and rafts for the trip home. We found some quarries I

far inland; moving the larger disks would have required the 1 efforts of hundreds.

Legend has it that the Yapese first discovered the covet- I ed stone five hundred to six hundred years ago after an . expedition got lost and accidentally landed at Palau. The I group's leader, Anagumang, ordered his men to cut the

limestone into a shape of a fish. (Rai is a homonym for i "whale," perhaps in reference to this tale.) But they were: dissatisfied with the fish.shaped stones-they were proba- i bly cumbersome to carry and transport-and began carv- I

ing pieces into the shape of a full moon, which were perfo- : rated through the center so a pole could be slid through the hole, each end resting on a laborer's shoulders.

Only rai under six feet in diameter could be transported in a canoe. The Yapese boats likely had a crew of six to eight people when unloaded, but only two when returning with rai to Yap. Probably within one hundred years of first

quarrying rai, the Yapese began to use rafts, allowing them I

to transport disks of much larger size. There's a legend that: mentions this development, too: A Yapese fisherman want- !

500 ed to travel to Palau and quarry rai, but his canoe was built

       only for use in the lagoon and wasn't seaworthy. The long

 

trip would also be risky because his helmsman was of low rank and there­fore unfamiliar with the magic of the high seas. But the clever helmsman used his humble magic on a butterfly, which then flew ahead of the canoe, shining at night, leading the way. On Palau the men carved a few disks, but the canoe couldn't carry the heavy load

'back to Yap. They secured them to a raft instead and with the help of the enchanted butterfly made it home. These first stones to reach the island by raft became known as rai no burage, or "stones of the butterfly."

One of the biggest obstacles to gain­ing access to the quarries was not physi­cal but social. The Palauans spoke a different language, were protective of their territory, and required the Yapese to pay

. tribute with beads and copra, or dried coconut meat. Johann Kubary, a Polish-born naturalist who visited Palau in the early 1870s, noted, "The Yapese... were treated disdainfully, because other than personal ability, they brought nothing with them but hunger. . ., They were permitted to go to the uninhabited Koheals [in the Rock Islands] and hammer out their.. .m~mey, and for occasional food offered them, they

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were required to perform services which

                          were willingly rendered............ They gath­

ered firewood, carried water, built fish­weirs, and acted as sooth sayers, doc­tors, and conjurers."

                                  Although it is unknown exactly how

                                                                                              .. many people perished or were injured

in the effort to quarry stone money, or

                        even how many canoe loads of Yapese

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attempted the journey, there are historical reports of several hundred quarry workers at a single site. Large deposits of food remains such as shellfish indi­cate the presence of

An archival photo of a Yapese islander with           many laborers

 what may have been a small fortune                They all had to be transported to Palau

          as measured in stone                             and back to Yap. In all, it was an

                                                            ardu­ous journey that took several months

depending on the weight of their cargo, winds, weather, and currents. Casualties over time were probably extensive.  Why would the Yapese risk life and limb to travel

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              a ~

                                                                                 :;.~~

               

     ,A money bank of rai lines a walking path of Yap. Though rai may be given or sold, they are rarely moved: Stones may get new owners but not new homes

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                across vast stretches of the Pacific in                 search of such stone? Valuable commodities already exist­ed in the villages of Yap-shells and spices, among other things, were used as trade goods. But limestone was virtu­ally unknown to the Yapese, and its exotic quality made it

 

 

fIis Majesty O'Keefe

A

~ IRISH-AMERICAN SHIP CAPTAIN with savvy sea skills and a short fuse, David Dean O'Keefe wasn't the first enterprising Western

: ;. t..der to be intimately involved with South

Pacific islanders. History has recorded European and American entrepreneurs who imported firearms and stimulated rivalry between local chiefs, but they also served 'as translators, negotiators, and emissaries of foreign powers.

Still, none. of them conducted this complicated cUI­

Jural exchange so thoroughly-or so lucratively--as O'Keefe, who by the time of his death in 1901 had taken one American and two Yapese wives, amassed a half.million-dollar fortune, lived for thirty years on Yap, and earned ihesobrlquet "His Majesty O'Keefe."

.O'Keefe's ;hipwreck near Yap in 1871 proved to be

serendipitous (for him, at least-he was the only sur­vivor of the pearl-seeking vessel the Belvidere), for it was through trade with the Yapese that he gained his riches. In exchange for his assistance acquiring stone money, the Yapesegave him goods valuable in the Far East: copra, which was used to make coconut butter, oil, and soap, and trepang, thought to be both an aphrodisiac and a soother of painful arthritic joints.

His relationship with the Yapese was by most' I accounts san&Uine. He was said to make fair deals, I unlike many traders, who collectively had a reputation

for cheating and overcharging natives. O'Keefe had f

several childrepwith his two Yapese wives. (His American wife and daughter, left behind in Savannah, Georgia, received regular checks from him.) His lavish lifestyle earned him his "royal" nickname. O'Keefe was even given his own island by a Yapese chief. On the other hand, his contribution of rifles to intervillage

raids led to higher body counts, and a British court

judgment against a Palau village for its plundering of his shipwrecked vessel Lilla led to the destruction of the community through the joint efforts of a rival viI­lage"and.the firepower of O'Keefe's ship.

IronicallY, iUs with his own employees that his gen­erally good ,reputation gained its tarnish. The manager of one of his trading stations accused O'Keefe of defrauding him of wages (O'Keefe retorted that the manager shirked work to go on drunken sprees), while another claimed O'Keefe both cheated and beat him.

'Perhaps inspired by these accusations, the 1953 film His Majesty O'Keefe, based on a novel of the same name, portrays an O'Keefe who washes up on the shores of Yap after his mutinous crew tosses him over­board. Burt Lancaster p1ays the role of the red-haired salty dog.

 

extremely desirable. Like diamonds, the value of rai was dependent on the rarity and beauty of the stone, the quali­ty of carving, its shape and size, and its carver's skill. With rai, however, the history behind each piece was equally important. If a famous navigator brought rai back to Yap, or if people were injured or killed during the expedition, it might be considered even more valuable. The same also held true if there was an exceptional story behind a stone. For instance, there is one piece in Yap called "the stone without tears" because no one died during the journey to Palau and back-a rare occurence. It too is highly prized.

Most rai in Yap have a pedigree; the names of previous owners are passed down to the new owner. Rai could be exchanged for; food or given as a gift to a bride or newborn child; it could be used to pay a loan, secure allies in times of conflict, or ransom a battle corpse from another village to

 

An airy private house on Yap is surrounded by rai. It's likely each piece has a unique story that figures into its value. A family's wealth and status are indicated by its stone-money holdings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left and below: Metal tools such as blades and picks were used by the Yapese

     for quarrying limestone

after contact with Western

     traders like David Dean

     O'Keefe in the late

nineteenth century. Right Researchers survey one of the limestone quarries in a

     cave in Palau.

 

name a few uses. Many rai today, as in the past, are placed in

. front of meeting houses or along pathways known as "money banks." Prominently displayed, they attest the status and power of the owners. Even after being traded or sold, they are rarely moved; ownership generally changes titles, not hands.

The first rai brought to Yap created a demand for more. Fighting and competition grew between villages on the four main islands of Yap. As chiefs in different villages tried to obtain more prestigious pieces of stone money, rai became larger and better carved over time.

The arrival of Europeans to Micronesia in the sixteenth century led to dramatic changes in indigenous ways of life, especially after the introduction of iron. As contact became more frequent in the mid-nineteenth century, the Yapese began to change how they quarried stone money. The most notable shift came after an entrepreneurial Irish­American trader named Captain David Dean O'Keefe was shipwrecked in Yap in the 1870s. Nursed back to health by the natives, O'Keefe hitched a ride on a German steamer to Hong Kong, where he quickly found a new ship to cap­tain and returned to Yap to make his fortune.

Capitalizing on the Yapese desire for more stone money, O'Keefe used his ships to ferry the islanders to Palau to quarry limestone with the iron tools he provded. (At the quarries we discovered tools, blades, and pickaxes.) O'Keefe then transported the workers and the rai back to Yap, making the journey far less difficult and dangerous. For this assistance the Yapese traded copra and trepang, or sea cucumbers, which O'Keefe sold in the Far East, amass­ing a fortune in the process. So comfortable was he with the arrangement that he lived in Yap for three decades. (See "His Majesty O'Keefe," opposite page.)

Because of O'Keefe's involvement, Yap became inundat­ed with stone money by the late I 800s. As would happen with any economy suddenly flooded with currency, infla­tion rose dramatically; known as "O'Keefe's Money," these ; rai had less value than those quarried by traditional meth­ods. In Yap today, smaller rai carved with traditional shell

 

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or stone tools and without the help of Europeans are still considered much more valuable.

Ongoing disputes between Spain and Germany, who both had commercial interests in Micronesia, and a ban on inter-island voyaging by German administrators at the turn of the twentieth century eventually collapsed the stone-money trade that had been so lucrative for Western traders and life altering for the Yapese. Our excavations show that at this time, quarries that had been mined for hundreds of years stopped being used. The relationship between the Yapese and the Westerners was one of the most storied accounts of Pacific Island crosscultural collaboration ever documented.

The efforts of the Yapese may rival those of Easter Islanders, who moved their gigantic statues only across land. Rai were transported around jagged coral rock islands, through labyrinths of reefs, and over an ocean filled with often unpredictable winds, currents, and swells. The Yapese's quarrying and moving of such immense stones was clearly an enormous feat, and one that will help us under­stand the fascination ancient Pacific Islanders had with carving and moving megaliths across both land and sea.

More than thirteen thousand' pieces of rai were record­ed on Yap by the Japanese in the 1930s. Some were later used as anchors or in runway construction during WWII. Many more have been buried by typhoons or simply forgot­ten. But stone money is still highly revered by people in Yap today. Rai have become a symbol of the Yapese nation­al culture and are even showcased on official automobile license plates, which boast of Yap's reputation as "The Land of Stone Money." They are still given as gifts and used in other traditional ways. Yet while the Yapese have held on to their traditions, time does march on: The every­day currency in Yap is the U.S. dollar. .

 

Scon M. FITZPATRICK is assistant professor of anthropology at North Carolina State University. He is editor of the forth­coming booh Voyages of Discovery: The Archaeology of Islands (Praeger, 2004).

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Archaeology. March/April 2004
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