Big Money 4

                             


                              “It's all about the money.”
                                                           Joe Jackson

                              “Money just draws flies.”
                                                    Mahalia Jackson



The big money had been drawing flies long before the castaway arrived. There were five kinds of traditional currency strewn about the island. There was New Guinea shell money called Yar, which was still used to buy oneself a bride.
The local stone stuff was small and either about a foot wide, Reng, or up to two feet, Mmbul, from the municipality of Aalipebinaw. The fourth was Gaw, long, up to ten feet in length, and imported from an island called Ganat near Pohnpei, our next port of call. The most valuable stone money on Yap was also of foreign provenance, but had transmuted from coinage to cult. On a tropical paradise where ‘all food, drink and clothing were readily available, so there was no barter and no debt,’ life was still a game, and money was how the Yapese kept score. High value transactions were given higher value through the material and materiel and medium of the transaction, transactions conducted with five-ton rocks that had been towed on rafts behind wind-powered canoes, almost five hundred kilometers across the open ocean. It is reasonable to deduce that the Yapese that had done this, and the purposes for which it was done, were nuts.
The Palau stone from which they quarried their ray or rai or fe’ or fei, was a special sort of translucent limestone that glistened in the light, called aragonite, the same stone that the Spanish King Ferdinand, husband of Queen Isabella, and his daughter Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII, were named after. The Yapese had only shell tools, to make their large twelve-foot wide calcite donuts, thicker toward the middle, beginning around 1400 AD. It took twenty men to carry one, on a pole slung through the hole bored through its center.
Their value, kept high because of the hazards and difficulty involved in obtaining them, was measured by a complex formula that included their size, age, quality, and the number of lives lost in bringing them to Yap. The money supply was fixed and shiny, like gold had been, in other parts of the world that the Yapese had yet to be illuminated about.
Once on Yap, the rai were used for land title transfers, the tattoo masters, in marriage gifts, or as compensation for damages suffered by an aggrieved party. Despite the widespread use of US currency for everyday transactions today, stone money is still mandatory for more traditional or ceremonial functions, despite the fact that it no longer physically moves around. The islanders know who owns every one of the 6800 pieces, and can trace that ownership through centuries of trade. It isn’t even necessary for the stone to have reached Yap to be still considered valuable. There are stories of some gigantic rai that remain the valuable property of the chief that had sponsored its carving, even though it was in several hundred feet of water, after the canoes transporting them had been lost at sea.
Robyn and I walked along the coast south of Chamorro Bay, beyond a green corrugated tin house with a purple door and roof, to a beach with stone money and a solitary palm that survived the hurricane winds of Typhoon Sudal. The sun beat down on us, and the place where another typhoon had dumped the castaway into the history of Yap, 130 years earlier.