Big Money 7

“With regard to the character of these people, little can be said in their
     favour. They are exceedingly treacherous, and should an opportunity
     offer, would not hesitate to cut off any vessel which might visit the
     island. Foreign finery however is a great temptation to savages and
     excites their covetous disposition to attempt obtaining by force, what
     their indolent habits prevents them from procuring by a fair and
     honest traffic. The dress of the males, if such it may be called, is
     slovenly in the extreme.”
       Andrew Cheyne, A Description of Islands in the Western Pacific Ocean, 1852


Most of the treachery, from where Robyn and I were quartered, had actually come from the covetous disposition of the visitors. When Andrew Cheyne arrived in Yap, for two months in the 1840s, he brought a disastrous sea cucumber enterprise, and an influenza epidemic that killed fifty people in the Tomil district. He barely escaped from Chief Leok’s plan to kill him in reprisal.
When Robyn and I walked up to Trader Ridge, that magnificent looking South Seas Inn that was in our view and on our horizon across Chamorro Bay, since the first day, indolent habits were still making fair and honest traffic difficult. But it was the habits of the New York owners, gathered behind the desk with their fax machine and calculators, that gave offense. We just wanted to know if it was possible to drop our things off early on the day of our reservation, because I had arranged a dive booking with Beyond the Reef for early the next morning. Apparently, it wasn’t, and we had committed some unspeakable sin for even climbing the hill to inquire. The Japanese had begat the Americans, and there were flies. Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet. Except when you meet it coming down headfirst.
The dive in Mills Channel was brilliant. My buddy was a chubby brown bald Oriental-looking Marlon Brando with a chin beard, who was so involved with his betel nut chew that it accompanied him underwater. I could track him from the occasional orange streak that appeared in his bubbles. If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies. It's the ultimate hustle. Chubby took me right to the manta coral cleaning stations, and back to my first encounter with them, snorkeling off Bora Bora, when the sky overhead went dark. There were Buffalo fish, and a lone Yap money stone, at the bottom. Liquid Assets.
Robyn met me back at Trader Ridge, on time to check in, where one of the New Yorkers tried to tone down the treachery, and turn up the charm. She smiled like the Yap crocodile fish I had just see below the surface. One of the staff, betel chew in cheek, showed us to out room. It was calm and well appointed with tropical hardwood furnishings, and a ceiling fan. I read more of what Andrew Cheyne had written of Yap, a century and a half earlier.

‘When Magellan arrived there on 6th March 1521, he named the group    ‘Islands of the Lateen Sails,’ but on further acquaintance with the people he changed the name to ‘Ladrones’ (the Islands of Thieves). The betel-nut tree is cultivated with the greatest care at this island. It is a beautiful slender palm; and grows amongst the coconut trees, which it resembles in appearance. The nuts are pulled before they are ripe, and are chewed, with the usual condiments - lime and Aromatic leaves - by both sexes. These people like all savages are exceedingly superstitious, one of which is their mode of procuring a light for their cigars. I have often wondered when sitting in their houses - where they generally have good fires - at seeing both men and women labouring away to procure a light by the friction of two sticks, and they sitting close to the fire at the time. On enquiring their reason for this unnecessary labour, their reply was, that were they to light their cigars from the fire, some calamity would be sure to happen.’