Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/314

302 Pacific groups, which are included in the designation of Polynesia but with some striking differences, which careful observers have ascribed, with great probability, to influences from Northeastern Asia. They are noted for their skill in navigation. They have well-rigged vessels exceeding sixty feet in length. They sail by the stars, and are accustomed to undertake long voyages.

The southernmost group of Micronesia, commonly known as the Kingsmill Islands, was visited and partly surveyed by the vessels of the Wilkes Exploring Expedition. During a very brief intercourse with the natives of the principal island, Taputeuea, large quantities of what was at first supposed to be an ornament were obtained from the natives, in exchange for other wares which they valued. This peculiar article was thus described, before its real character was understood: "It consists of a string of alternate wooden and shell beads, if this term may be applied to them. The 'beads' are in the shape of a sixpence with a hole through its center, or more nearly like the 'button-molds' of our dress-makers. They are made of fragments of cocoanut-shell and sea-shells, which are broken or cut nearly to the required shape, and then filed down together till they are smooth, even, and exactly of equal size. Those of sea-shell are white, and those of cocoanut black. They are strung alternately upon a small cord, and appear like a round flexible stick, half an inch in diameter, marked with alternate white and black rings." The beads, it appears, by the specimens preserved in the National Museum at Washington, were not all of one size. Besides the larger sort, resembling an English sixpence, there was a smaller description, of about half that size, and bearing when strung a surprising resemblance to a string of small wampum beads, the only difference being that the Kingsmill Island disks are thinner than the proper wampum cylinders; but both in size and in thickness they resemble closely the smaller shell-money of California.

Further researches disclosed the true nature of this article, which, as it appeared, had been already studied and described by earlier voyagers at other islands of the Micronesian range. Adalbert von Chamisso, the naturalist who accompanied Admiral Kotzebue in his voyage around the world, was the first to make known its character and use. In speaking of the natives of the Ladrone Islands, now an extinct people, he remarks: "We have discovered among their antiquities something which seems to show a great advance made in civilization beyond any of the other islanders of the great ocean. We speak of the invention of money. . . . Disks of tortoise-shell, of the shape of button-molds, but thin as paper, and made extremely smooth by rubbing, are strung close together on a thick cord of twisted cocoanut-husk. The whole forms a flexible cylinder of the thickness of a finger, and several feet in length. These disks were in circulation as a medium of exchange, and only a few of the chiefs had the right to make and issue them." Some other facts are mentioned, which seem to indicate that