A wife was formerly rated at the highest unit of exchange, her value being a canoe, or a wap, or a waiwi.
Macgillivray[127] states that in 1849 an iron knife or a glass bottle (which, when broken into fragments form so many knives) was considered a sufficient price for a wife. Now the natives usually give trade articles to their prospective parents-in-law. My friend Maino, the chief of Tud, informed me that he paid for his wife, who came from the mainland of New Guinea, a camphor-wood chest containing seven bolts (i.e., pieces) of calico, one dozen shirts, one dozen singlets (jerseys), one dozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen tomahawks, one pound of tobacco, one long fish spear, two fishing lines, one dozen hooks, and two pearl shells, and he finished up by saying, “By golly, he too dear!” If the above price was actually paid, there was some foundation for his exclamation. Once when he sold me something he particularly demanded a tomahawk in exchange, as he had to give one to his mother-in-law to “pay” for his last baby, and he did too. It appears that babies have to be paid for as well.
At the opposite end of British New Guinea, Sir William MacGregor informs us that at Pannaet (Deboyne Island), in the Louisiades, the canoes for which this island is famous are cut out with adzes of hoop-iron, but “they sell the canoes when made at from ten to fifty stone axes. They do not use the stone axe as a tool in this part of the country, but it still represents the standard of currency in great transactions such as the purchase of a canoe, or a pig, or in obtaining a wife. The natives always carefully explain that, as concerns the wife, the stone axes are not given as a payment for her, but as a present to the father of the girl. Steel tomahawks will, however, now be accepted, at least in some cases, in payment of a canoe, and no doubt the days of the currency of the stone axe for these and all other purposes are numbered” (July 1890).[128] In Misima (St. Aignan Island) also “they have entered the iron age, and appear to have entirely given up the use of the stone axe except as a medium for purchasing wives” (October 1888).[129]
The evolution of the money symbol is a very interesting history, and I would refer those who would like to inquire further into it to the masterly work by Professor Ridgeway.[130] In the following brief sketch of this question I draw largely from that book.
Among the Bahnars of Annam, who border on Laos, “everything,” says M. Aymonier, “is by barter, hence all objects of general use have a known relationship; if we know the unit, all the rest is easy.” After enumerating certain exchange values, he continues, “1 muk = 10 mats, that is to say, ten of those hoes which are manufactured by the Cedans, and which are employed by all the savages of this region as their agricultural implement. The hoe is the smallest amount used by the Bahnars. It is worth 10 centimes in European goods, and is made of iron.”[131]
“The Chinese likewise used hoes as money; but in the course of time the hoe became a true currency, and little hoes were employed as coins in some parts of China” (tsin, agricultural implements).[132]
At Ras-el-Fyk, in Dafour, the hoe also serves as currency,[133] and in West Africa “axes serve as currency; these are too small to be really employed as an implement, but are doubtless the survival of a period not long past when real axes served as money.”[134]
At the time when the Chinese made their great invasion into South-Eastern Asia (214 B.C.), they still were employing a bronze currency under the form of knives, which were 135 millimetres (5⅖ ins.) in length, bearing on the blade the character Minh, and finished with a ring at the end of the handle for stringing them. Under the ninth dynasty (479-501 A.D.), they used knives of the same form and metal, but 180 mm. (7⅕ ins.) in length, furnished with a large ring at the end of the handle and inscribed with the characters Tsy Ku’-u Hoa. Next the form of the knife was modified, the handle disappeared, and the ring was attached directly to the blade; but now, as weight was regarded of importance, its thickness was increased to preserve the full amount of metal, and the ring became a flat round plate pierced with a hole for the string.[135] Later on these knives became really a conventional currency,[136] and for convenience the blade was got rid of, and all that was now left of the original knife was the ring in the shape of a round plate pierced with a square hole. This is a brief history of the sapec (more commonly known to us as cash), the only native coin of China, and which is found everywhere from Malaysia to Japan.[137]
“Among the fishermen who dwelt along the shores of the Indian Ocean, from the Persian Gulf to the southern shores of Hindustan, Ceylon, and the Maldive Islands, it would appear that the fish-hook, to them the most important of all implements, passed as currency. In the course of time it became a true money, just as did the hoe in China. It still for a time retained its ancient form, but gradually became degraded into a single piece of double wire. These larins, made both of silver and bronze, were in use until the beginning of the last century, and bear legends in Arabic character. Had the process of degradation gone on without check, in course of time the double wire would probably have shrunk up into a bullet-shaped mass of metal, just as the Siamese silver coins are the outcome of a process of degradation from a piece of silver wire twisted into the form of a ring and doubled up, which probably originally formed some kind of ornament. The bullet-shaped tical is now struck as a coin of European form. Just as, perhaps, the silver shells of Burmah became the multiple unit of a large number of real cowries, so the fish-hook made of real silver came into use as a multiple unit, when the bronze fish-hook had already become conventionalised into a true coin.”[138]
“Every medium of exchange either has an actual marketable value, or represents something which either has, or formerly had, such a value just as a five-pound note represents five sovereigns, and the piece of stamped walrus skin, formerly employed by Russians in Alaska in paying the native trappers, represented roubles or blankets. This is an interesting parallel to the ancient tradition that the Carthaginians employed leather money” (p. 47).