CHAPTER 1 · WESTERN PACIFIC
Yap: the stones too heavy to move
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Watch
2
Play: Canoe run
Bring a stone home from Palau. A bigger stone is worth more, but it makes your canoe heavy. Steer with ↑ ↓ / W S, or drag.
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Rod moment
The islanders spotted their Rod.
O'Keefe's stones were easy to get, so, by later accounts, they traded for less than the old ones that had cost lives. Same as Ulm Hollow moving from pentaja to zirnet: when money gets easy to make, people quietly stop treating it as money.
Yap got lucky. Most places didn't. Next: glass beads, where this time you are Rod. (coming soon)
Sources
- W. H. Furness III, The Island of Stone Money (1910), ch. VII: Project Gutenberg.
- M. F. Bryan, “Island Money”, Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (2004), citing C. L. C. Gillilland, The Stone Money of Yap (Smithsonian, 1975).
- M. Friedman, “The Island of Stone Money”, Hoover Institution working paper E-91-3 (1991).
- Game values for small and large stones are made up; the ~2-foot stone's price (a big pig or fifty baskets of food) is Furness's.