Ternate - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

TERNATE 47 TOPOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL DESCRIPTIONS
contract work properly. Still, they offer for sale all kinds of small articles needed for daily
use on Ternate. They like to earn money by selling the products of their gardens or by
fishing. This is done without any compulsion or encouragement, since the native
government only concerns itself with the collection of taxes and the summons for statute
labor. The natives have a certain aversion to regular and constant work, and although this
is contrary to western beliefs it is understandable in a tropical [p. 71] climate, where the
basic necessities of life can be had for almost nothing. The people of Mariku occupy
themselves with fishing for julung-julung, 10 a kind of Hemiramphus called ngowaro in the
local languages. These they dry and salt and sell as far as Menado and Banda. From here
also come the most neatly finished beams, which are marketed at the capital Ternate. Most
frequently, the traveling smiths in these islands are Tidorese. They earn a lot of money
making pedahs, and one can often see them on the beach in huts made of sago leaves, busy
beating old iron which they have bought from the Chinese. When four or five people work
together they can make up to twenty pedahs in a day. These are then sold for fifty cents
each. Their tools are a pair of bellows, which consists of two wooden sockets in which
pistons move up and down, connected to a drawer at the end of which the air is emitted
through two thin bamboos; a wooden anvil with a steel case; and a few heavy hammers
(sewa-sewa). A tank with water serves for cooling. They make a fire with the hard rinds of
kanari (canari) fruits which have been collected in the neighborhood and then burnt into
charcoal. The haft of the pedah is usually carved from the wood of mangga (mango) trees. 11
[p. 72]
Sago is supplied from Halmahera. The best kind costs f 1.- to f 1.50 per fardu, which
is enough to feed twenty people twice. The best quality sago come from near Oba; the
product from Payae and Maidi is cheaper but of inferior quality. The worker usually gets
half the yield when he cuts down a tree and the owner gets the other half. The flour is
packed in crude baskets (baku), woven from the leaves of the boko (Pandanus) tree [sic].
Rice is only eaten by members of the royal family. The common people eat it only on festive
occasions. It is always Java rice, bought from the Chinese. Sagwire (lahan) comes from
Halmahera, where high on the mountain the arenga palms grow. The supply from these
palms is just barely enough for home consumption.
10 [p. 71, n. 1] When julung-julung fishing, the fishermen divide the catch in two: half is for all
the participants and the other half is exclusively for the owners or shareholders of the drag-net.
11 [p. 71, n. 2] The wooden sockets are made of lenggua wood and are called duwa-duwa; they are
about one meter long, have a diameter of two or three decimeters, and stand in a drawer (matiti)
which is made out of the same kind of wood; the pistons (ngoco or duwa-duwa-mangoco) are made of
nibung wood and consist of a stem and a disk. Chicken feathers are attached to the bottom and the
edge of the disk with rattan. The three or four decimeter-long bamboo sticks end in a hollowed-out
black stone where, on the other side of the hollowed-out area, lies the charcoal. The wooden
cylinders have been firmly fixed to a bamboo stand on which a plank lies and here sits the man who
moves the pistons up and down. The anvil (besi-matiti) is a piece of steel on top of a piece of wood
firmly attached to the ground. The tools are: a big hammer (sewa-sewa), small hammer (martelo), a
[p. 72] kind of file (gare), a nail or pointed piece of iron (dusu-dusu) firmly fixed between laths, a pair
of pincers (kota-kota), a poker (bare), a grindstone (nyonyifi), a stone (sasarara) to polish the iron,
and finally charcoal (nong). The complete apparatus costs 30 reals or f 48.-, and the smiths travel
with it to Ambon, Menado, and New Guinea. (N.B. All the words mentioned here are Tidorese; I
have not looked for the corresponding words in the Ternatese language.)
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