ABSTRACT
The dress of the men worn at work was a narrow girdle ( U aiuai-loi, in Yap Guaz), about a foot in breadth and some four feet in length, exactly the same as formerly worn in Japan, made of the woven fibre or baste of the banana or of the Nin tree, often dyed yellow from the juice of the Morinda citrifolia. It goes once round the waist, down between the thighs, and is tucked in behind at the back, so as to leave a piece depending like a tail. (It is the Hume of the Marquesas, the Malo or Malomalo of Hawaii, Samoa and Fiji, the Maro of Tahiti, Mangareva and New Zealand, and the Palpalof the Mortlock Islands.) The dress worn on occasions of festival or after work was the Kol (that of a chief in the language of ceremony was called Mol) or native kilt, composed of the split filaments of young coconut leaflets (the pinme of the branch) steamed in the oven, steeped a day in water under heavy stones, scraped with cockle-shells to remove the green vegetable matter. These also were often dyed bright yellow with turmeric, or with the juice of the bark of the Morinda citrifolia or Flame Tree. A new Kol is a pretty sight, but exposure to the sun quickly
makes the bright hues fade out. Sometimes with the cockle-shell each frond would be carefully pinched, crimped, and creased into wavy lines, the work of the old women. This was a Kol-Ikoch. The working dress was called Lt"kau-mal or Lz"kau-en-tuka, and their regular dress for festivals or leisure Kapuot or Kapot. The chiefs and men of note in the community used to wear belts of banana fibre (Tor, Tur), elaborately woven out of banana fibre on which was strung rows of pink, white and grey shell beads. Curiously enough, in Hebrew Tur denotes a row of jewels. These were of two designs and varying sizes, one resembling in shape the Maori heZ"-#kz"s or rectangular pendants of greenstone called Pake or Puake -the other round, which they call Pul. For a common man to put on the belt of a chief was a serious offence in Ponape as in Hawaii, in which latter country the penalty was death: if. the old distich-" Ina hume ke kanakai ko ke alii malo, e make noia." " If a common man bind on a chief's girdle, he shall die for it." Carved and plain shellbracelets were also the fashion styled Luou-en-Matup from the place of their manufacture. A wise woman named Kamaz" is said to have invented them. The same word is applied to a ring of turtle-shell as far as Yap, fourteen hundred miles to the westward. (Possibly the word is the Lz"o or LZ"ko of Polynesia, and denotes a hoop or circle.) Ear-rings of turtle-shell (Kz"chz"n-pot) were sometimes worn, but the Ponapeans of the present generation do not pull down and distort the lower lobe of the ear as do the Mortlock Islanders, and as the primitive people on Easter Island did, who were destroyed by a Polynesian invasion under Hotu-Matua, and styled by their conquerors the Taringa-Roroa or Long Ears. A similar custom prevailed amongst the early Bisayas in the Southern Philippines, and the Spanish chroniclers of the Conquest of Peru remark upon it as a fashion of the early Inca nobles.
