Sandalwood

Sandalwood

Sandalwood served as a unit of account and means of payment in nineteenth-century Hawaii. Sandalwood is a hard, light-colored, close-grained wood that in Southeast Asia is ceremonially burned in funeral rights of Hindus, Buddhists, Parsis, and Muslims. Early in the nineteenth century sandalwood became the major Hawaiian export, and a Hawaiian ruler, King Kamehameha, owed his rise to power to income derived from the export of sandalwood to the Orient.

During the heyday of the sandalwood trade, merchants and exporters kept accounts in terms of piculs of sandalwood, making sandalwood the unit of account, rather than metallic currency such as the Spanish dollar, the international currency at the time. A picul was originally the amount of wood a man could carry, but evolved into an oriental measure of weight between 132 and 140 pounds.

Hawaiian chiefs purchased foreign goods on credit, making payment in promissory notes payable in sandalwood.

These promissory notes were not issued as payment for token amounts. A Hawaiian ruler purchased eight sailing ships at a price of $300,000 and made payment in promissory notes payable in sandalwood. The first quarter of the nineteenth century saw massive Hawaiian debt pile up that was payable in sandalwood. In 1826 the United States government sent a sloop of war to forcibly arrange for the payments of these debts. Every man found himself assessed with a head tax payable either in half a picul, or in four Spanish dollars. The debts were paid in full, but soon afterward the supply of Hawaiian sandalwood dried up.

Sandalwood money belongs in the category of tobacco money in Virginia, or sugar money in the West Indies. Metallic money was often in short supply in the remote areas of the world, and commodities tended to surface that could fill the role of money.