Each incoming steamer brought loads of "Dobie" from the
Asiatic coast, but our good dollars and quarters went out of sight
like falling stars.
The silver coins consisted of pesos, medio-pesos, pesetas (twenty-cent
pieces), media-pesetas (ten-cent pieces), and it seems to me that I
have a hazy recollection of a silver five-cent piece, though I cannot
be certain. The copper coins were as mongrel as the silver.
There were English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese coins from the
neighboring coasts, but the greater part of the copper coins consisted
of roughly pounded discs with ragged edges, which were made, they
said, by the Igorrotes. The coins had no inscriptions, but went with
the natives by the name of "dacolds"--the native word for "big,"
The Americans renamed the dacolds "claquers," and used either name
at pleasure. It required eighty dacolds to equal one peso, forty to a
half-peso, sixteen to a peseta, eight to a media-peseta. Theoretically
a peso was a hundred cents, as a peseta was twenty cents, but there
was no cent with which to make change. You accepted the dacold at
its value of eighty to a peso, or you transacted no business. The
Filipinos also had a way of figuring a medio-peso as _cuatro reales_,
thus giving the _real_ a value of twelve and a half cents, though
there was no coin called a _real_. Nevertheless, the _real_ figured
in all business transactions.
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