Indian Antiquary Vol 48

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 153

SEPT., 1919) NOTES ON CURRENCY AND COINAGE AMONG THE BURMESE
149
NOTES ON CURRENCY AND COINAGE AMONG THE BURMESE.
BY SIR RICHARD TEMPLE, BT. (Continued from p. 111.)
4.
SPELTER AND TIN. Closely connected with the lump-lead currency there was in use, in Pegu at any rate, a similar currency in the alloys which may usefully be given the generic term of spelter. They have gone under many names and expressions among the old travellers and writers, ar.d have been used as currency, side by side with tin and lead themselves, in many perts of the East and Far East. Spelter is properly zinc, but it has often been used loosely to express alloys 70 of lead and tin, lead and copper, lead and brass, copper and zinc and so on, almost precisely in the same way as have its philologically most interesting, though mongrel Europeo-Oriental equivalents, tutnag, ganza, and calin in all their keleidoscopic forms. English trade equivalents have been white copper, white lead, Queen's-metal and bellmetal,71
Oddly enough, the first of all the accounts I have seen, outside the Portuguese accounts, of the currencies of these parts, itself full of Portuguese expressions, is the only one that calls these mixed metals by their proper name of pewter. In the English Trɛnslation of the Collection of Voyages of the Dutch East India Company, 1703, we read in the diary of the First Voyage, 1595-7, p. 246, of Malacca, "Achem,!' etc., that "The little Baher contains also 200 Cates, but each of these Cates contains but 22 Tayels, or 32 ounces and an eighth part, for the Tayel of the little Beher weighs an Ounce and en half good weight. They weigh with that weight Quick-silver, Copper, Tin, Pewter, Leed, Ivory and so on." At p. 247 we read, "The Basaruco's [coins) are the worst Allay, being made of the worst Pewter." In the second voyage, 1598-9, we find again of Bantam :-"As soon as the five Ships cast Anchor, several Pirogues (prows] came on board, and brought all sorts of Refreshments, which they exchanged for Household Pewter, and gave for one Spoon as much Victuals as a Man can eat in two days."
It was under the name of Ganza that the lump lead or lump spelter currency of Pegu was known to travellers. In 1354 Nunes found that in Pegu there was no coined money, but that pieces of a broken utensil of "a metal like frosylegra (? spelter)" were used for coins, and that this was called gamça (in Portuguese), and writing in the same year Caesar Frederick calls the metal ganza (in Italian) and says it formed the money of the country. The English version of this last writer, dated about 1567, gives the passage thus "The current money that is in this Citie [i.e., Pegu] and throughout all the kingdom, is called Gåssa or Ganza, which is made of copper and lead. It is not the money of the King, but every man may stamp it that will." 73 La Loubère (Siam, E. T., p. 14) writing in 1688. 83y8:-Vincent le Blanc 7 relates that the Peguans have a mixture of Lead and Copper
70 That is, pewter. "Billon," a rather confused term, I have avoided, taking the debased amalgams it is used to represent to contain always an admixture of silver and gold.
71 Yule, Hobson-Jobson, s. vv. Tootnague, Ganza and Calay.
73 Just as the Nicobarese will do at the present day, and, as the same book notes (pp. 107. 109, 115) that the Malagasy did in the 16th century.
18 This, and similar quotations that will be given later on, accounts for the mysterious Tenasgerim Medals, unat have hitherto been such a puzzle, and turns them into traders' tokens.
He was "the physician retained by the King of Siam to work in his mines." Marginal note to La Loubère, loo. cit.