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This is the tool used in felling and cutting up all trees, and in getting out and dressing all timbers and boards. It is the sole carpenter tool, unless the man by chance possess a bolo. There are no metal agricultural implements in common use. As was noted earlier in the chapter, the soil-turning stick and the woman's camote stick are now and then shod with iron, but they are rare.
The yellow-flowering gourd, called penca, has two kinds or varieties, the common and mamillary, owing to the fruit of the latter having a large nipple-shaped process at the end. Its pulp is sweet, and resembles in taste a kind of potato named camote. The quelghen, or Chili strawberry has rough and succulent leaves, and its fruit is sometimes as large as a hens egg.
Besides the different roots which are used by the natives of the island instead of bread, there is the batata, which they call camote, and which they have acquired from the Philippines, as I was informed by one of our Caroline Indians, who is a native of the island.
The Spaniards have imported the horse, the bullock, and the sheep; maize, coffee, sugar-cane, cacao, sesame, tobacco, indigo, many fruits, and probably the batata, which they met with in Mexico under the name of camotli. From this circumstance the term camote, universal in the Philippines, appears to have had its origin, Crawfurd, indeed, erroneously considering it a native term.
This is somewhat more than can be said of the dance of the women with the camote sticks, pestles, and spun thread. The women in no way "act" they simply purposely present the implements or products of their labors, though in it all we see the real beginning of dramatic art. Other areas, and other pueblos also, have different dances.
One of the young women turning the soil wears a skirt; the other one and the old woman wear front-and-back aprons of camote vines; the youth with them is nude. The three transplanters wear skirts, and one of them wears an open jacket.
If there was any wheat grown in the islands, we never heard of it, and judging from the way in which flour was sold in their markets at ten cents for a small cornucopia that would hold about a gill, it was probably brought from either Australia or America. They have a camote, something like a sweet potato. Although it is watery and stringy it does very well and is called a good vegetable.
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