The Cowrie's Long Voyage

Lyrics

[Intro]The women of the Maldives, they waded in the shallows.Their children's hands were quick.Searching for the little tigers, the money cowries.*Cypraea moneta*.Sun warm on their backs.A good day's harvest.[Verse 1]They packed them into barrels, they rolled them to the shore.Thirty billion little shells, maybe even more.From fifteen hundred on, the long count starts.Loaded in the dark holds, breaking women's hearts.Not their women's hearts, not yet.Just cargo, on a ship with a name I forget.Sailing west from the reefs, around the Cape of Storms.A currency in waiting, taking on new forms.[Verse 2]The air gets thick and heavy, in the Bight of Benin.The salt-smell mixes with the trade, and the sorrow baked within.They spill them on a wooden table, a clattering, milky sound.A mountain of white porcelain, on the dark, unforgiving ground.The counting isn't one by one, it's done by weight and measure.Someone's ledger book is open, to tally up the treasure.[Chorus]The year is sixteen ninety.And the number's written down.Twenty-five thousand shells for a life, in a coastal trading town.Twenty-five thousand promises, smooth and hard and white.For a name the ledger never kept.Gone into the night.[Verse 3]The hands that gathered them are gone.The hands that counted them are dust.The hands that paid the price are bound, in iron and mistrust.The book just says a number. No story and no name.Just a column full of cowries, in a long and brutal game.Thirty billion tiny tombstones, that's what they became.Each one a silent witness, to the profit and the shame.[Bridge]A pretty thing, a money shell.Held spirits in its curve.A gift from the ocean's floor, a life it didn't deserve.To be the coin of misery, the price tag on a soul.To fill a ship's dark belly, and make a monster whole.From the Indian Ocean's cradle, to the Atlantic's grave.The long, long voyage of the shell, and the person it couldn't save.[Chorus]The year is sixteen ninety.And the number's on the page.Twenty-five thousand shells for a life, to start a new, dark age.Twenty-five thousand pieces of faith, in something you can hold.For a human story never told.Bought and sold.[Outro]They're still there, in the red dirt.Washed up on the shore.The voyage is over.The counting is no more.Just the echo... of the number....Twenty-five thousand.