The earliest known examples of Tobian speech date from 1836 and are contained in Horace Holden's Narrative of the Shipwreck, Captivity and Sufferings of Horace Holden and Benj. H. Nute, published by Russell, Shattuck and Co of Boston. Horace Holden was an American sailor whose New Bedford whaleship, the "Mentor" was wrecked in Palau. He spent the two years from 1832 to 1834 stranded on Tobi. The ship's captain, Edward C. Barnard, known to the Tobians at that time as Peeter Inglish, also left a narrative, which has been published as "Naked and A Prisoner": Captain Edward C. Barnards' Narrative of Shipwreck in Palau 1832-1833, edited by K. R. Martin and published by the Kendall Whaling Museum of Sharon Massachusetts.

Holden included an appendix by the scholar John Pickering discussing the Tobian language. In that appendix are a word list and five specimens of extended speech provided by Holden. To illustrate the language, he used the device of an extended argument between himself and a man named Pahrahbooah with whom he lived while on Tobi. The basis of this argument is Holden's wish to go home and Pahrahbooah's wish to use Holden as a means of acquiring wealth. Holden called these examples "dialogues."

Holden places these dialogues in the months after Captain Barnard had left the island. Barnard promised great wealth to the Tobians who delivered him to a passing ship, but failed to deliver anything at all to the Tobians. Thus Pahrahbooah's skepticism that Holden will come back with iron and other valuables if he manages to leave. Why England and not America is used as Holden's home place in these dialogues is unclear. It may be that Tobians had previously encountered Englishmen and simply failed to see the American whaling men as being from a different place, or perhaps England had come to be the word for the home of foreign sailors in this part of the world following the shipwreck of the East India Company packet Antelope in Palau in 1783.

Why Captain Barnard was referred to as Peeter Inglish is another mystery. Holden says that some time before he and the other Mentor survivors arrived on Tobi, a man from Ternate named Peeter Kart visited the island and taught people many useful skills.

In the summer of 2006, in Koror, Palau, Isauro Andrew and Peter Black recorded Isauro's translations of Horace Holden's dialogues into modern day Tobian. Much of Holden's version of the Tobian language consists of words which Isauro does not recognize as Tobian but which seemed to him to be Indonesian or Palauan.

In the interest of efficiency, several of the longer sentences in the dialogues have been broken up into segments and recorded separately. Where Isauro's translation diverges significantly from the original, we provide a separate translation back into English.

Dialogue One:

Dialogue Two:

Dialogue Three:

Dialogue Four:

Dialogue Five:

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Updated: December 9, 2006