METHODS OF FISHING
The beds of the marine shell-fish from which pearls are taken lie always under water. Unlike others which are sometimes left exposed by the tides, to be gathered by man without difficulty, the pearl oyster is never left uncovered by the sea. It is found usually on shoals some distance from shore, sometimes but five to seven feet from the surface; more frequently fifteen to forty feet deep, and often one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five and even one hundred and fifty feet deep.
Everywhere, then, man's quest for pearls is confronted by the heaving, restless waters of the sea, for the greater part of the year rough and turbulent, frequently lashed to furious racing by tropic tempests but through which he must in any case go to get them. In a few places where the beds lie in shallow inlets and sheltered bays they can be dredged, but almost universally the oysters are gathered by divers. During the greater part of the year, when storms rage, diving is very dangerous if not quite impossible; but when the song of the sea is hushed to low crooning, and the gentle roll of the waves does no more than playfully slap the boats in passing, then in the seas where men dive for pearls they gather to the harvest of gems.
There are two ways of diving—naked, and with dress. The former is the common method throughout the Orient and is practised to-day after the same manner that it was in the days of the Pharaohs and the Cæsars, for the primitive method survives with few variations wherever eastern people control the fisheries.
In the fishing season one sees now in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and about Ceylon, the same scenes as they were enacted there before Rome was a city, or France a nation, or the Macedonians overran Egypt. Naked divers, diving into fifteen to forty feet of water, use few aids. They grease their bodies, put greased cotton in the ears and a forked stick, or tortoise-shell clip, upon the nostrils to compress them, hang a wide-mouthed wicker basket or net at the waist, and they are ready.
There are several methods of naked diving: head-first from a spring-board attached to the side of the boat, as the Malabar coast Hindus and some of the Egyptians do; swimming to the bottom, as practised in the deep waters of the South Sea; and dropping to the oyster bed with a stone. The latter is the most common way in Indian, Egyptian, and Arabian waters, especially where the banks lie in forty to fifty feet of water.
Standing on the spring-board a few seconds to fill his lungs, the head-first diver suddenly plunges overboard and passes smoothly and rapidly through the water straight to the shoal below. Gathering quickly as many oysters as possible while his breath lasts, he places them in the net at his waist, attaches them to a convenient rope hanging from the boat's side and shoots to the surface. There he recuperates by lazily floating about if the water is shallow, if deeper, by climbing back into the boat for his next plunge. If diving in pairs, one rests while his partner dives.
Expert divers who dive singly have an attendant, a manduck, who attends to the lines and looks out for his interests generally. The manduck drops a line with the oyster basket overboard and attaches to it another weighted with a forty to fifty pound stone. These are so fastened that they can be quickly released. The diver then drops into the water feet first and placing his foot in a loop in the line over the stone puts the basket on it, and releasing the lines, sinks to the bottom. Disengaging himself, he proceeds to fill his basket while the attendant pulls up the stone and adjusts it for the next descent. When ready to return he signals his attendant, and holding on to the line with the basket is drawn to the surface, occasionally accelerating his own return by climbing the rope hand over hand at the same time. He rests in the water by the boat's side until ready to dive again, making seven or eight descents before climbing into the boat for a longer rest and sun-bath.
The divers of India, Arabia and the Red Sea are natives of the Madras Presidency, descendants of Arab fishers at Jaffna in Ceylon, Arabs, and Egyptian Negroes. They travel long distances to the fisheries and there are many of them between the Red Sea and Ceylon. At the last fishing in the Gulf of Manaar there were about forty-five hundred. Their dress during the time of the fishing consists of a loin cloth only. They have many hereditary and class superstitions, chief of which is their faith in shark-charmers. While waiting for the fishing to begin they also seek to get from the fates an inkling of the luck which will attend them. One common method is by breaking a cocoanut on the diving stone; the more clean and even the break, the better the luck.
The mortality among divers at the fisheries is not great in Asiatic waters. Pneumonia is the greatest scourge, fatalities in diving being few. It is necessary however to select robust men for depths beyond forty feet; comparatively few can work without injurious effects below that.
Some curious mixtures of ancient days and present times, of the Pharaohs and infant industries, are seen. One may see a black slave diver in the Red Sea hanging over the edge of his boat taking observations through an old tin kerosene can with a bit of glass in one end of it. This he sinks a little way in the water and gazes through it below. Presently the can is discarded, over he goes and returns shortly with a few shells; while near by a clumsy monster emerges and a diver in dress climbs into his boat. This use of modern tin cans and glass is adopted in seas where the shells are scattered and is common to pearl-divers the world over.
The Moros have a method of fishing in very calm weather peculiar to themselves. They drop a three-prong catcher attached to a rattan rope upon the oyster bunches and so haul them up to the boat. This can only be done when the sea is perfectly still, as even a ripple would render a sight of the oysters impossible. Ordinarily they dive to any depth down to twenty fathoms.
Many attempts have been made to introduce dress-diving among the natives of the east but so far few have been successful. Results from experiments have not compared favorably with naked diving and so, with few exceptions, naked diving is still the rule in the east where natives control the fishings.
But of all, the Polynesians, both male and female, adhere most closely to the old way. Most of them will not even use a stone to assist the descent, and they probably reach greater depths than the naked divers of any other sea. Travellers report that, at a coral atoll in the Southern Pacific owned by the French government and known as Hikuereu, where the natives of Tahiti and other islands flock during the season to fish for pearls, the boys and girls and women are almost as expert as the men.
Whole families congregate here, remaining during the season housed in huts framed of light cocoanut palms roofed with leaves. These they bring with them, some coming several hundred miles. The shells are mostly in sixty to seventy feet of water; some however are brought from a depth of one hundred feet. It is reported that a boy, on an exhibition dive, remained under water for two minutes and forty seconds, going to a depth of a little over one hundred feet. He was in sight all the time, the water being so transparent that he could be seen on the bottom, leisurely selecting pieces of coral for the officers of the ship above. These divers hang in the water by one hand grasping the gunwale of the boat while they examine the bottom for oysters through a glass which they hold below the surface in the other hand.
When shells are sighted the glass is discarded, the lungs are filled several times and the air expelled slowly. Upon reaching a certain fit condition a long breath is taken until the lungs are inflated to their utmost capacity; the diver then suddenly lets go, sinks a few feet below the surface, turns quickly and head-first swims rapidly to the bottom.
Arriving there, he pulls himself along by grasping the coral branches and breaking the shells loose from their anchorage with his right hand, which is protected by a cloth wrapping, and stows them away in a cocoanut fibre basket slung over the shoulder. This done, he straightens himself and shoots to the surface with astonishing rapidity, seeming to leap up from the water as he arrives with almost sufficient impetus to carry him into the waiting canoe. In a few minutes he is ready to dive again. In some localities where divers were employed the women were preferred, not because they could do better work always, but one could depend on them more safely. This was true of the divers in Torres Straits between Queensland and New Guinea.
Before dress-diving was introduced these naked natives would dive into ten or twelve fathoms and bring up an oyster under each arm. The shells were large, weighing three to six pounds together and sometimes ten, but they contained few pearls and those were generally small. As they were brought up the oysters were searched for pearls and the fish used for food. The shells sold in Sydney then for eight to nine hundred dollars the ton. Years ago the women of Chile about the Bay of Concepcion claimed as a right the fishing for mussels. The men rowed them out to the beds and stuck long poles into the shoal below, down which the women would slide, returning with both hands full of mussels. The fishing was done from canoes, each holding one man and one woman. The women did not consider this a hardship but a privilege of which they were quite jealous, for they devoted the proceeds of their catch to the purchase of finery.
Wonderful stories are told of the great depths to which these naked divers go and the great length of time they can remain under water. Many of these tales are gross exaggerations,—yarns which have grown more wonderful with the telling, or the reports of careless or inexperienced observers. As a matter of fact at most of the fisheries, twenty to thirty feet is good diving, and from forty to fifty feet is the maximum depth. Sixty to eighty seconds is the average limit of time they remain under water. If one will try to hold the breath for sixty seconds, even while remaining perfectly still, it will be at once understood that to do so while moving and working rapidly under water is a great feat. Nevertheless there have been instances undoubtedly, where naked divers have gone to much greater depths and remained under for several minutes. Such cases are rare however and occur most frequently among the natives of the South Sea Islands, who, male and female, are expert divers from childhood and spend much of their lives in the water.
Visitors have claimed that natives of the Tongarewa Islands, in longitude one hundred and fifty-eight degrees W. and latitude nine degrees S., can do twenty to twenty-five fathoms and will even go deeper when tempted by the sight of a few oysters lying in a hole or depression near by. Going below twenty-five fathoms results almost invariably in a sort of paralysis. The diver comes up howling and incapable of motion and unless companions at once seize and rub him vigorously with salt water until circulation is restored, a process lasting sometimes many hours, he dives no more. If restored he will dive again next day, and such is their recklessness that the same temptation would lead him to take the risk again.
Monsters abound in these waters. Should the diver be attacked by a devil-fish, shark, or sword-fish, he does not use a knife, as blood would attract other devils of the sea and becloud the water to his own confusion. Instead he seeks to avoid his enemy, and if the troubler is a sword-fish, tries to find shelter among the rocks. If the fish departs quickly, he escapes; but the time of a live man one hundred feet under water is short and sometimes the sword-fish over-stays it.
Helmets have been used to a certain extent in all parts of the world. Many of them were clumsy affairs, abhorred by all native divers, and were a bad introduction to the "dress" used in the large operations of big fisheries such as those of Australia and the Pacific coast of this continent. In the seas about Australia, modern appliances are being rapidly introduced. The Australians use them if possible, wherever they fish. On their own coast all diving is now done in dress; but among some of the islands of the Pacific, where they are extending their interests, native prejudice is still able to hinder the use of it.
Probably the chief reason for the general use of the dress on the Australian coast so early was that the shallows were soon exhausted, and naked diving was not successful beyond a depth of fifty feet. With the dress, a diver can work at much greater depths, remain under water an hour or two, and work all the year round.
Copyright, 1892, by The Century Company.
NATIVE AUSTRALIAN PEARL-DIVERS
In fisheries like those of Ceylon, where the banks are seldom over forty feet deep and well known, being fished over and over again at one season of the year only, at comparatively short intervals (four to six years), the necessity for dress-diving is less and the naked native diver will probably survive for many years although modern innovations are gradually creeping in even among the fisheries controlled by Orientals.
The dress consists of a rubber suit all in one piece, which the diver gets into through the neck; leaden-soled boots, corselet to which the helmet is screwed, and chest and back weights. The diver dresses and steps on to the ladder hanging over the boat's side. The air-pipe, life-line, and helmet are attached, the man at the air-pump is set to work, and last of all the face glass is screwed up.
A plunge, a splash, and he drops swiftly through the heaving billows to the quiet depths below, his life in the hands of the tender he has left in the boat. This man must feel the diver constantly by the life-line, keep him supplied with air and be ready for any of the emergencies always liable to arise. Only an alert man of good judgment and quick action should tend the life-line, though the most successful diver, a Japanese, on the Australian coast some years ago, had the best tender of that section in the person of his wife.
If it is the diver's first plunge, his ears and head will be racked with pain as he descends. This pain will leave him when he reaches bottom, but on his return to the surface he will find his nose and ears bleeding and will probably spit blood also. After this he will not experience pain in diving, but in common with nearly all divers will never be quite free from extreme irritability and bad temper while below; he will also have gained the diver's ability to blow smoke through the ears.
Diving is injurious to the health and, if persisted in, produces deafness and incipient paralysis. Few of the divers on the Australian coast now are aborigines. Their antipathy to the dress amounted in many cases to a superstition, so as the fishing was pushed out to deeper waters and the dress became a necessity, they were discarded with the old methods. It is said that in the old times diving had a peculiar effect upon the black-haired natives. By the end of the fishing season the color of their hair became yellow though the natural hue returned later.
With the dress, a diver can work comfortably at one hundred to a hundred and twenty-five feet, but men who know the fisheries doubt if that can be exceeded. Nor does it seem needful to go deeper, for in seas which have been explored at greater depths it is usually found that the bottom consists of ooze unsuitable for the life and growth of the oyster.
Beyond those inherent to the art of diving, either method has its peculiar difficulties after bottom is reached. In naked diving, especially at the shoals of Ceylon and Venezuela, where the shells are small and abundant, it is simply a question of gathering as many as possible while the breath lasts and looking out for the dangerous fishes indigenous to tropical waters.
Sharks are common in many of the pearl-oyster seas, but experienced divers do not fear them greatly, as the fish, formidable as it may appear, and dangerous as it is when it can come upon one unawares, is easily frightened. Many expert swimmers of the Indian and Pacific oceans do not hesitate to attack them in their own element. Usually vigorous splashing will frighten them away. The dress-divers of Australia scare them off by allowing a jet of air to escape. As the bubbles start for him, the man-eating monster shoots away from them as if terror-stricken.
The diamond-flounder of the Pacific and Indian oceans, a huge flat fish with a habit of seizing its prey between the side fins and crushing it, is more dangerous. If a dress-diver of experience sees one of these approaching, he is apt to shut off the air-escape of his helmet and signal to his tender that he is coming to the surface as fast as he can get there.
The rock-cod also is sometimes troublesome on the Australian coast. Occasionally he attains an enormous size. This fish lies hidden in submarine caves, his head protruding and his monstrous jaws yawning vertically wide like an entrance to the cave itself. But accidents from the denizens of the sea are comparatively few; the physical results of deep-sea diving are more to be dreaded, for paralysis hovers close to the thirty-fathom line.
Although dress-diving has the advantage over naked diving that it gives a supply of air to breathe while at work, it also entails dangers and difficulties from which the old method is free. An imperfect supply of air may cause the bursting of a blood-vessel. Fouling of the lines might not only cut off the air supply entirely, but prevent the man, anchored by his heavy dress under twenty fathoms of water more or less, from signalling the man at the life-line. As on dry land, there are holes and precipices at the bottom of the sea to be avoided.
In some seas there are swift currents and as the dress-diver remains under water for some time, instead of returning at once like his naked brother, he must keep moving with it, and as he moves, the boat must move in unison and his tender must keep the lines free. Both diver and tender must be skilful and alert to do this. Nor is it always easy in deep-sea diving to find the oysters. They lie in scattered bunches, often hidden by sponges, coral or other sea growths, their gray or moss-grown exteriors scarcely to be distinguished from the surroundings; if in mud, only an inch or so of the sharp lips of the two valves projecting above the surface are in evidence; while if in stooping to gather the shells he should fall, he is likely to shoot feet foremost to the surface.
Though dress-diving has heretofore been confined almost entirely to white men, the Japanese, Chinese, Malays, South Sea Islanders, and others in different places, are now being educated to it chiefly through an Australian fishery.
At the northwestern corner of Australia, a thousand miles from the nearest railroad and ten days from the nearest port, there are pearl fisheries where the climate is so hot that white men cannot be obtained for the work. Colored men are shipped there from Singapore to man the boats, the pearl-fishers giving a bond to the government of 100 pounds sterling for each man employed, as a guarantee that he will not go to other parts of the state. A fleet of about three hundred boats and fifteen hundred men are employed there, the supply station being at Broome township.
In all things, when once the improvements of science gain a foothold anywhere in the world, the whole earth succumbs eventually to their advantages, and so with diving; the habits and prejudices of thousands of years will be forced by commercial pressure to submit themselves to modern appliances, and the picturesque nakedness of the swarthy orient will soon be hidden under the ugly but useful dress of civilization.