The pearl lagoon

by Charles Nordhoff

As they worked no more than five hours a day, we did not leave camp till the sun was well up, illuminating the bottom of the lagoon. I went out with a pair of middle-aged Paumotans whose acquaintance I had made during the passage from Raiatea. It was about half a mile from the islet to the patch of shell on which work was to begin. Uncle Harry had gone out ahead of us in the whaleboat and as the little fleet of canoes drew near, he pointed out to the paddlers the two acres of lagoon in which they were to work. The bow-man in our canoe dropped anchor in about seventy feet of water, and began to prepare himself to dive.

First of all, he stripped off the cotton shirt he had been wearing and hitched the pareu tight about his waist. Then he polished his water goggles, adjusted them carefully over his eyes, and thrust his right hand into a heavy working-glove. A pile of coral lumps, picked up on the beach the night before, lay in the bottom of the canoe; the stern-man placed a couple of these in the basket and lowered it into the lagoon till it came to rest on the bottom. Then the diver went over the side and lay in the water with a hand on the gunwale of the canoe, while his partner coiled the diving-line and lowered the leaden weight till it hung a few feet beneath the surface. The man in the water gripped the line with his left hand and the toes of his left foot; he took two or three long breaths before he jerked his head upward in a sudden gesture that meant: "Let go!" Coil after coil of line went leaping overboard, as the diver sank like a stone, leaving a trail of bubbles in his wake. When the lead touched bottom the stern-man hauled it up at once, coiling the line in readiness for the next dive.

A minute passed—a minute and a quarter—a minute and a half. The canoe lurched to a sudden strain on the taut basket-line. I looked over the side. Far down in the green water I could see the shadowy figure of the diver, mounting the rope with leisurely movements of his arms. He came to the surface, exhaling the breath from his lungs with the strange shrill whistle I had heard before. Then, raising the goggles from his eyes, he gave the exultant whoop of the diver who has brought up a rich haul—a cry that was beginning to ring out on all sides, where the canoes lay at anchor. He lay resting alongside while his companion pulled up the basket, loaded with six or seven great gold-lipped oysters; and craned his neck to watch as the other opened the shells with a twist of his knife at the hinge, felt for pearls under the soft mantle, and tossed the body of each mollusk into the open kerosene-tin. My companions seemed excited.

"Aué!" exclaimed the diver. "There is no other island like this! It is as Seroni told us—the bottom is covered with shell, and the water is not overdeep: twelve fathoms, by the knots on my line. Last year, at Hikueru, I worked at twenty till my head ached all through the night. And this shell—the size, the weight, the color of the lip—think of what it must be worth a ton! No man in all these islands has ever seen its like! I would still dive if there were fifty sharks instead of the one Seroni killed yesterday. But watch carefully, and if a shark comes, move the basket up and down a little so that I may be warned. Now pass me the weight, for I am ready to go down again."

At the end of three hours the diver clambered stiffly into the canoe; even in this water, only a few degrees below the temperature of one's blood, a man grows chilled and must come out to rest and warm himself in the sun. He had averaged a minute and a half to two minutes under water, and five minutes' rest at the surface between dives, and I noticed that he sent up five or six oysters each time he went down. We had brought along a bottle of water and a package of cold food done up in leaves. When lunch was over and the diver lay basking in the sun, I asked him how he could stay under water so long, and how a man could stand the pressure of the depths. At home in California I had excelled my friends by bringing up sand from the bottom at thirty feet, and my ears had ached for an hour afterward. These natives thought nothing of working at seventy feet, and from what they said, I knew that one hundred and twenty feet was not considered an extraordinary depth.

"It is not difficult," the diver remarked, smiling at my efforts to question him in his own tongue. "If he would take the trouble, the white man could learn as well as we. But one must know how. You say that at six fathoms your head ached and your lungs were bursting. That was because you tired yourself by swimming down instead of letting a weight pull you to the bottom. And perhaps you held all of your breath until you rose—that is wrong. First of all, you must learn never to tire yourself beneath the water, and not to fill your lungs too full before you start. When your time is half up, you must begin to let the air out of your lungs, little by little,—a few bubbles now and then,—so that, as you reach the top, there will be scarcely any air left in you. If your ears ache, swallow; or hold your nose and blow—this will clear the little passages between your nose and ears, and stop the pain. That is all, except that in deep water you must never look up, nor bend your body backward. As for the sharks, there is little danger—not one in a hundred will do you harm. When that one comes, you will know him by the way he swims, and if there is sand or mud on the bottom, you can escape by throwing it up to cloud the water while you pull yourself quickly up the basket-rope. Otherwise you can only take refuge in a crevice of the coral, hoping that the shark will leave you before your lungs go flat. Conger eels are more to be feared; you must watch sharply as you pass the holes where they lie hidden. The big eel's jaws are like the jaws of a dog! If a conger seizes wrist or ankle, it is useless to struggle—ten strong men could not drag one from his hole. Three times, when I was young and careless, I have felt the teeth of the eel; see—my ankles bear the scars to this day. But I remembered what the old men had told me and lay quietly without struggling, till the conger relaxed his jaws to dart forward for a better hold. Each time I tore my ankle free and reached the surface with only the loss of a little blood. But we must get to work—the others are beginning to dive."

The canoes returned to camp in mid-afternoon. The women were waiting to begin their task of cleaning shell, and there were exclamations of wonder as the day's catch was brought ashore. While the men went off to rest, their wives and daughters sat gossiping in little groups, hammering, chipping, and washing the mother-of-pearl. Half of the catch of each canoe had been set aside as my uncle's share, and some of his own people—Ivi, Ofai, and a few men and women from the settlement on Iriatai—set to work to clean it in a space reserved for them. I saw a number of women along the beach, filling the tins from the canoes with sea water, mashing the soft meat between their fingers, and pouring off the mess little by little, as they searched for any pearls that might have been overlooked. My uncle was delighted with the first day's work.

"It is going better than I had hoped," he said, as we sat in his stateroom that evening. "They brought in about two tons of shell to-day, and the quality is superb—nothing like it has ever been seen in this part of the Pacific. Your canoe had no luck, but the others netted four handsome pearls and a number of small ones for the day. That alone proves that there must be something in von Tesmar's theory. I've seen thousands of black-lipped oysters opened without a pearl. Old Maruia found a beauty to-day, with her usual luck. I gave her a thousand dollars for it, and any jeweler in Paris would jump at a chance to offer twice as much. You are smiling, eh, to think of that funny old woman having a thousand dollars, all at once? Why, in the eyes of her people Maruia is a millionaire! Twenty years of diving have made her the owner of a fine plantation, and one of the prettiest villas on Tahiti. Ah—I almost forgot to show you our first pearls."

He leaned over to twirl the knob of the safe, swung open the door, and took from the shelf a small tobacco-tin, which he opened and handed to me. It was lined with cotton and there, lying side by side like tiny eggs in a nest, were four pearls, pale, lustrous, and without a flaw. Three of them were like peas in size and the other was larger than the three together,—I had never seen a pearl of such size and beauty,—shimmering with a soft opalescence in its bed. My uncle took it in his hand, turning it to admire the perfection of its shape.

"You won't see a pearl like this five times in a season," he remarked. "There are many larger ones of greater value, but there is nearly always something wrong with them—a flattened spot, a flaw on the surface, a dullness in orient. Though not of great size, this is a really perfect pearl. If I had a mate for it I could ask my own price for the pair!