“Yes the Taote got a rough deal,” he admitted. “But his pearls made another man’s fortune, and astonished all who saw them in Paris. Let me tell you! Last year I visited three culture fields, and they are doing wonderful things. The Japanese for many years only copied the methods of the Chinese. They forced the fresh water mussel and the abalone to coat with nacre substances they inserted within their folds, but they got no pearls of the best size, shape, or luster. Now, Kokichi Mikimoto has gone much further than anybody. I spent a week with him at his pearl farm in the bay of Ago in the Inland Sea of Japan. The bay is a dozen miles long and five wide, with an average depth of sixty feet, but it is remarkably free from currents and severe storms. Mikimoto is a scientist as was the Taote. He opens a three-year-old shell and lays a head of nacre on the outer, shell-secreting skin of the oyster. This skin is then dissected off the oyster and fitted about the bead like a sac. This sac is then transplanted into the tissues of another oyster in its shell, an astringent is sprinkled on the wound, and the second oyster is planted in the prepared bed at anywhere from twenty-five to eighty feet. It stays there from three to seven years, and then his girl diver brings it up. Mind you, he has laid down suitable rocks in certain shallow places, and when they are covered with oyster spat they are removed to deeper beds and set out in order. It is these which are dissected at three years of age, and the nuclei inserted in them. These beads are of all colors, mother-of-pearl or pink or blue coral, and the pearls are of the color, white or pink or blue, of the beads. The oysters often spit them out, the starfish and octopus ravage the beds, and the red current sometimes spoils everything for a year. They have similar farms in other parts of Japan, and in Australia and Ceylon, but Mikimoto has done most. He sells millions of pearls every year. Of course they are blisters and so not orient or perfect, because the bead has touched the shell while growing, and has not remained in the folds of the oyster. But I am afraid, for I was told a few months ago that Mikimoto and others were making perfect pearls. If they do they will ruin the market.”
“You can tell the difference between natural and culture pearls in any case?” I asked.
“Mais oui! If you cut open the grafted pearl you find the center a bead or bit of coral, but in the true pearl the center is a grain of sand, or a hollow formerly occupied by the tapeworm or parasite. Well, you won’t make any money cutting pearls open, so we use the ultra-violet ray. Most of Mikimoto’s pearls are about as big as French peas, and, as I say, lack sphericity because of attachment to the inner shells. But, mind you, his oysters are merely the avicule or wing-shelled kind, and small. Here are these Paumotu shells from six to eighteen inches across and the oysters in proportion. Think of what they might do, if they were put to work by science and—”
“They were once,” broke in Kopcke. “My girl’s father knows all about it.”
“I know much about it, too,” said Mandel; “and I have never known just what to believe. I only know that some one sold a string of pearls in Paris finer than any in the world, and they are now in New York.
“The Empress Eugénie’s necklace came from here, and so did Queen Victoria’s five-thousand-pound pearl, but these were said to be finer.”
“For heaven’s sake!” I exclaimed. “Tell me what you do know of this mysterious Taote and his tragedy. Mapuhi has put the devil to work in it. I have been hearing talk about it since I landed in Tahiti.”
“Come down to my shack,” said Kopcke, “and I will get old Tepeva a Tepeva to tell you his part of it.”
“I will finish with Mapuhi,” Mandel said, “and will be along in ten minutes.”
That the fixing of a price for the twenty-five pearls was not to be concluded in public was evident, and so Kopcke, Lying Bill, and we others sauntered to Kopcke’s hut. Nowhere do whites despise one another as feelingly as in the South Seas. Their competition in business and in love is so intimate and so acute that there are no distances nor withholdings of emotion. The finesse and impersonal euchering of rivals practised on mainlands is not copied in this hotter and more primitive mart where adversaries are of ruder breed, and courtesy is considered weakness. As we strolled under the palms to Kopcke’s house, McHenry said to me, “This Taote, this doctor or magician they gab about, I knew better than anybody else, an’ he was a bloomin’ queer ’un. I kept a store at Penrhyn for years, and this fellow was around there studyin’ the lagoon. Everybody called him Doc, but whether he was a M.D. I don’t know. He had a tool-chest, though, like a bloody sawbones, and could fix a cut or saw off an arm fine. He had michaelscropes and all sorts o’ professor junk, an’ he was good-hearted, and had money enough, too.”