Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,
As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered there.”
So dreamed Clarence on a memorable night, and, indeed, what treasures, known and unknown, must not the ocean cover!
The well-known term which forms the heading of this chapter, with its popularly-understood meaning, is familiar to every schoolboy, yet its origin is most obscure. Mr. Pinkerton, an ingenious correspondent of that valuable medium of inquiry, Notes and Queries,[25] argues as follows, and his opinion is entitled to respect. He says:—“I have arrived at the conclusion that the phrase is derived from the Scriptural account of the prophet Jonah. The word locker, on board ship, generally means the place where any particular thing is retained or kept, as ‘the bread locker,’ ‘shot locker,’ &c. In the ode in the second chapter of the Book of Jonah, we find that the prophet, praying for deliverance, describes his situation in the following words:—‘In the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about; the depth closed me round about; the earth with her bars was about me.’
“The sea, then, might not misappropriately be termed by a rude mariner Jonah’s locker: that is, the place where Jonah was kept or confined. Jonah’s locker, in time, might readily be corrupted to Jones’s locker, and Davy, as a very common Welsh accompaniment of the equally Welsh name Jones, added; the true derivation of the phrase having been forgotten.”
However this may be, it is of the hidden treasures of the ocean locker and its explorers we would now speak. And first let us take a glance at the pearl, coral, and sponge fisheries,[26] as they are somewhat incorrectly called, inasmuch as it will pave the way to the subject of divers and diving.
The pearl oyster (Meleagrina margaritifera) is the most valuable and interesting of all the nacre (mother-of-pearl) bearing shells. The shell is nearly round, and greenish in colour on the outside; it furnishes at once the finest pearls, under favourable circumstances, and the nacre so useful in many industrial arts. Fine pearl and nacre have, in short, the same origin. The nacre invests the whole interior of the shell, being the same secretion which, in the pearl, has assumed the globular form; in one state it is deposited as nacre on the walls of the bivalve, in the other as a pearl in the fleshy interior of the animal. Between nacre and pearls, therefore, there is only the difference of the form of the deposition. The finest pearls—“solidified drops of dew,” as the Orientals poetically term them—are secretions of nacrous material spread over foreign bodies which have accidentally got beneath the mantle of the mollusc. The animal, if irritated by the intrusion of only a grain of sand, and being unable to remove it, covers it with a natural secretion, and the pearl gradually grows in size. Almost invariably some foreign body is found in their centre, if broken, which has served as a nucleus to this concretion, the body being, perhaps, a sterile egg of the mollusc, the egg of a fish, or a grain of sand, round which has been deposited in concentric layers the beautiful and much prized gem.
The Chinese and other Eastern nations turn this fact in the natural history of this bivalve to practical use in making pearls and cameos. By introducing into the mantle of the mollusc, or into the interior of its body, a round grain of sand, glass, or metal, they induce a deposit which in time yields a pearl, in the one case free, and in the other adhering to the shell.