In the Eastern seas professional divers are employed to go down into the depths of the ocean in order to obtain them—a dangerous occupation, at one time only followed by condemned criminals. The best-known fishery for pearls is that at Ceylon, which was a very lucrative concern, at one time, in the hands of the industrious Dutch.
THE SCOTTISH PEARL-MUSSEL.
Pearls are of remote antiquity. In the time of Pliny they held the highest rank among all gems, and the Romans esteemed and largely used them—the ladies ornamenting, with lavish extravagance, all parts of their dress with them; and so extravagant did they become in their use of these gems by way of personal ornament, that Seneca, the wise moralist, reproaches a patrician by saying that his lady wore all the wealth of his house in her ears, it being at that time the fashion for a lady to have three or four of these valuable gems hung in each ear-drop. As to the value of these drops from the deep, we may instance Cleopatra’s banquet to Mark Antony, when, according to vulgar belief, she took a pearl from her ear, worth £80,000 of our money, and dissolving it in vinegar, swallowed it! The pearl which Cæsar presented to the mother of Marcus Brutus is said to have been of the value of £48,000. Then we are told that Clodius, the son of the tragedian, once swallowed a pearl worth £8000. Actors’ sons of the present day have been known to do extravagant things; but few of them, I suspect, could achieve a feat like this. In the East, too, in those early days, the pearl was held in the highest esteem. We read of one gem, still to be seen in Persia, I believe, that had a market price set upon it equal to £100,000 of our money; and there is another pearl mentioned as obtained in 1587 from the island of Margarita which weighed 250 carats, the value of which was named as being $150,000; and there are many other instances on record of the value of pearls to which I need not make further reference.
When our government took up the Eastern pearl-fishery in 1797, the annual produce was £144,000, which in the following year was increased by £50,000, but immediately afterwards fell off, most probably from overfishing. It revived again, and in the beginning of the present century the pearl ground was leased to private adventurers at the large rent of £120,000 per annum, with the wise understanding that the bed or bank was to be divided into portions, only one of which was to be worked at a time, so that a part of the mussels might have a good rest. From various causes, however, the Ceylon fisheries have again failed, and for a year or two have been totally unproductive. In a privately-printed work on Ceylon, by James Steuart, Esq. of Colpetty, which the author has kindly forwarded to me along with a quantity of Oriental pearl-oyster shells, there is a very interesting description of the Ceylon pearl-fishery, with notes on the natural history of the oyster. In reference to the recent failure of the fishery for gems in the Gulf of Manaar, Mr. Steuart has supplied me with the following interesting note:—
“The Gulf of Manaar pearl-fisheries having again ceased to be productive, the government of Ceylon appear to be impressed with a belief that further information is needed respecting the habits of the pearl-oyster, and that it may be desirable to obtain the services of a naturalist to study and report on the best means of insuring a continuous revenue from pearls.
“The natural history of the edible oyster is now so well understood that its culture on artificial beds is in successful progress in many places on the coasts of both England and France; but it is one thing to breed and fatten edible oysters for the palate, and another to breed the pearly mollusc of Ceylon to produce pearl.
“That which is commonly called the pearl-oyster of the Gulf of Manaar is classed by naturalists with the mussel in consequence of its shells being united by a broad hinge and its having a strong fibrous byssus with which it attaches itself to the shells of others, to rocks, and to other substances. It had long been believed that the fish in question had not the power of locomotion, nor of detaching its byssus from the substances to which it adhered; but in the year 1851 it was satisfactorily ascertained that when it had become detached it possessed the power of extending its body from within its shells and of creeping up the inner side of a glass globe containing sea-water. It was, however, left to the late Dr. Kelaart, when employed by government as a naturalist to study the habits of the fish, to discover that, although it could not detach its byssus from the rock to which it adhered, it had the power of casting off from its body its entire byssus and of proceeding to some other spot, and there, by forming a new byssus, of attaching itself to any substance near to it. It is therefore now believed that the Manaar pearl-fish has the power of changing its position, and this may account for the disappearance of large quantities from the sandy places on which the brood sometimes settles; but it is by no means so clear that these fish are able to drag their shells after them over the rugged surface of coral rocks.
“I have already stated that the produce of the pearl-fish of the Gulf of Manaar varies in richness of colour, in the size of the pearl, and the quantity of its yield, according to the nature of the ground on which it rests, or of the food which that ground supplies. In some cases the pearl produced barely repays the cost of fishing. It would therefore appear to be desirable that the component parts of the surface of the most productive banks should be subjected to chemical analysis. And as the natural history of the mussel and the scollop does not appear to be so well ascertained as that of the edible oyster, it might be attended by some useful result if a prize were offered for the best treatise on these European bivalves as being the nearest approach to the pearly mollusc of Ceylon. With the information thus obtained, it might not be necessary to incur the expense of sending a naturalist to Ceylon.”