[86] In 1857, the chief shark-charmer was a Roman Catholic!
Accidents with sharks are of rare occurrence: the noise of 1000 divers on the water at once seeming to scare the animals. Moreover, the dark colour of the skin of their bodies, acts as a considerable protection to the divers, so that there are numbers who blacken their legs, in order still more to alarm the monster.[87]
[87] An encounter in the water between a shark and an expert swimmer, armed only with a knife, is not so unequal an affair as might at first be supposed. The pearl fishers of the Gulfs of Panama and Nicoya only use a short stick, with which, if the sharks get above them, they stir up the mud, under cover of which they swim along the bottom for a little distance, and then shoot up to the surface. Of the equality in which a good swimmer armed with a knife feels himself in encountering a shark, there are numerous instances. Many years ago, when shipping was more plentiful in Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, than at the present day, vessels had occasionally to put up with somewhat awkward berths, when they used regularly to "foul their anchors," whereupon it became necessary, of course, to send some one down to free the cable. For this purpose, negro divers were employed, and one man attained a wide reputation from having himself, unscathed, slain in fair combat at different times, no less than five sharks! Ultimately the sharks steered clear of any black man who had a knife suspended round his neck.
After these preliminaries, the divers go down into the water, each carrying a basket-shaped net, in which to bring up the oysters, when selected—a stone of from 15lbs. to 25lbs. weight being fastened round the body, so as more readily to enable him to sink to the bottom. When at a depth of some 5 or 6 fathoms, the diver unfastens the stone, which is forthwith hauled up. He now throws himself forward on his face, and keeps himself as close as he can to the ground, while he rapidly rakes up and collects together all that is within his reach, so as to fill his landing net. He crawls along in this manner during the minute of his submersion, over a space of from 40 to 50 feet; and so soon as he pulls the cord attached to his plaited basket-edge, it is immediately hauled up, and he himself speedily follows it to the surface.[88]
[88] The divers are mostly old men, vigorous and healthy in appearance, thus dispelling the general notion that deep-sea diving weakens the body and shortens life. We were told of one diver, employed during the year 1856, in the pearl fishery, who was so stout and fat, that in addition to the ordinary diver's stone, he had to make fast a considerable weight to his body, in order to sink himself in the water.
The utmost depth at which the diver can safely remain seems to be about 40 feet, beyond which blood is apt to issue from the nose and ears. They seldom remain above 50 or 60 seconds under water, although cases occasionally occur in which the stay under water is protracted to 80 seconds. The diving is carried on for 5 or 6 hours without intermission, so that each of the ten divers can, in the course of a day, bring up from 1000 to 4000 oysters. By dint of good fortune, and close packing, about 150 oysters are brought up in each basket-net, while occasionally an unprolific bed does not give more than five or ten oysters. So soon as the oysters have been dragged to land, they are sorted in shares, of which one goes to the oyster fisher as his remuneration, and the remainder are sold in lots of 1000 each to the highest bidder. Now begins speculation. Chance presides here, quite as capriciously as at a lottery or another game of hazard. It often happens that a single oyster contains thirty or forty pearls, of which some may be worth a sovereign on the spot; but it more frequently occurs that several hundred oysters do not yield a single pearl. The small, valueless pearls, called also "seed pearls," are burnt down, and sold as pearl-lime to the wealthy Malays, by whom it is used as a luxurious addition to the betel and cabbage nuts, as masticatories. The Ceylonese mix the lustreless pearls with other grains, with which they feed the poultry, in whose croops the pearls regain their former brilliancy after a few minutes' grinding. The croop is then slit up, and the glittering stones extracted, white as the most beautiful pearl-muscular tissue.[89]
[89] This method of procedure, which is adopted by the rest of the Indian races, and in which the lustreless pearls are swallowed by hens, pigeons, and ducks, so as to be polished up, after being subjected to the preliminary digestion of these birds, has been proved to be anything but beneficial to the pearls as regards loss by attrition. Careful observation has established, for example, that four pearls, weighing twelve grains, have lost four grains by undergoing this process during twelve hours, while eight others, weighing thirty grains, were reduced to twenty grains after a sojourn of two days in the gizzard of a duck.
The pearl oysters caught on the coast of Ceylon are all of the same species (Meleagrina Margaritifera), uniformly oval in shape, and about 9½ inches in circumference. The number taken in Ceylon annually must be numbered by millions. In the year of our arrival to Ceylon (1858), the pearl fishery yielded £24,120. According to the last returns, before us as we write, there were in the year 1859, 1352 boats engaged during eighteen days in the pearl fishery, the gross take of which amounted to 9,534,951 oysters, sold for £48,216. The divers' shares amounted together to 2,126,749 oysters.
The wide-spread popular delusion, that the pearl in the oyster is but a produce of disease in the animal, has long been refuted by scientific research, and although the great German poet, Henry Heine, in his "Romanzero," sings,
"Those world-famed pearls,
They are but the wan mucus
Of a sad oyster,
Dimly sickening in the depth of the sea!"