As with sealskins, so with pearls. The pearl-diver's occupation is among the most dangerous known. Generally either an Arab or a full-blooded negro, he is invariably a man of splendid physique and indomitable courage. Long practise has enabled him to remain under water for two minutes at a time without apparent inconvenience. Nevertheless, the life of a professional pearl-diver is not considered by experts to be worth more than six or seven years' purchase.
Many succumb every season to a strange and deadly form of paralysis. Many more are eaten by sharks, drowned through getting their feet entangled in weeds, caught in crevices in the rocks while exploring the depths of the sea, or seized and devoured quickly by shoals of gigantic octopi—those ghouls of the ocean—which invariably infest the fishing-grounds.
It is estimated that of the hundreds of egret-hunters who each year set out for the heronries of Yucatan, a full ten per cent. never return. Deep in the deadly, fever-laden recesses of the forest swamps of the hinterland these beautiful birds breed. The hunter pursues them remorselessly, his life in his hand, for the snow-white tail-feathers are worth from five to eight guineas.
The climate is deadly. The atmosphere is saturated with miasma and infected with myriads of poisonous insects. Alligators lurk, too, in the black slime of the tortuous bayous, which constitute the only means of inter-communication. An egret-hunter who runs short of ammunition or quinin simply lies down in the bottom of his canoe and waits for death. Usually he has not long to wait. On the average, for every half-dozen aigrettes—one may see hundreds being worn any afternoon in Bond Street—a man's life has been sacrificed.
Hardly less perilous, if any, is the orchid-hunter's profession. Orchids love warmth and moisture, and warmth and moisture in tropical countries are synonymous with miasma and fever. Wild animals also and poisonous serpents abound in the umbrageous depths wherein the rarer varieties lie hidden. Not infrequently, too, the collector has to seek his specimens among savages or semicivilized peoples, who strongly resent his intrusion into their midst.
One firm of orchid-importers reported a year or two ago that they had had five collectors killed in as many months by the wild tribesmen of the Western Himalayan slopes; while other three, even more unfortunate, were made prisoners and carried off to undergo the nameless horrors which have from time immemorial been characteristic of Central Asian slavery.
Rubber is purchased at a terrible price. The mortality in the State of Amazonias, in Brazil, corresponds with almost diabolical exactness to the number of tons of rubber produced. In fact, it is said each ton costs a human life, and although there are no such horribly fiendish atrocities in Brazil as has been charged against the Congo, it is nevertheless true that the laborers who are brought into the rubber-fields do not average more than three years of life; and are, if not in law, at least in fact, subjected to hardships never known or endured by the slaves in the United States, or even by the slaves in the coffee countries of Brazil.
Of nearly seven million pounds of camphor obtained annually, Formosa produces all but about six hundred thousand pounds, but very few people have the faintest conception of the dangers to which Japanese camphor collectors are exposed in the Formosa hills when gathering this product. Up to the present, in fact, the Japanese have found it impossible to control the head-hunting savages of the hills, and the development of this valuable industry depends equally upon the success of their measures for encountering and suppressing these determined and as yet unconquered tribes.
Formosa, which is shaped somewhat like a huge sole, has a rugged, mountainous back-bone, in which Mount Morrison towers into the clouds to a height of twelve thousand feet. Throughout the wild penetralia of these mountains lurk a number of warlike tribes of varying strength, whose lives are devoted to hunting, fishing, and fighting with one another, their one community of interest being a passionate ardor in the collection of human heads, whether of their tribal enemies or of the Chinese coolies who live on the verge of the hills or are engaged in the camphor industry.
The tree from which camphor is obtained is a species of laurel indigenous to Formosa, and it is on the mountains overrun by these terrible hordes of head-hunters that the extensive forests from which practically the world draws its supply of camphor are found.