The Pearl, its story, its charm, and its value

by Wallis Richard Cattelle

Standing on the spring-board a few seconds to fill his lungs, the head-first diver suddenly plunges overboard and passes smoothly and rapidly through the water straight to the shoal below. Gathering quickly as many oysters as possible while his breath lasts, he places them in the net at his waist, attaches them to a convenient rope hanging from the boat's side and shoots to the surface. There he recuperates by lazily floating about if the water is shallow, if deeper, by climbing back into the boat for his next plunge. If diving in pairs, one rests while his partner dives.

Expert divers who dive singly have an attendant, a manduck, who attends to the lines and looks out for his interests generally. The manduck drops a line with the oyster basket overboard and attaches to it another weighted with a forty to fifty pound stone. These are so fastened that they can be quickly released. The diver then drops into the water feet first and placing his foot in a loop in the line over the stone puts the basket on it, and releasing the lines, sinks to the bottom. Disengaging himself, he proceeds to fill his basket while the attendant pulls up the stone and adjusts it for the next descent. When ready to return he signals his attendant, and holding on to the line with the basket is drawn to the surface, occasionally accelerating his own return by climbing the rope hand over hand at the same time. He rests in the water by the boat's side until ready to dive again, making seven or eight descents before climbing into the boat for a longer rest and sun-bath.

The divers of India, Arabia and the Red Sea are natives of the Madras Presidency, descendants of Arab fishers at Jaffna in Ceylon, Arabs, and Egyptian Negroes. They travel long distances to the fisheries and there are many of them between the Red Sea and Ceylon. At the last fishing in the Gulf of Manaar there were about forty-five hundred. Their dress during the time of the fishing consists of a loin cloth only. They have many hereditary and class superstitions, chief of which is their faith in shark-charmers. While waiting for the fishing to begin they also seek to get from the fates an inkling of the luck which will attend them. One common method is by breaking a cocoanut on the diving stone; the more clean and even the break, the better the luck.

The mortality among divers at the fisheries is not great in Asiatic waters. Pneumonia is the greatest scourge, fatalities in diving being few. It is necessary however to select robust men for depths beyond forty feet; comparatively few can work without injurious effects below that.

Some curious mixtures of ancient days and present times, of the Pharaohs and infant industries, are seen. One may see a black slave diver in the Red Sea hanging over the edge of his boat taking observations through an old tin kerosene can with a bit of glass in one end of it. This he sinks a little way in the water and gazes through it below. Presently the can is discarded, over he goes and returns shortly with a few shells; while near by a clumsy monster emerges and a diver in dress climbs into his boat. This use of modern tin cans and glass is adopted in seas where the shells are scattered and is common to pearl-divers the world over.

The Moros have a method of fishing in very calm weather peculiar to themselves. They drop a three-prong catcher attached to a rattan rope upon the oyster bunches and so haul them up to the boat. This can only be done when the sea is perfectly still, as even a ripple would render a sight of the oysters impossible. Ordinarily they dive to any depth down to twenty fathoms.

Many attempts have been made to introduce dress-diving among the natives of the east but so far few have been successful. Results from experiments have not compared favorably with naked diving and so, with few exceptions, naked diving is still the rule in the east where natives control the fishings.

But of all, the Polynesians, both male and female, adhere most closely to the old way. Most of them will not even use a stone to assist the descent, and they probably reach greater depths than the naked divers of any other sea. Travellers report that, at a coral atoll in the Southern Pacific owned by the French government and known as Hikuereu, where the natives of Tahiti and other islands flock during the season to fish for pearls, the boys and girls and women are almost as expert as the men.

Whole families congregate here, remaining during the season housed in huts framed of light cocoanut palms roofed with leaves. These they bring with them, some coming several hundred miles. The shells are mostly in sixty to seventy feet of water; some however are brought from a depth of one hundred feet. It is reported that a boy, on an exhibition dive, remained under water for two minutes and forty seconds, going to a depth of a little over one hundred feet. He was in sight all the time, the water being so transparent that he could be seen on the bottom, leisurely selecting pieces of coral for the officers of the ship above. These divers hang in the water by one hand grasping the gunwale of the boat while they examine the bottom for oysters through a glass which they hold below the surface in the other hand.