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

by Wallis Richard Cattelle

ANTIQUITY OF THE PEARL

How long the pearl has been used as a jewel is unknown. It is seen all through the pages of history, from the long ago days when records were inscribed on the leaves of plants, to the rapid-fire prints of to-day, which unceasingly scatter to myriads the knowledge of things as they occur.

Back of history, pearls loom everywhere in the mists of tradition like delicate but imperishable orbs of beauty set in the smoulder of burned out days and passions. And wherever their tranquil light attracts the eye of imagination, the ghosts of the great are seen, for pearls lie in the hair of royalty and clasp the fair necks of Queens. Upon them shine the eyes of turbanned princes who valued them above the blood and life of thousands of subjects. Shades of imperious fingers, long since fallen to the elements, toy with them: they deck the spectral gatherings of the mighty in all lands and ages, and there is no dream of song or story which does not hold them among the chief enchantments. As the fair moon hangs from the brow of night when she broods over lonely waters, so does the pearl shine in the shades of the ages.

In this country abundant evidence exists that before the advent of the white man, or of the red-skins as we know them, the aborigines, from the cold rise of the Mississippi to the glades of Florida, used them for their adornment. In savage wilds, and on coasts that knew not the sight of ships or other shores, copper-skinned natives treasured the glistening things they found in the mollusks of the sea-shoals and inland streams. Quantities of pearls have been found in the Indian mounds, many of them loose, others strung for necklaces and wristlets, some mounted in quaint and primitive fashion, all showing that in the days of unbroken forests and swarming game and roving tribes of untrammeled savages, in the tepees of the braves, their queens wore pearls even as they are worn now by fairer successors in the palaces reared where once were forests and camping-grounds. In those days the savage lords of the undivided earth knew nothing of whirring lathes and drills; of hardened points of steel turning with lightning rapidity and unerring precision. Slowly they burned a way through the gem with hot copper wire, destroying thereby with ruthless ignorance the delicate beauty of jewels fit for royalty. To them the slender prongs of gold with which the modern jeweller holds the lustrous balls, uncovered and in safety, were unknown. Instead, the savage set them in holes bored in the teeth of animals, possibly to enhance the relics of a great fight with some fierce beast that succumbed finally to his prowess: possibly to add beauty to the grim reminders of her lord's valor when he hung them round the neck of a favored mate. The Indian of this continent was much more primitive in the art of the jeweller than in the manufacture of implements for war and the chase. Gaudy colors extracted from plants and minerals appealed more to his unthinking eye than a chaste form of beauty. With these he could stain his blankets, record on skins of slaughtered animals his deeds, or paint in hideous signs upon his face the malignancy of war. His time and thought and ingenuity were given to things which would contribute to his master passion and glorify its deeds. The scalps of his enemies, the skins of animals he slaughtered, the feathers of birds that fell to his unerring arrow, the teeth of bears and mountain lions slain in desperate encounters, these were his jewels. Nor was his sexual instinct sufficiently refined to enthrone his mate. She was his slave, and her reward for toil was pride in his deeds and glory. He knew little of the tender homage which brings gifts and lays them at the feet of woman. Instinctively he made a setting for his pearls of bears' teeth, that they might carry the scent of blood and tell the story of his conquest. Nevertheless, among these rude tribes of wolfish savages, sequestered from the touch of other people more refined, the modest pearl found favor, and in it they unconsciously paid tribute to one of the purest forms of beauty. But even this recognition must have been the growth of years, possibly of ages, for not until the understanding of worth has become general among a people is value established, and only things valuable are stored. As desire for a thing for its inherent qualities spreads, there is added a larger number of those who seek to possess it for the profit they can make in supplying that desire. Not many years ago, fishermen along the streams of remote parts of Kentucky had no eye for the beauty of a pearl, and no knowledge that men and women lived who prized them. If while fishing, the fisherman's hook fell between the gaping valves of a mollusk it was immediately seized. The disgusted angler thereupon angrily pulled the nuisance out, and if upon disengaging the hook from the bivalve, he found within the shells a pearl, it was immediately tossed back into the stream for luck; for the beginning of a day's sport with a catch of that kind was ill-luck and the fates could only be appeased by the finding of a pearl, or a "mussel egg" as he would call it, in the mollusk, and its return to the water. There lives yet on the banks of the Clinch River, an old pearler, the distress of many a speculator for his knowledge of pearls and their value, who sometimes sorrowfully relates how he thus in bygone years angrily threw away many good pearls, one of them the finest "ball" pearl he has ever seen. If these gems were so regarded by the ignorant white settlers of the west until the advent of men who had learned to appreciate them either for their beauty or the price they would bring from the outside world, it may be surmised that the awakening of the ancient Indian to their beauty, must have been a much slower process, unassisted as it was by men from beyond their limits who had long regarded them as precious. At first, probably, pearls were thrown to the children as playthings, as diamonds were in the Cape: then the young squaws gradually opened their eyes to the fact that the white shining things enhanced the charms of their smooth copper skins by contrast: the brave sought them to please the maid he would bring to his tepee: perhaps rovers brought news that in the far south, in lands of houses and teocalli and much magnificence, or farther off among the Incas, these baubles were prized by the chiefs. So gradually it dawned upon some that the "eggs" of the mollusk were beautiful, and upon others that they could be bartered for skins, blankets, or arrows, possibly for a pony, and so they came to be gathered and stored and displayed as things which enriched the owner.

How far back in the ages the use of pearls on this continent extends cannot be estimated. The discovery of them in the mounds east of the Mississippi, which are credited to an ancient race that finally succumbed to the similar but more war-like red men found here when the country was discovered by Europeans, suggests many centuries. And the use of pearls to the extent manifest by the discoveries, favors the theory that the mound-builders had reached a degree of refinement never attained by the North American Indians of record. When white men invaded the North American continent, they found tribes of red men as rugged as the coasts of New England. Inured to hardships, despising pain, contemptuous of death, they lived by hunting and found their chief pleasure in the slaughter of their enemies. Camping at will, their lodges were here to-day and there to-morrow, and brutal if heroic, they roamed over fields once inhabited by a race which had passed, but left evidence that they were sufficiently civilized to appreciate the pearl.

In Florida and South America, the conditions, when the country was discovered by the Spaniards, were different. The ancient races, corresponding with the mound-builders of the north, undisturbed by the incursions of stronger tribes, had continued to progress and had reached a high degree of barbarous luxury.

In Mexico, when Montezuma gave audience to Cortez, he was ablaze with gold and silver and precious stones. His cloak and sandals were adorned with pearls. Pearls were used to decorate temples, canoes and even the paddles. Indian women had great strings of them coiled around their necks and arms, and the chiefs used them freely on all occasions of state. It was the same on the Colombian coasts.

At the island of Cubagua and on the main coast, Columbus found great quantities of pearls, as did De Soto and his followers when they landed at Tampa Bay, known by the Spaniards as "Spiritu Santo," in Florida in 1539. The Incas of Peru also owned many fine pearls. Though the natives of all these countries ignorantly injured the gems by cooking the oyster to extract them, or by their crude methods of boring, and reckoned them of little value as compared with the European idea, they nevertheless esteemed them as jewels and must have done so for ages, for the invaders found them in the sepulchres of the dead, so altered by the processes of time that they retained nothing of their original beauty.