Oyster
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George Morrow, ‘Marginal Notes on History. Family Physician (to Cleopatra). “AH! WE’VE BEEN DRINKING PEARLS AGAIN, HAVE WE?”’, an illustration from Punch (28 February 1912).
But the value of the pearl in Western culture reached its zenith in that great era of conspicuous consumption: the Renaissance. In 1498 Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the three major islands off the eastern coast of Venezuela: Coche, Cubagua and Margarita. Trading with the natives he discovered they were adorned with gold and pearls. ‘Seeing this I was much delighted’, he wrote.10 But it was the Spanish who returned the following year to claim these islands for the Spanish crown and to name the region the Costa de las Perlas. The pearl rush was now on. For decades, pearls were a more prized commodity than gold, as the ruling families of Europe – the Habsburgs, the Valois of France, the Medici and Borgia of Italy, the Tudors and Stuarts of England – sent their agents to bid for the largest pearls available from the pearl-trading merchants as their boats returned from Persia and India.
With the increasing demand for pearls in Europe, the Spanish tried to increase their supply from the Pearl Coast. In the early years of the trade the Spanish pearl merchants employed the natives from Margarita to dive for pearls and paid for them in wine, linen shirts, wheat bread, firearms and other European goods. But when the Guayquer started to raise their prices, tensions arose. The Spanish were in a difficult position – none of them could swim, let alone dive to the pearl beds that were between 13 and 22 metres deep – so they began to import slave labourers from surrounding islands, including the indigenous peoples of Trinidad and the Venezuelan mainland coast and large numbers of Lucayan Indians from the Bahamas, who were especially prized for their swimming skills and deep-diving abilities. A young Lucayan diver fetched 150 gold pesos (ducats) in the slave market in the early decades of the sixteenth century, equivalent to about £35 today. Within ten years, the Bahamas had been completely depopulated of Lucayos from an original population believed to be 60,000 people. All for pearls.
Enslaved pearl divers were treated harshly. Branded on the face and arms and whipped if they rested for too long between dives, they were chained at night and forced to dive throughout the daylight hours. Sharks killed many divers; others died from haemorrhages produced by water pressure or intestinal disorders caused by diving in cold water. There was much at stake: a single boat could harvest 35,000 oysters in two weeks.
By the 1520s Cubagua, an island only 8.5 square miles in diameter, had became a wild mining ‘frontier’ land with a resident population of nearly 300. Drinking, gambling, murder, adultery and the rape of native women were common. Punishment of insurrection amongst the natives had become both ritualistic and sadistic. The slave divers, now desperate and with little to lose, ambushed and massacred a notoriously cruel slaver and his men, burned the missions on the mainland, killing all the friars, and poisoned the water springs in Margarita. When a newly arrived ship came ashore, the pearl divers axed the crew to death and took the ships. Under siege and with no fresh water, the Spanish settlers seized 200 Margarita natives who were expert divers, crammed them into four ships and returned to Hispaniola. From there the government sent a large force to crush the rebellion and to build a fortress at Nueva Cadiz on Margarita, which, in 1527, became the first European city in South America.
Now with a good deal of money invested in the Pearl Coast from which he demanded a return in jewels, the Spanish king authorized the use of dredges, although local people warned that dredging would severely deplete the oyster-beds. They were right: by 1531 the pearl supply was beginning to decline, and although the Spanish began to place limits on boat size, on the number of divers per boat and the number of diving hours, within five years there were no pearls left in the Cubaguan beds. The colonists moved out, taking the slave divers with them; by 1539 there were between 10 and 50 people left on the island. On Christmas Day 1541 a hurricane and tidal wave destroyed the remaining buildings and wiped out the last occupants. Cubagua was never permanently inhabited again.
When the French essayist Michel de Montaigne read Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia General de las Indias (1552), he was appalled at the greed and decimation the pearl trade had excited: ‘So many goodly cities ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed and made desolate; . . . the richest, the fairest and the best part of the world topsiturvied, ruined and defaced for the traffick of Pearles and Pepper’.11 Once the supply of riches from the Americas had been depleted, the Spanish economy did not recover. In a decade or so, in search of quick wealth, the Spanish had decimated the native populations used as slave divers along the Pearl Coast and created one of the fastest cases of natural resource depletion in history, leaving behind them the empty shell of a colony built for the production of wealth.
Few consumers of pearls in the sixteenth century knew the horrors of the pearl coast. If they had known about the conditions of the divers, however, it is still unlikely that pearls might have been boycotted as fur is by certain groups today. Elizabeth I, who ruled England from 1558 until her death in 1603, was, like Cleopatra, a mistress of spectacle and conspicuous display; like Cleopatra she used the pearl as a centrepiece in the composition of her public image. She was rarely seen or painted without them. The eighteenth-century art collector Horace Walpole described Elizabeth’s astutely iconographic self-representation: ‘A pale Roman nose, a head of hair loaded with crowns and powdered with diamonds, a vast ruff, a vaster fardingdale, and a bushel of pearls, are the features by which everybody knows at once the pictures of Elizabeth I.’
In an age of emblems, pearls signified a queen’s purity and chastity as well as immortality. Even Elizabeth’s pet ermine is shown in one portrait wearing a pearl-encrusted collar. Sir Francis Bacon suggested that the queen’s pearl- and jewel-encrusted public image also served to distract attention away from the fact of her aging (her increasingly thick white face paint could not disguise this): ‘she imagined that the people, who are much influenced by externals, would be diverted by the glitter of her jewels, from noticing the decay of her personal attractions’. At her funeral Elizabeth’s coffin bore her wax effigy dressed in wax facsimiles of her pearls: a coronet of large spherical pearls, pearl earrings and pearl medallions on her shoe-bows. A poet at the time wrote that as the funeral procession passed along the River Thames, ‘Fish wept their eyes of pearl quite out / And swam blind after’.12
Anonymous, Coronation Portrait of Elizabeth I, 1600, oil on canvas.
The Pearl Age came to an end in the seventeenth century with political turmoil, the Thirty Years War, Protestant uprisings and the growth of a new aesthetic of austerity in Protestant Europe. By the mid-eighteenth century most of the natural pearl fisheries around the world had been fished to exhaustion, but nonetheless, perhaps because of the natural pearl’s rarity, pearls rose in popularity again, particularly among the royal families of Europe. Aristocratic women wore pearl parures – matched sets of necklaces, bracelets, earrings and brooches. Pearls were particularly popular in Russia in the eighteenth century, worn in elaborately patterned head-dresses.
Pearl head-dresses worn in Russia in the seventeenth century.
The Jewesses of Little Russia also had a tradition of wearing pearl-caps in the mid-nineteenth century, as the German traveller Johann Georg Kohl described in 1846:
For all the women through South and Little Russia and even as far as Galicia wear a certain stiff, baggy cap which is very disfiguring, and is covered all over with a great number of pearls, upon a foundation of black velvet. It is called a ‘mushka’ . . . They spend their last money in order to secure such a pearl-cap and even when they are clad in rags their head is covered with pearls. In order to furnish the requisite material for this wide-spread fashion, the commerce in pearls of Odessa, Taganrog and some other places in Southern Russia is not unimportant. There may live in the regions where the pearl caps of which I speak are worn at least 2,000,000 Jewesses . . . We inquired of our beautiful Jewess whether she was not
in perpetual dread on account of her pearl-cap, and how she protected it from thieves. She answered that she wore it on her head all day and at night placed it in a casket which rested under the pillow. So that the whole short life of these Jewesses of the steppes revolves around their pearl-cap as the earth does around the sun.13
Russian refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution who migrated to Paris in the 1920s brought with them these Russian traditions of pearl ornamentation, and created a new European taste for Czarist jewellery, relics and objets d’art. In 1910, just before the outbreak of the First World War, the Ballets Russes’ production of Diaghilev’s Scheherezade (Paris, 1910) caused a sensation in Paris and influenced new fashions in dress and interior decor. The Ballets Russes’ co-founder and costume and stage designer was Léon Bakst, a Jewish Belorussian who designed exotic, orientalized pearl-studded costumes in canary yellows, bright blues, jades, cyclamens, hennas and reds dramatically contrasted against backgrounds of black, deep green and tobacco browns.
Rudolph Valentino dressed in pearls for the film The Young Rajah, 1922.
In 1912, exiled as a Jew from St Petersberg, Bakst settled in Paris. The fashion designer Paul Poiret (1880–1944), influenced by Bakst’s new exotic orientalism, created turbans and minaret skirts covered with cultured pearls. Another Russian designer, born Romain de Tirtoff but who called himself Erté after the French pronunciation of his own initials, started producing whimsical clothing designs covered in pearls as well as pearl-studded costumes for the Folies Bergère. At the same time the extraordinary African-American dancer Josephine Baker arrived sensationally on the Parisian stage, her beautiful muscular body often only adorned by feathers or strings of cultured pearls.
In 1927 the designer Judith Barbier introduced this crocheted head-piece designed to resemble the pearl headdresses popular in the fourteenth century.
By the latter part of the twentieth century only the very rich – or the glamorous recipients of gifts from the very rich, like Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn – could afford natural pearls. Richard Burton bought the famous pear-shaped La Peregrina pearl for Elizabeth Taylor in 1969, which was believed to have been discovered near Panama in the sixteenth century by a slave diver who bought his liberty with it. The pearl was sent to Spain and presented to Philip II and later given as a wedding gift to Mary Tudor when she married Philip. Elizabeth Taylor famously lost it at a casino. After a frantic search the pearl was found in the mouth of her pet dog.
PEARL DIVING
Local people were fishing for pearls in the Persian Gulf as long ago as the second millennium BC. A cuneiform inscription from the ancient Assyrian city of Ninevah describes a king’s interest in ‘the sea of changeable winds’ where ‘his merchants fished for pearls’.14 Methods of diving for oysters have changed very little throughout the centuries. In the South Seas and in Japan most pearl divers have been women. In the Persian Gulf and the waters of Ceylon and India most have been men. Since the end of the enslavement of the pearl divers, these men and women have inspired enormous respect from their own tribes and communities for the skill, courage and risks they undertook.
In the Persian Gulf the pearl season has for centuries lasted from June until early October. Small boats with a captain, several divers and attendants sailed out of the harbour in three or four fleets; these pearl divers were usually migrant workers arriving at the coast just before the season began and returning to their homes when it was over. Until recently, most wore only a loincloth, a horn nose-clip and finger thimbles to protect their hands. They stepped into the loop of a rope attached to a rock or iron weight and jumped into the water, sinking quickly to the bottom. A second rope had a basket attached to it to hold the oysters. When the basket was full, which would take about a minute, the diver pulled on the rope to be pulled back up with his basket. On the boat he rested for two or three minutes, before diving again, making 40 or 50 dives a day throughout the four-month season. On shore, other migrant workers searched the oysters for pearls, kneading through piles of oyster flesh. Then shell and oyster meat would be thrown overboard.
Bahrainian pearl divers in the Persian Gulf wearing noseclips.
In Japan, pearl divers – or ama – have been girls or women for centuries, frequently depicted by Japanese printmakers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sitting on the edge of the land, feet in the water, half-dressed, working, feeding their children, wringing out their loincloths, searching through opened oyster-shells or combing their hair, sublimely unaware of the gaze fixed on them. As early as the eighth century the poet Lady Nakatomi described their skills and courage:
Utamaro, Abalone Divers, centrepiece of 19th-century triptych, woodblock print.
No one dives to the ocean-bottom
Just like that.
One does not learn the skills involved
At the drop of a hat.
It’s the slow-learnt skills in the depths of love
That I am working at.
The ama have been romanticized as mermaids but the demands of the pearl trade have meant that they rarely rest during the daylight hours. These women inhabit 24 villages on the coastline of Japan and dive as deep as 60 feet (18 metres) wearing nothing but loincloths, sounding the ama-bui whistle as they surface. Photographs of the semi-naked women show the strength and muscularity of their limbs. When the Pearl King Mikimoto employed these ama in the twentieth century in his cultured pearl beds, he instituted a new dress code, replacing the loincloths with white cotton garments that covered them from neck to knees, for safety reasons.
The female pearl divers of Japan, known as ama.
For centuries pearls have drawn the lines of empires and, where pearl divers have been enslaved, the pearl trade has decimated communities and destroyed cultures. But if the pearl trade has broken up communities, it has made other, strangely itinerant multi-cultural communities on shorelines around the world, brought together for a few months for pearl harvesting. In 1908, for instance, George Frederick Kunz described the opening of the pearl-fishing season in Marichchikadde in India, describing the pearl harvesting as a kind of Babel, as men, women and children from all parts of the East gathered not just for the pearl harvest but also for its market, a shoreline city built on and for pearls:
Fosco Maraini, ‘Diving ama’, from L’Isola delle pescatrici, Bari, 1960.
A week or so before the opening of the season the boats begin to arrive, sometimes fifty or more in a single day, laden with men, women and children, and in many cases with the materials for their huts. In a short time the erstwhile desolate beach becomes populated with thousands of persons from all over the Indian littoral, and there is the noisy traffic of congregated humanity, and a confusion of tongues where before only the sound of the ocean waves was heard. Beside the eight or ten thousand fishermen, most of whom are Moormen, Tamils and Arabs, there are pearl merchants – mainly Chetties and Moormen, boat repairers and other mechanics, provision dealers, priests, pawnbrokers, government officials, koddu-counters, clerks, boat guards, a police force of 200 officials, coolies, domestic servants, with numbers of women and children. And for the entertainment of these, and to obtain a share of the wealth from the sea, there are jugglers, fakirs, gamblers, beggars, female dancers, loose characters, with every allurement that appeals to the sons of Brahma, Buddha or Mohammed. Natives from the seaport towns of India are there in thousands; the slender-limbed and delicate-featured Cingalese with their scant attire and unique head-dress; energetic Arabs from the Persian Gulf; burly Moormen, sturdy Kandyans, outcast Veddahs, Chinese, Jews, Portuguese, Dutch, half-castes, the scum of the East and the riffraff of the Asiatic littoral, the whole making up a temporary city of forty or more inhabitants.15
PEARL MANUFACTURE
If a drop in market price had turned oysters into the food of the poor in the nineteenth century due to developments in oyster farming and transportation, the pearl, as an adornment of clothing, also changed its status at around the same time. For scores of centuries pear
ls have been worn by the rich and powerful and have – all too often – resulted in the exploitation of the weak. Along with gold and diamonds, they have been one of the principal markers of conspicuous consumption. But in the nineteenth century, mass-production techniques of pearl buttons enabled by the Industrial Revolution made it possible for the very poor to mimic and even subvert the use of the pearl as a marker of wealth. Pearl buttons, carved out of the mother-of-pearl lining of oyster-shells by new cutting machines, were striking but relatively cheap to produce. In the second half of the nineteenth century pearl button makers flourished in Britain and America. In Silver-Shell; or, the Adventures of an Oyster (1856), the Revd Charles Williams describes the manufacture of pearl buttons in Birmingham in the mid-nineteenth century. Huge storerooms on the Birmingham docks housed piles of oyster-shells from the coasts of Ceylon and from the Australian seas. Merchants bought them for £120 per ton.
Let us now transport ourselves to one of the large manufactories of Birmingham. Ascending the stairs and entering a room, we see some shells washed in water and we follow a basket of them to witness the operation of another department. A man stands here at a strongly formed lathe, which, revolving, puts in motion, a hollow spindle, having at one end some saw-like teeth, presses the shell against the teeth to cut it into circular piles.16