56 SPOLIA ZEYLANICA. 



A SKETCH OF THE CEYLON PEARL FISHERY OF 1903, 



By EVERARD IM Thurn, O.B., C.M.G. 



IT is difficult to imagine a more picturesque incident than the 

 '* harvest of the sea," when pearls are the crop gathered in. 

 The scene is in the shallow tropical sea which is shut in by 

 Ceylon on the east, the coast of Southern India on the west, and 

 on the north by "Adam's Bridge," a reef partly just awash and 

 partly cropping up in the form of a chain of islands which connects 

 Ceylon with India. In the Gulf of Mannar thus formed it was 

 found at least some 300 years before Christ that there is an 

 abiindant growth of pearl-producing mussels — locally called 

 oysters. The banks or " paars " on which these bivalves grow 

 lie from 5 to 10 fathoms below the surface of the water. Thither 

 for 2,000 years, when the rumovir goes abroad that the harvest is 

 ripe, divers have come together from the Red Sea and the Persian 

 Gulf and the coasts of India, as well as from Ceylon itself, to 

 gather in the Orient pearls which have been distributed to adorn 

 stately men and beautiful women in many a function throughout 

 the civilized as well as the barbaric world. 



The coast lands of Ceylon nearest to the oyster paars is for the 

 most part very sparsely inhabited, and, like the opposite coasts of 

 Southern India, consists chiefly of rolling sand plains, with here 

 and there a little coarse grass or low sparse vegetation or even 

 occasional scrubby jungle. For some mysterious and hitherto 

 unexplained reason this harvest of the sea has always been an 

 uncertain one, apt suddenly, and at any stage in its growth, 

 to disappear ; and often it is many years before it re-appears. 

 At most times of the year, and sometimes for years together 

 when the oyster crop is known to have failed, the adjacent shore 

 is a desert in which a human being is rarely to be seen. But 

 nowadays, and throughout the past century, as each November 

 comes round, an official from Colombo visits the paars, takes up a 

 certain number of oysters from each, washes out the pearls, sub- 

 mits these and the facts connected with them to experts, and 

 the Ceylon Government thus decides whether or not there shall 

 be a fishery in the following March and April. 



