7©4 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [April 2, 1888. 
unpiecc dented gem was, as often happens, un ware of its 
value and sold it for 100 dol. Tbe purchaser considered 
himself fortunate when he was offered 2,000 dol. for it 
by four gentlemen in Perth. They sent the curiosity 
to England and had it mounted and exhibited in 
the recent Colonial and Indian Exhibiiion in London, 
where it attracted a great deal of notice and was of- 
fered for sale at the advanced price of 50,000 dol. 
Whether a purchaser has yet been found for it is not 
known. The exhibitors hoped that His Holiness the 
Pope might consider it his duty to become the possessor 
of so marvellous a natural production of the Holy Tree; 
and perhaps some pious devotee may before now have 
purchased it for a jubilee offering to the Pontiff. 
Curious enough, the largest single pearl on record has 
recently changed hands on the death of its late pro- 
prietor, Beresford Hope, an English member of Parlia- 
ment. This gem, which, till the discovery of the South- 
ern Cross, was the most valuable pearl known, weighs 
no less than 30 oz., is 2 in. long and 1 J in. in diameter. 
Pearls are not as valuable in modern day as they used 
to be in ancient times. There is a pretty story told in 
the Talmud which illustrates the fact that in the very 
earliest days they were considered the most precious of 
all gems. This is not, however, to be wondered at, 
when it is remembered that all the gems which in 
modern times have eclipsed the pearl owe a great 
part of their beauty to the skill with which they are 
cut and polished, while the beauty of a pearl is purely 
natural. 
Pearl fishing has been going on during the last few years 
all around the north coast, off Port Darwin, in Torres 
Straits,and off the coast of North Queensland generally, 
but just lately the fisheries off the western coast have 
been coming into the highest favour, and boats have 
been arriving there from the other parts of Australia 
and from Singapore. Mr. Streeter, the famous 
jeweller, of Bond-street and Cornhill, in London, 
has himself had a boat there for the last year or 
two, and only towards the end of last year or the 
beginning of this lost one of his sons, who was en- 
gaged in the pursuit of pearls. 
These new comers have introduced the use of the 
diving dress, in which whits men descend to collect 
the shells, but a large part of the fisl ing is still 
carried on by Australian natives, who arevery good 
at diving, and can stay under water for a leng time. 
Most of the boats which boast a diving dress are 
strong lugger-rigged craft of seven or eight tons 
burden, built for the most part in Sydney. They are 
generally manned by seven men, one of whom com- 
bines the functions of skipper and diver. He goes 
down to the bottom, and one of the crew keeps hold 
of the single rope. 
Oys'ers are not such stationary creatures as might 
be supposed, and the divers say that they remain de- 
tached from the bottom and allow the tides to drift 
them about constantly. Thus the different patches 
of shells are always shifting. 
For deep sea fishing, of course, the diving dress is a 
very great advantage, but the price of the outfit is con- 
siderable, and on the shallower banks at any rate the 
native s do very well. These of course wear no sort of 
clothes, but dive to the bottom, carrying with them 
a sack or basket in which to collect the shells. They 
can stay down for a full minute and sometimes longer, 
and they occupy their time in busily loading the 
receptacle they have brought down with shells. 
In this they make a good deal of use of their toes, 
with which they can pick things up with marvellous 
dexterity. Their great toes can be moved out from 
their feet as easily as a white man's thumb from his 
hand, and this is the way in which they habitually 
pick up any small object off the ground, thus s^ing 
themselves the trouble of stooping. 
The life is a very trying one, owing to the great 
pressure of the water at the depths to which they 
have to descend. Sharks also introduce a formid- 
aMi! element of risk, aud a pearl diver's life is 
rarely, if ever, a long one. The poor fellows get 
so little for it, too, that one cannot but pity them. 
On the coasts of Iudia tbe dive? gets one-fourth 
of the produce of his labour, * but not so the poor 
West Australian though for tbe matter of that be 
would be no scrap the better off if he did but 
rather the worse for having no idea beyond the beast 
f the field what to do with money, he would assu- 
redly spend it all either in drink or in clothes, both of 
which would be most injurious to him. 
The export of pearl shells from Wettern Australia 
during the year 1885 was valued at over 217,000 dols., 
and the pearls for the same year were worth about 
75,000 dols. Probably the take last year was consider- 
ably larger, but this year it will be very small indeed, for 
last April, just at the end of the fishing season, a most 
terrible catastrophe overtook the whole fleet or boats 
which was fishing off the coast in the neighbourhood of 
Eoebourne and Cossack. 
A hurricane of the very violent and local type known 
as " cock-eyed Bob," or by the native name of " Willy 
Willy," dispersed the fleet, and sank nearly all the 
boats. Some six and twenty boats, most of them 
luggers, and laden with shells, were lost, and a consider- 
able number of white men, with as many as 140 native 
Australians, were drowned. 
The business of getting the pearls out of the oysters 
is an* tolerably disagreeable one. The oysters are 
thrown into large vessels, and left to die when the 
shells open of their own accord. The shells are then 
removed, but the oysters themselves are left in buckets 
till they become decomposed, when they are well 
stirred. The pearls sink to the bottom, and the re- 
mainder is poured off. It may be readily inferred that 
the odour in the camp of pearl-seekers is more power- 
ful then pleasant. The innumerable flies, sandflies, and 
mosquitoes that swarm around do not tend to make 
the neighbourhood more soothing to the feelings. 
If the end of the pearl's connection with the oyster 
is offensive to our nostrils, the beginning of it is sup- 
posed to be not less offensive to the excellent bivalve 
itself. The pearl has its origin in the efforts of the 
oyster to protect itself from the irritation caused by 
the presence of some foreign body between the shell 
and its mantle, as the soft skin of tbe oyster is techni- 
cally termed. The foreign matter may perhaps in 
some instances be a grain of sand, but is believed to 
be more often either a parasite of some kind, or per- 
haps an egg belonging to the oyster herself. To 
mitigate the suffering caused by this vexatious intruder, 
the oyster deposits thereon a coating of the same 
material as that of which the shell is composed, and, 
when once this process has begun, it continues, till the 
time the pearl grows large enough to kill the oyster. 
If this occurs the shells open of their own accord, and 
the pearl is lost to man. This danger, and others that 
attend the lives of oysters, even in their deep sea home, 
makes it inadvisable to leave the banks too long un- 
fished, though, of course, so long as the oysters continue 
to live, the older they are the larger the pearls they 
contain. It is thus still a matter of doubt at what age 
it is most advisable that oysters should be fished for, 
but the general opinion seems to be that they are at 
their best, on the average, when four years old.t 
If the pearl is buried in the soft substance of the 
oyster it is round or pear-shaped generally, and is 
called a pearl, or, if very small, a "seed pearl." If, on 
the other band, one side of the pearl is a ihering t o the 
shell, while the other is round, it is ca'led a "button 
pearl." Sometimes a boring parasite makes its way 
through the shell, but before it gets quite through the 
oyster feels the irritation and pressure which it causes, 
and deposits a layer of pearly matter on the shell itself. 
This is called a pearl blister. These are often found of 
curious shapes, but they are not of great value, except 
as curiosities. 
The formation of pearls is thus in point of fact 
common-place enough, suggesting even to the prosaic 
* In Ceylon the proportion has been one-third for 
sum years back. — Ed. T.A. 
f The belief is that full maturity is attained in the 
seventh year, but oysters so frequently die off, or are 
swept off by currents bsfore attaining this age, that 
it is deemed advisable not to delay fishing beyond the 
fourth year.— EP. T. A. 
