The pearls of others

By Roxani Margariti.

There was much rejoicing last November in Atlanta, the great city of the new American South.  The Atlanta Braves won the Super Bowl!!  I must admit that I know shamefully little about this favorite American sport, but in the midst of the celebrations and related commentary I was thrilled to learn about Joc Pedersen.  In addition to his skills as an outfielder, Joc stands out because he wears his team’s jersey with a…brilliant string of pearls! 

Joc’s pearls puzzled, intrigued and delighted the fans.  For me, it was as if the universe had given me a little gift ahead of a seminar I taught this past spring on the history of global commodities of the Middle East and South Asia entitled “From Pearls to Petroleum.” Seeing the classic pearl necklace on Pedersen’s jersey, I was reminded of another, worn by the Mughal emperor Akbar, and I started my class with this question: what does Joc Pedersen have in common with Akbar, who lived in India between 1542 and 1605?

During the semester, we found a lot to say about the cross-cultural and diachronic valuation of pearls and other gems as well as their shifting symbolisms across space and time.  So much, in fact, that it cannot fit in a single post!  There’s little doubt that the great medieval savant Abu’l-Rayhan al-Biruni (died ca. 1053) was right: the appeal of pearls is recognized by all nations of the world! 

Here, we’ll focus geographically on the western half of the Indian Ocean (with a short detour in the Pacific) and thematically on the history of the people who supplied pearls to global markets and without whom the beautiful gems would have remained underwater.  We will glimpse the anonymous sailors and divers who harvested pearls from the warm and shallow but dangerous waters of the Southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Mannar from antiquity to the first decades of the 20th century.

The fetishism of pearls

Before sailing with the pearl fishers, let’s devote some time to that which makes pearls so universally desirable.  Everything that shines is not gold, but luster is clearly a diachronic value. 

The luster of pearls results from the biology of the pearl oyster and the process of their formation.  In the southern seas of the Eastern Hemisphere, two genuses of bivalves are pearl-giving:

The genus Pinctada, which includes the characteristic species Pinctada Margaritifera

And the genus Pteria, which stands out with the wing-like shape of the shells.

The various species of pearl-bearing marine shells were collected not only for their pearls but also for “mother-of-pearl”, the lustrous interior walls of shells (in Arabic the word ṣadaf, صدف designates both for the oyster and its shiny surface, the mother-of-pearl). Mother-of-pearl has been used to make jewels, buttons, combs, handles, even whole table sets, and as inlay or veneer in furniture, boxes, and other objects.

Both pearls and mother-of-pearl are formed by the same biological process called biomineralization. The process is common not only to pearl-bearing oysters but also other mollusks. The mantle (a covering of the vital organs) of these animals secretes a calcium carbonate compound, also known as nacre, in crystalline platelets. Several layers of these form the mollusk’s protective shell, including the lustrous interior surface. When a grain of sand or microorganism enters the shell and irritates the mantle the same secretion settles on the irritated spot, covering it in spherical layers and eventually forming a pearl. In other words, pearls are the outcome of a pathogenic process, just like ambergris as we discussed in a previous post! The process is vividly recreated in this segment of a National Geographic documentary about the famous black pearls of the South Pacific (Pinctada maxima).

Every pearl is unique, differing from its siblings in shape, luster, hue, size and smoothness. The Romans called pearls uniones, obviously referring to their uniqueness, while one of the most famous pearls of the medieval Islamicate world was called al-yatīma, the orphan, signalling its incomparable nature. Some are small and very common, others large and impressive. The mystery of their formation preoccupied the maritime folk of the southern seas early on. One theory among many prevailed in the Mediterranean and western Indian Ocean. It is attested already in Roman times, and is later related in Arabic by the savants of the Islamicate world: that the pearl is the child of the oyster, born of the marine animal’s impregnation by a drop of fresh water. In one version of this explanation, oysters swim to the surface of the water, there to be fertilized by drew or rain drops that have captured the light of the moon; it is that light that gives the pearl its luster.

As unique objects and as products of a hitherto mysterious and fascinating natural process, pearls became commodities and were transformed for their owners into what Karl Marx might have called fetishes. For Marx, the fetishism of commodities means that by acquiring a market price, that is an abstract value, commercial goods hide the labor that went into their making and the social relationships pertaining to that labor. How many owners of beautiful pearls think of the toil and dangers that the divers experienced to procure them, rather than the exchange and symbolic value of the precious object?

Pearls certainly symbolize a variety of values, often unique to the cultures of their users. A suggestive example of the identification of pearls with wealth and its ostentatious display is the fact that in the 1st century CE, Pliny devotes a chapter of his Natural History to this very topic. The story that stands out is Pliny’s account of the fate of two famous pearls, the largest in the world, owned by the Egyptian queen Cleopatra and inherited by her from “the kings of the East.” According to our not-so-objective reporter, Cleopatra wagered with Mark Anthony that she was capable of spending ten million sestertii on a single feast. She then had one of her famous earrings dissolved in vinegar and drinking this outrageous cocktail proved to her lover her consuming power!

Yet beyond luxury, pearls were also capable of symbolizing more ethereal values and even sanctity. Thus, while continuing to be used on a large scale in stunning jewelry, pearls in Christian contexts also denoted purity, wisdom, the light of religion and even Christ.

Two views of a dazzling pair of Byzantine bracelets (6-8th century) with resplendent pearls.  New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17.190.1670, 1671.

Pearlfishers through the eyes of others

As with other global commodities, the economic and social life of pearls entails a geographical and cultural binary. Historically and traditionally, producers and consumers of pearls lived in different geographical and ecological zones and their relationship to pearl oysters and their products expressed differently. As in many other cases of the history of labor, the direct evidence from pearlfishing communities is fragmentary. The voice of the producers comes to us indirectly, mostly refracted through the accounts of others. Archaeology comes to fill in the picture and provide vivid glimpses in some cases. One of the few examples for the use of mother-of-pearl by fishermen are the fishing hooks made across Polynesia by those intrepid maritime people from 1200 onward.

Hooks made of mother-of-pearl like the middle one pictured above from the Bishop Museum, Hawaii, were found in the lowest layers of the site of Pu’u Ali’i (the Hill of Chiefs) in Hawaii. This site represents the earliest settlement in the archipelago and served as a fishing settlement par excellence. The other two examples pictured are also from Polynesia, now at the British Museum: Oc1944,02.26 and Oc,VAN.377.a-b

Fortunately, the intensification of exchange networks that brought pearls to a variety of consumers in the medieval period coincided with the flourishing of letters and sciences in the Islamicate world, and many authors (travelers, cosmographers, chroniclers, and encyclopaedists) convey, mostly in Arabic, knowledge about the wonders of the sea and even about the ways local populations supplied them. The polymath Abu’l-Rayhan al-Biruni, for example, provides a well-known chapter on pearls and pearl-fishing in his book on gems; and his and other testimonies on the maritime labor involved can be compared to later ethnographic data as shown in archaeologist Robert Carter’s extensive study about the long history of pearl fishing in the Persian/Arabian Gulf.

In later, colonial, times, in spite of continued interest in pearls and the exploitation of pearl banks, the life of pearl fishers is romanticized and exoticized. We see this in the sublime music but weak scenario of Georges Bizet’s opera Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers).

The plot takes place in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). An island and “a small continent,” Ceylon produced pearls already in the period of Indo-Roman trade in the turn of the eras and was the most likely source for the pearls on Akbar’s necklace. Later, at the time when Akbar’s libretto was written, the pearl banks of the gulf of Mannar were being heavily taxed. Pearls became one more object of British colonial exploitation and a mode of domination over local societies.

The opera focuses on the friendship between two pearl fishers, Zurga and Nadir, and their dangerous love for Leila, the priestess of Brahma.

The priestess guaranteed the safety and success of men at sea, but for her prayers to be answered she had to remain pure. Leila, however, fell in love with Nadir. The mutual affection thus threatened not only the friendship of the two men but also the well-being of the entire community. Opera lovers do not seem to have cared that the majority of the population of Sri Lanka was Buddhist or that the worship of Brahma did not work in the way conveyed by the plot. In spite of colonial contact with and knowledge of Sri Lanka, The Pearl Fishers remained an orientalist fantasy and had little to do with the lives of actual fishermen at the time.

The relationship between pearl producers and consumers but also the prejudices of the latter is characteristically conveyed in a textbook about mollusks published by none other than Edgar Allan Poe in 1838. It is a product of the same period as Bizet’s Opera. The naturalists’ new scientific knowledge was being popularized, while at the same time colonialism spread accompanied by an insatiable quest for the appropriation of the global south’s maritime wealth.

“Testaceous animals form the principal subsistence of an immense number of savage nations, inhabitants of the seaboard. On the coast of Western Africa, of Chilli, of New Holland, and in the clustered and populous islands of the southern Seas, how vast an item is the apparently unimportant shell-fish in the wealth and happiness of man!  In more civilized countries, it often supplies the table with a delicate luxury.  Nor must we forget the services of the pinna with its web, nor of the purpura with its brilliant and once valuable dye nor omit to speak of the pearl-oyster, with the radiant nacre and the gem which it produces, and the world of industry which it sets in action as minister to the luxury that it stimulates.”

Edgar Allan Poe, The Conchologist’s First Book.

The actual toil and hard lives of pearl divers emerges vividly from the pages devoted to them by Australian author Alan Villiers. An intrepid seafarer, photographer, and keen observer of the last ships of the Age of Sail, Villiers testified to the twilight of the pearling industry in the Gulf and wrote about it in his sailing chronicle The Sons of Sindbad (1940), later also published in Arabic

In 1938, Villiers traveled with a Kuwaiti ship from South Arabia to the East African coast all the way to Mozambique and stayed on board for the ship’s return voyage to the Gulf. Once the sailing season was over, the pearling season began and some of his shipmates would find employment in that industry. Maritime labor followed the seasonality of the monsoons and pearling provided a necessary supplementary income to poor and often heavily indebted seamen.

Villiers, who observed pearl diving first hand, describes how sailors and divers worked incessantly to pay their debts. He also describes the harsh conditions on board, the dangers and privations, as well as cases of sickness and even death. To him, given the conditions he witnessed, the end of the pearling was not to be lamented.

Today, the economy of the Gulf has left pearling behind in most senses. The First World War, the subsequent financial crisis, changing tastes, and of course the development of the cultured pearl industry thanks to the technique first popularized by Kokichi Mikimoto brought an end to traditional pearling cultures around the globe.

In that same period, the discovery of petroleum in the region began to transform Arabian economies, some of which went literally “from pearls to petroleum.” Pearling remained as an important element of the Gulf states’ cultural heritage, signaling on the one hand a period of national beginnings and the relationship between the nation and the sea, and on the other, the hardships of the pre-petroleum past.

In closing, I would like to make a quick nod to the gendered aspect of pearl fishing. We have little evidence regarding women’s participation in any aspect of the production of pearls in the Western Indian Ocean. In the comparative study of global fishing cultures, however, it is worth bearing in mind that one of the most famous examples of direct involvement of women in fishing activities is that of the Japanese female divers, the ama, that Dimitra described in her post comparing the fisheries of abalone and Minoan seashells. Diving for pearls, these women attracted, inadvertently, the imagination and fantasies of artists, writers and others. A closer glimpse of their world, however, reveals the hard work and continued connection to tradition and the sea that sustains them to this day.

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