The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [210]
Of all preciosities, pearls are most purely maritime. They are completely aquatic, and entirely natural. Unlike precious stones, their shape is not affected by humans, though in recent years people have helped nature to produce pearls: nevertheless, the shape and colour are beyond human intervention. As such, a brief description is in order. The decline in the traditional pearling industry is hardly a cause for lamentation, for it was brutal and dangerous. This trade had boomed in the Gulf in the nineteenth century. Exports rose from about £100,000 a year at the beginning of the century, to £300,000 in the 1830s, £700,000 in the 1870s, and over £1 million around 1900. At this time the Gulf produced half of the pearls in the world.62 These profits were produced with a very heavy human cost. Off Bahrain all the divers were indebted to the merchants who controlled the trade, and so had no choice but to continue diving. Worse still, their debts were inherited by their sons, who as a result were also forced into the debilitating and dangerous activity. The trade declined catastrophically in the 1930s, partly as demand for this luxury product fell during the depression, partly as the Amir of Bahrain implemented reforms, but mostly thanks to competition from Japanese cultured pearls.63 In the season for pearling, June to October, in 1939 Alan Villiers found only 150 craft venturing out from the other main centre in the Gulf, Kuwait, when forty years before there would have been at least 600. The price of 'real' pearls had fallen to one-tenth of what it had been, but he could not regret this decline, because for the divers the activity 'was accompanied by hardships almost intolerable, by risk to health and life and limb, and its rewards were scanty, often distributed most unfairly, and sometimes withheld from their rightful owners altogether.' Divers, using only a nose peg, were required to dive to a depth of 60 and 70 feet over 100 times a day, staying under for about a minute. By this time many of the former divers had been able to escape and work for the oil companies instead.64
The decline occurred also in the Gulf of Mannar, the other traditional pearling region. Developments around Broome, in Western Australia, over the last century or so are worth a brief description, as they provide a useful case study of change and adaptation. In 1861 the pinctada maxima oyster was discovered in Roebuck Bay. These are the largest oysters known, with the shells reaching a diameter of up to 12 inches. Aborigines had been diving for pearls, and the mother of pearl shells, for many years, selling them long before the white invasion to traders, often Chinese from Makassar. From the 1860s Europeans entered this trade, using coerced Aboriginal divers. Women were preferred. In Nickol Bay six or eight of them would go out in a dinghy with a white man in charge. They had no aids at all – no goggles, no stones – and went down only to a depth of about 10 metres. Mortality was very high. In the 1890s copper helmets and canvas suits began to be used, and an influx of divers from Japan and the Malay area produced a boom in the 1880s and through to World War I. Some 400 luggers were based in Roebuck Bay. In the off season 3,000 divers congregated in Broome. This was still a very dangerous trade, as witnessed by 900 Japanese graves in Broome's Japanese cemetery. Great risks were taken, and many divers died when their lugger was caught in a cyclone. In 1936 twenty luggers and 142 men were lost in a huge cyclone. Even more