Gem Trader

By Louis Kornitzer
Sheridan House, New York
1939

Louis Kornitzer writes:

I inherit the world of gems.

Many years ago, when I was walking in Northumberland, I came across an old fellow on the banks of the Coquet who was busy making artificial flies. He looked the sort of oddity who is worth a good story or two for the trouble of drawing him out, so without any formal preliminaries beyond that of praising the blueness of the sky and the wetness of the water at our feet I squatted on my heels beside him.

For a long while I had to be content with watching in silence while the taciturn old man continued with his work. But after I had thought to make him free of my tobacco pouch he talked freely as one brother of the weed to another. From youth up it appeared that he had been making flies for the gentry in those parts and for the trade. He was an expert, and no wonder, for he had learned his craft from his father, who had been taught by his father and so back into the mists of time. Not only that, but this singular occupation, which my casual riverside acquaintance had followed all his life, had also been the calling of nearly every member of his family for several generations. One of his brothers, he told me, had gone out to British Colombia, and another to New Zealand, while a third had not gone but had emigrated to Ireland; and all of them, not to mention numerous cousins, second cousins and nephews, were engaged in the fishing fly and tackle business.

While I first thought of writing this book I cast my mind back to that chance meeting on the bank of the Coquet and thought that I and this old chap were in much the same case in the way we had inherited our occupations. He had inherited artificial fly making. I for my part had inherited gem dealing. I had, in other words, inherited the prescriptive right to risk all I had on the dubious chance of earning a living from a somewhat fickle trade.

My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was a pearl merchant, and my grandfather, his son, and at least one of his brothers, one resident in Vienna and the other in London, followed in their father’s footsteps, and my mother herself, first was a wife of man more student than business man and then as a widow, brought up a family of eight children on what she made as a shrewd dealer in gems.

My uncle who stayed in Vienna had no sons by any of the three wives who had sweetened his days, so he adopted a boy when he was nearing seventy and trained him in his ways to make a pearl man of him before the breed die out and leave humanity with no one to supply it with expert knowledge about gems. For he took the métier of our family seriously and thought that the gem world depended upon us.

My London uncle was more fortunate in his progeny, for he had two sons, one of whom was to become one of the world’s leading exponents of pearlcraft, while the other went to the New World, then sadly deficient in pearl experts, and there thrived for several decades to the benefit of his adopted country as much as to himself.

Not-after-all this—that the daughters of the breed were negligible when it came to carrying on the tradition. My mother was not an exception. She had four or five sisters who married husbands and taught them what had been so well learned in the paternal home, making pearl merchants of them. And so, through sons and daughters alike, the family trade passed down through the generations.

If pearls were the main theme of my family’s existence, still there were various cousins and second cousins of mine who varied it by taking to diamonds and the lesser gems, the reason presumably being that the known pearl fisheries did not yield a sufficient supply of gems to provide a livelihood for all my numerous connections. This was before the discovery of the Australian pearl beds, in the development of which, as I have written elsewhere, I played my part.

Of my own generation, in my own immediate family, all the five sons went into the family game and all the three daughters married into the trade. From my earliest days I have lived and breathed in the atmosphere of gems. And if I have sometimes strayed to other ways of making a few pounds here and there as a general merchant, yet I have to thank pearls and precious stones, and other stones not so precious, for my very existence. If am not like the cheese-mite in the Gorgonzola, all cheese, at least my interest are almost as exclusive and for the same reason. The cheese-mite and I were both born in the business.

A rough count for the purposes of this survey has revealed, to my astonishment, that no fewer than forty seven members of my family, more or less closely related, have thought the gem business good enough for them. Nor have their activities been confined to one country or even one continent. In the fullest sense of the word they have looked upon the world s their oyster. Poland, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Australia, Spain, Belgium, England, USA, Venezuela, Panama, the Philippine Islands, South Africa, China, Japan, Turkey, Brazil, Colombia, Malaya are some of the countries whither the feet of my far flung kin have stayed. Truly, like the British Empire, the sun never sets on them! They also inhabit the older centers of the gem trade where from time immemorial men have dealt in precious stones and in pearls. The Habibs and the Rosenthals of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf, and the Menasses of the Levant and Salonika and of India, are also connections of mine, and these are names which men know honorably wherever gems are the merchandise.

Success in a material sense may not have come to all these relatives of mine. But they fought their battles in a tough trade bravely enough and there is success in that. Some of them were pioneers. I think, for instance, of an uncle who went out to South Africa, lured by the early tales of great discoveries of diamonds in the Cape. I believe that with him discretion was not the better part and that he paid dearly for transgressing against the strict laws relating to I.D.B. He had left behind in Europe the wife of his bosom and did not return to her for thirty years. She could have presumed his death and remarried, but this she steadfastly refused to do. There were many who admired her faithfulness, and at last this was rewarded. Her errant spouse returned to her. Then at last was her tongue unloosed. As an eyewitness later told me, she gave him such a complete dressing down that fled back whence he had come and never saw his Griselda again, no doubt preferring his final fate as a Rhodesian lion’s dinner.

Other pioneers were a cousin of mine whose intrepidity helped to make known in the eighties of last century the pleasing if not first rate pearls of California, and two other cousins who braved fevers and discomforts galore when Panama was still an unhealthy spot. For one succumbed to Yellow Jack on the Isthmus and the other paid with lifelong ill health for such competency as he had acquired from dealing in the pearls of that region.

One of my mother’s cousins was amongst the fist in recent years to carry on a lively trade in Venezuela pearls. Later on he pioneered in North Western Australia among the pearl fishing centers south of Java Head, several years before I myself went to that unhealthy coast. I met his widow once after his death, and in a burst of confidence she told me of a spot far up the Amazon where her husband had adventured once upon a time and found some huge priceless pearls, only to have them stolen from under his pillow by of the ship owner’s crew as he journeyed down to Para. She had intended to keep the secret of where these huge pearls were to be obtained for her eldest son, but as he wisely preferred the quiet life of a diamond merchant in Madrid to that of a pearl pioneer in the wilderness of Brazil, she handed on the chance of a fortune to me. But somehow adventure has always kept me busy elsewhere!

Pioneering does not pay. I mean it does not pay the pioneer. And those of my family who have fared best have been the bread and butter men who did not listen to the Lorelei-song of distant lands, but stayed in the great gem trading centers of London, Paris and New York. Nevertheless, I have never, for my part, regretted that I have dangerously and not spent my time accumulating a mountain of gold. Nor, I suppose, do those who live and die exploring the far corners of the world really regret having thus lived and thus died.

To my mind there is nothing like the quest for gems at their source, which will throw a man into the whirlpool of adventure and—if he has eyes to see it—into the arms of romance itself. Adventure and romance usually prove to be uncommonly uncomfortable at first hand, but they are the stuff of memory, and memories studded with gems, memories literally bejeweled, are to me memories worth having indeed. More to the point as far as my readers are concerned, they are memories worth sharing.