I Go A – Pearling

Louis Kornitzer's book, Gem Trader, is partly autobiographical and partly woven round the lore of pearls. It's educational + explains the distribution chain of gems, as they pass from hand to hand, from miner to cutter, from merchant to millionaire, from courtesan to receiver of stolen goods, shaping human lives as they go + the unique characters in the gem industry.

(via Gem Trader) Louis Kornitzer writes:

Now, I have already written two books about pearls and the men who live on the rare fruits of the oyster. And yet no book of gems, and certainly no book of mine, should leave out all mention of the pearl. Luckily for me, pearl-lore would fill half a dozen books and not then be exhausted, so I need not repeat myself.

It was a humble young dealer in Hatton Garden that the urge to adventure came to me, that strong, compelling urge like a kick in the pants, which is produced by the fact that one’s family is hungry and growing. I had a chance to go pearl-hunting in the tough pearling grounds in North-Western Australia, and I took it. From Australia the chase for pearls led me in half a lifetime all around the world, but I was a stone that rolled slowly enough to gather a minute quantity of moss. At any rate, I have never regretted it. One looks back with a strange satisfaction on the lonely and risky periods of one’s life.

As I was the first white trader ever to penetrate into the pearl fisheries of the Sulu Seas, I still have a proprietary feeling about that part of the world. An irrational feeling, for after all, the Chinese, the Arabs and the Japanese had discovered Jolo—as it was then called—long before I had ever heard of that interesting neighbor of Borneo. The crews of pearling luggers are usually mixed crews from half the colored races of the world; and whatever the rest may be, black men, Arabs, Indians, Malayans, Chinese, half-castes, the divers are pretty sure to be sons of Nippon.

Like Ohtami, a diver I knew, these men are from the hardy fisher stock of Northern Japan, which wrests a miserable existence from the storm-ridden Pacific. The diver’s job, better paid, is no less precarious. Ohtami, for instance, stepped into the lead-weighted boots of his predecessor, who had been swimming off the beach and had met a shark. The Idmu was two day’s sail from port at the time, and as there was nothing left of Toyo to commit to the deep, the only formality that remained was to choose a new diver. The choice fell on Ohtami, which meant he was to work in alternate shifts with principal diver at a rate of pay plus cumsha (rake-off) better than anything he had ever seen before.

Ohtami looked as though he had been cut with a clasp-knife out of a block of wood. He was short and very thick, with enormous lung development and extraordinarily long and mobile arms. With the assistance of his tender, who would look after the air pump and the end of his lifeline while he was below, he got into the thick woollens that the diver wears beneath his rubber cuirass, into the felt front-piece and back and shoulder pads, into the suit itself. The boss ran an eye over him. The things fitted. Ohtami took them off again, and squatted to chow with the others, for it was sundown.

Each man helped himself from a bowl full of rice, broke the rice paper seal around a pair of chopsticks, rinsed his mouth with tepid water and spewed a libation to the jealous demons of the deep. Around them on platters stood the delicacies of their diet, boiled purple seaweed, cubes of pickled cabbage, chopped onions, pearl oyster mince. Sea and air were still. A thin blue haze hung over the water. The fifteen-ton lugger, under bare poles, drifted quietly round its stern anchor chain. The men were silent, for the death of their shipmate had depressed them. Who could say what Ohtami felt? Toyo had come from the same storm-swept village and they had been friends.

In those latitudes there is no sunset, and the sun plunges into the sea. At the precise moment of its departing Ohtami thought he saw something. He thought he saw a great arm sticking up out of the sea, pointing with one finger at a couple of islands not more than a mile away. Ohtami was greatly excited, but no one else would believe he had seen anything, and they laughed all the more because they were so relived to have something to laugh about that night. Ohtami relapsed into sullen silence.

The next day he went down to the seabed after the shell. But it was an unlucky trial trip, for he found nothing. When the number one diver went down he had no better fortune, and so it went on the whole day. It was a prospecting trip after new grounds, and the pearling master was glum. He made up his mind to hoist anchor and make for a place he knew that would give him at least his three or four piculs of shell night and morning. Then Ohtami, whose voice was hardly ever heard, opened his mouth—and close it again.

I Go A – Pearling (continued)