Pearl-Diving

A Vanished Industry In French Oceania

From Our Own Correspondent

Papeete, Oct. 18.

TN the days when public taste favoured " pearl-handed knives, pearl-backed hair brushes, pearl-inlaid pistols, pearl-veneer ed boxes, and long rows of pearl-buttons on clothing of every description, the lagoons of the Tuamotu atolls in French Oceania were golcondas of wealth.

The diving season opened in July and continued until December. At only one island was diving permitted in any par ticular year. The Government rigidly conserved the fishing grounds, opening each island lagoon in rotation, from sea son to season, thereby giving the others time for recovery. No diving machines were allowed —the whole procedure of winning the shell was in the hands of native divers. All shell was the property of the diver who won it, as were any pearls discovered in the pearl oysters.

Before the diving season a pearl island was a lonely ring of coral sand inhabited by, perhaps, 100 or 200 natives. When the season actually opened, a city sprang up. Merchants from Papeete established warehouses filled with every sort of mer

chandise that appeals to native fancy; pearl-buyers from Europe were at hand to chaffer for any gems of value; there was a cinema theatre there; and most im portant of all, were the divers, gathered from every island in the Tuamotus.

With them were their wives, their chil dren, their sisters, their cousins, and their aunts!

The coming and going of many schoon ers gave to the lagoon the appearance of a metropolitan harbour.

As diving proceeded very little actual money ever saw the light. The universal currency was pearl-shell: so many mother-of-pearl shells for a meter of dress goods, a tin of salmon, a pair of gold earrings or an admission to the picture show. The wives, sisters, cousins, and aunts of a good diver lived sumptu ously and dressed like peacocks. Purple and fine linen were beneath their dignity as social leaders. Silk was the only weave worthy of their patrician eminence, and they had to display a new confection every day to maintain their position.

The end of the season usually found even the most successful diver in debt to the company to which he had engaged himself. This pleased the latter since it bound him to its service for the next diving year. The companies gathered a bounteous harvest. They had received excessively high prices for their merchan dise disposed of at the island and they had the shell to bring them another per centage of gain in its marketing.

All this is in the past tense. The vagar ies of fashion, the invention of bakelite and many new plastic materials which can be made into buttons and com pounded to imitate everything under the sun, have brought to an end the useful ness of mother-of-pearl shell. There has been a revival in the markets for other products of the Islands, but the lagoons of the pearl atolls lie silent, awaiting a new day which may never come.