Remote Australian Settlement Is No Backwater When It Comes to Pearls

The real pearl of the Orient is a sunken treasure in the peacock waters off this dusty, tin-roofed, steaming, back-of-beyond seaport. It lies in the gut of Pinctada maxima , the pearl oyster.

Hundreds, maybe more, have died in quest of P. maxima .

Their epitaph is a South Seas saga scripted for dark alleys, nut-brown Malays, high tea with the ladies, pigtailed Chinese, God save the Empire, cold-eyed Sinhalese, starched white suits and parasols, Singapore Slings and barroom brawls, dinner clothes and diving helmets, cyclones and lazy ceiling fans, thick-waisted baobab trees and kangaroo bush, greed and bravery, seafaring Koepangers, swaggering Japanese and onlooking aborigines.

And money.

The latest chapter is being written by the Australians.

“We are taking over our own industry again,” says Jean Haynes, a Broome native whose father, “Unsinkable” Kennedy, once ran seven pearl luggers on the Indian Ocean grounds.

Matching the Japanese

They’ve done it by matching the Japanese, who dominated for a century, at their own game: diving for and culturing pearls.

A decade ago, the Aussies brought over some scuba-equipped abalone divers from New South Wales. After a few missteps, they began outperforming the Japanese helmet divers.

And the Aussies are mastering the technique of seeding oysters, a monopoly the Japanese guarded as closely as the emperor’s throne.

“If you come near a Japanese pearl culturer, he’ll drop his tools and get very irate,” says Steve Arrow, a 26-year-old pearl farmer. “If you keep standing there, he’ll walk away.”

But Arrow’s wife, among other Aussies, has solved the secret.

Lords of Ocean Bottom

For 100 years the Japanese divers were the lords of the ocean bottom, with the courage and persistence to risk the bends or death 250 feet down, eight hours a day. They were the best, and their strut showed it.

Ironically, their copper-helmeted diving suit was the invention of an Englishman. In 1820, John Deane, of Whitstable, grabbed a helmet from a suit of armor at a nearby manor house, told someone to pump air instead of water from a hose into it and dashed into a burning stable to save the horses.

Hardly had the smoke cleared than he thought the idea might work under water. It did. Or did after Deane invented the lead shoe to keep from turning upside down.

Broome is an accident of nature, just as the pearl is. If it is not at the end of the Earth, you can see it from here. The nearest city is Koepang, 350 miles across the sea in Timor, Indonesia. Its remoteness has bequeathed it a heritage of both raffish mining camp and imperial propriety.

The Bad Old Days

Fighting was “in the true English fashion”--no eye gouging. One fight lasted three days. Bowling pins were champagne bottles.

In the bad old days, by one account, the Broome clergy “forgot (that) references to Sodom and Gomorrah were regarded as appropriate tributes to civic progress rather than as warnings of future divine retribution.”

Broome may be the smallest town on Earth--6,500 residents at the moment--with its own Chinatown.

“We have just about every race here,” Haynes says. “Someone asked my father once ‘How about an Eskimo?’ He looked around, and sure enough he found a half-Eskimo. If he’d looked harder, he’d probably have turned up a full-blooded one.”

They were--and are--here because the pearl oyster is.

P. maxima is a tropical bivalve that lives on the bottom of the vast continental shelf off the northwest coast of Australia, the world’s largest oyster bed. It grows to the size of a salad plate as it dines on plankton passing in the current.

Coats Irritant

When storms or tides sweep a speck of sand into its shell, it tries to vomit it out--and usually does. But if it can’t, it begins coating the irritant with nacre, and a pearl is born.

One oyster in a thousand or more will have a pearl. If there’s copper in the water, it will be yellowish. If there’s zinc, it will be, well, pearl colored.

P. maxima likes a flat, silty bottom. This makes it hard to see, as it is covered with marine growth like everything else. It burrows in the silt and can only be detected by a slight ridge of muck around its perimeter. Younger shells make the best mother of pearl. The older ones usually are scarred by worms.

The aborigines long knew about P. maxima . They used the shells for ornaments or ground them up in a rain-making ceremony.

Caesar brought pearls from freshwater mussels in Britain back to Rome. In the 13th Century, Ye Jin Yang cultured pearls in China by putting tiny carvings into oysters. Louis XIV of France wore a huge pearl in his crown.

Britain’s William Dampier noted the presence of P. maxima while exploring this coast in 1688. A lieutenant named Helpman out of Fremantle, down the coast, found a pearl in another species, Pinctada radiata , in 1858.

Crew Collects Shells

Three years later, Francis Gregory led an expedition to this area to search out good

pastureland. While waiting for him to return, the idle crew collected mother-of-pearl shells near the beach at low tide.

Not long after, a bloke named W. Tays sought to reverse his ill fortune and collected nine tons of shells, which he sold as mother of pearl for 1,350 pounds. The pearl rush was on.

You could buy a sailing lugger for 150 pounds and pay it off with your first ton of shells. If you found a pearl too, so much the better.

By 1875, there were 57 luggers licensed for pearling. The first divers were aborigines. They could stay down an average of 57 seconds. Unscrupulous whites put the bush people into virtual slavery.

Asiatic Crews

Gradually, Asiatics began crewing the luggers. They came cheap, could stand the cramped quarters, could subsist on fish and rice for the months a cruise lasted and, if they got “uppity,” could be deported as aliens.

A typical lugger had firewood piled on deck, hens roosting in the rigging and children of the divers running everywhere. In time, the white dealers ashore left the sailing to the Asians, the only European aboard being a pearl counter who put the gems down a one-way spout into a locked box.

By the 1880s, Deane’s diving suit was introduced, and the Japanese quickly showed an uncanny ability to find oysters. If they survived--in 1914 alone, 33 divers died from the bends--they could earn enough in a few years to live on for the rest of their lives.

The Japanese divers were the aristocracy of the waterfront, and they showed particular contempt for the dark-skinned Koepangers. The Filipinos hated the Malays. So the shrewd boat owners sailed with mixed crews, safe in the knowledge that the ethnic groups were too antagonistic toward each other to unite in a mutiny.

There was a three-day riot in 1920 after the Japanese punished a Koepang diver by dragging him astern of a lugger until he drowned.

White Man’s World Ashore

Ashore, it was a white man’s world. Aborigines were confined to quarters after 6 p.m. They couldn’t speak to a white unless spoken to. With the nearest civilization a week’s sail away, Broome developed an exotic life of its own.

T. B. Ellies was a Ceylonese pearl skinner who would serve nervous pearl owners drinks while he tried to peel away imperfections in pearls without ruining them.

No one could calculate how many of the pearls were “snide”--stolen. Perhaps the most famous was the Southern Cross, a priceless cross of seven pearls grown together that is now in the Vatican. There was the Star of the West, big as a sparrow’s egg. But the real crop was mother of pearl, from which buttons were drilled.

The Japanese divers had only one fear: the excruciating pain in the shoulders that heralded decompression sickness--the bends--which could kill or cripple for life.

A Perth newspaper wrote in the best tradition of the British Empire in 1913 that a European had “more pluck, endurance and energy far transcending any Asiatic, but he does not get shell.” By 1918, a decompression chamber, now a monument in the town park, dramatically cut the death toll from the bends, but many divers were nonetheless marred for life.

Wore Fresh Whites Daily

Back in town, the Europeans looked and acted like Ronald Colman in a film epic about the heyday of the British Empire. Despite the sweltering heat and constant red dust, they wore fresh whites daily. Some sent their clothes to Singapore to be laundered. A yuppie of the day might spend a third of his income on getting the red grit washed out of his whites.

It being Australia, Broome of course had a race track, and still does. Asians and aborigines could watch the horses but not from the white grandstand.

Below the elite life of the veranda lay the inevitable waterfront subculture, which was as murky as the depths the divers lived in. Bars stayed open until the last drinker went home or collapsed. Gin slings were free for early risers until 8 a.m.

World War II brought pearling to a halt. Housewives brought cakes down to the docks for the Japanese divers as they left for home and the enemy side of the war. They returned in 1942 when Japanese planes from occupied Timor shot up the town. By 1944, there were only 10 Europeans in Broome. Most of the luggers had been burned in a scorched waterfront policy.

Anti-Japanese Sentiment

Feeling ran high about the Japanese after the war, but by 1953 some of them were back and 42 luggers were pearling out of Broome. The Japanese, who had mastered the art of culturing pearls in their akoya oyster--which produces a smaller gem that takes twice as long to develop as with P. maxima --had begun pearling intensively around Thursday Island in the Torres Straits.

They had also begun farming in Breknock Harbor north of Derby. The oysters there are left on trays suspended in the water. So strong was the Japanese dominance that the bay was renamed Kuri Bay in honor of Tokuichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese pearl king.

The Japanese controlled the world pearl market just as the Debeers syndicate monopolizes the diamond trade. This even though Broome produces 60% to 70% of the world’s finest cultured pearls in a $40-million-a-year harvest.

Plastic buttons sunk the mother-of-pearl market in the 1960s, but Japanese helmet divers were still working to find oysters to move to Kuri Bay for seeding.

When Alan Badger, the Australian spearfishing champion, tried scuba diving in 1971, he admitted that the results were “pretty disastrous.” Hugh Edwards, in his fascinating book on Broome, “Port of Pearls,” said the Japanese skin-diving gear was “all right for play, no good for work.”

By the end of 1971, a trial Aussie boat had taken only 16% of the oyster haul of the Japanese. The next year, however, two Australian luggers took 10,000 shells in four days against only 5,000 for the hard-hat divers.

Helmet Divers Disappear

The Japanese got the picture, and the last helmet diver retired in 1975.

The Japanese still carry on their old traditional pearl culturing at Kuri Bay, but the Aussies have begun a new technique, raising seeded oysters in their natural environment, the seabed.

“We’ve gone from gathering MOP (mother of pearl) to harvesting young oysters, seeding them and putting them back in the ocean,” Arrow says.

Teams of skin divers hunt the bottom at the end of a sunken outrigger. “You might find 10 shells in half an hour,” he says.

The boats go out for eight to 10 days in the March-November season, when the tropical cyclones don’t blow. (A storm in 1935 killed 141 pearlers and sank more than two dozen luggers.)

Arrow says that about 60% of his oysters produce pearls. Mother of pearl has made a comeback for cutlery handles and inlays, and the muscle cut out of the oyster for implantation is sold in China for $60 a kilo. It is thought to be an aphrodisiac.

Looks Like Japan

“The Japanese do it the old way because they always have,” Arrow says. “They like Kuri Bay because it looks like Japan.

“But the major cost of pearling is transportation. If you don’t have to set up a farm in one of the remotest parts of the world, you save a lot of money. And I think one day we won’t have to rely on the . . . Japanese for expertise.”

Natural pearls still turn up and are prized by oil-rich Arabs. One of the biggest pearls ever found in these waters was discovered in a slop bucket of discarded oyster meat.

The oysters are implanted with small nuclei machined from the shell of the pig toe mussel found in the Mississippi River. The nucleus is carefully inserted in the oyster’s gonad, and the animal is put back in the sea to do its thing for two years.

An oyster can be reused to try again. Older ones are seeded with half nuclei to produce pearls for brooches and such.

“X-rays can tell us if the oyster is producing,” Arrow says. “That helps free up stock.

Aussies Taking Over

“Aussies are taking over diving and the smaller farms on the ocean bottom. And now we’re moving into the marketing.”

In Broome itself, khaki bush dress has long since replaced white suits. The horses still run at the yearly meet, particularly for the Sam Male Memorial Broome Cup.

Grandchildren of Japanese divers who married into the melting pot mingle freely with the Westerners. Timeless aborigines laze under baobab trees out of the noonday sun drinking beer.

Haynes misses the old social life of weekly dances and picnics.

“Television stopped all that. People stay home and turn on the air conditioning and the telly. We’ve lost a lot of spontaneity.”

But there are still some old sailing luggers, now converted to diesel, resting on the mud awaiting the 28-foot tides to carry them once more out to the pearling grounds.

Cleopatra wore pearls. So does Elizabeth Taylor. The gems are no less appealing for bearing the touch of man.

“It’s still nature that’s making something so beautiful,” Arrow says, rolling a gem across a table top to demonstrate its symmetrical perfection.