Notas del episodio
Wild pearl oysters could live as deep as 125 feet, and a diver might bring up more than a ton of shells to find three or four quality pearls. Free divers faced sharks, eye damage, and shallow water blackout on the ascent, so divers in the Middle East and Asia coated themselves in grease, plugged their ears with greased cotton, pinched their noses with tortoiseshell clips, and rode heavy stones straight to the bottom. In the Persian Gulf and Eastern Arabia, pearling was the core of the economy before the 1950s oil boom, selling into Paris and Bombay. Boats carried haulers, shell openers, cooks, bookkeepers, religious scholars, and singers whose songs set the pace of the work, while divers sank into debt from advances taken during a cycle that could last a year.
In the 16th century Spanish colonizers turned the oyster beds off Margarita Island and Cubagua in Venezuela, and off Colombia and Panama, into forced labor camps under the rescate system, first with indigenous people and then with enslaved Africans. On Cubagua divers were branded with a C and chained at night, and many settlements were abandoned by 1540 after the beds were stripped bare. In late 19th century Western Australia and the Torres Strait, Aboriginal Australians, Torres Strait Islanders, and imported Asian workers dove ever deeper for mother of pearl to make buttons until cheap plastics crashed the market around World War I.
- Spanish masters believed unchaste divers would lose the ability to sink.
- Divers in Panama surfaced with oysters stuffed in their armpits and mouths to meet quotas.
- Suetonius suggests Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BC partly for Scottish freshwater pearls.
- The Kellie Pearl, found in an Aberdeenshire river in 1621, is set in the Crown of Scotland.
- Scotland banned pearl fishing in 1998, long after Kokichi Mikimoto's cultured pearls had replaced wild harvesting.