made
of them which are worth up to 1,000 ecus * and beyond, they cannot
enter into comparison with those of the East and West Indies.
It
is possible that none of those who have written before me concerning
pearls have recorded that some years back a fishery was discovered in a
certain part of the coasts of Japan, and I have seen some of the pearls
which the Dutch brought from there. They were of very beautiful water,
and some of them of large size, but all baroques. The Japanese, as I
have said above, do not esteem pearls. If they cared about them it is
possible that by their means some banks might be discovered where finer
ones would be obtained.2
Before
concluding this chapter I shall make a very important remark in
reference to pearls and the differences in their waters, some being
very white, others tending to yellow, and others to black, and some
which are, so to speak, lead-coloured. As for the last, they are found
only in America, and this colour is caused by the nature of the bottom,
which is muddier than in the East. In a return cargo which the late M.
du Jardin,3 the well-known jeweller, had in the Spanish
galleons, there were included six perfectly round pearls, but black as
jet, which weighed altogether 12 carats. He gave them to me with some
other things to take to the East, to see if they could be disposed of,
but I brought them back again, as I found no one who would look at them.4
As for the pearls tending to yellow, the colour is due to the fact that
the fishermen sell the oysters in heaps, and as the merchants wait
sometimes as long as fourteen or fifteen days till the shells open of
themselves, in order to extract the pearls, some of these
oysters lose their water during this time, decay, and become putrid,
and the pearls become yellow by contact. This is so true that in all
oysters which have
been resumed on the river Ugie in north-east Aberdeenshire ; in former times this was a lucrative industry (The Sunday Times, 26th March 1922).
1 £225.
2 The Japanese have recently started the industry of producing pearls in oysters by artificial means.
* See p. 125, below.
4 Black pearls do not suit dark complexions so well as the lighter kinds.
