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Ch. 11: Pearl Fisheries

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PEARL FISHERIES
taken in three years near New Boston, 111., from one bed. Reckoned by the usual average this would mean not less than 100,000,000 shells. In some beds, the mussels have been found several feet deep, the bottom layers being dead.
Notwithstanding the enormous numbers, these beds are often completely exhausted in a few seasons. When the beds are first dis­covered, men will take as much as 1500 to 2000 pounds of shell each, in a day's fishing. In one hundred pounds of shells as they are taken, the average number of valves or half shells will be, nigger-heads, about one thousand; sand-shells, nine hundred; muckets, eight hundred, which would be an average of nine thousand mussels per ton.
The meat in a ton of nigger-heads weighs over three hundred pounds. This is usually removed by the fishermen by boiling the mussels for ten or fifteen minutes in crude sheet iron tanks when the shells open and the fleshy part falls out or may be easily removed by hand. To show how little the pearls they may contain enter into the calculations of these
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Ch. 11: Pearl Fisheries Page of 358 Ch. 11: Pearl Fisheries
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