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PEARLS FROM ASIA
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samples
are collected. Several thousand oysters are taken up, the pearls are
removed, examined, and valued by uninterested experts, and the results
are published, so that prospective buyers may have a reliable idea as
to their value. Otherwise this would not be possible until the
merchants had washed some of their own purchases, which ordinarily
would not be for a week or ten days after the opening of the season.
The
fishery usually begins late in February or early in March, as the sea
is then relatively calm, the currents least perceptible, and there is
less danger of storms. It is prosecuted from a temporary settlement or
camp on the sandy shore at a place conveniently near the reefs. The
important fisheries of the five years ending in 1907, were centered at
the improvised settlement known as Marichchikadde. Although prosecuted
from the coast of Ceylon, relatively few Cingalese attend compared with
the large numbers who assemble from India, Arabia, and elsewhere.
A
week or two before the opening of the season, the boats begin to
arrive, sometimes fifty or more in a single day, laden with men, women
and children, and in many cases with the materials for their huts. In a
short time the erstwhile desolate beach becomes populated with
thousands of persons from all over the Indian littoral, and there is
the noisy traffic of congregated humanity, and a confusion of tongues
where before only the sound of the ocean waves was heard. Beside the
eight or ten thousand fishermen, most of whom are Moormen, Tamils, and
Arabs, there are pearl merchants—mainly Chetties and Moormen, boat
repairers and other mechanics, provision dealers, priests, pawnbrokers,
government officials, koddu-counters, clerks, boat guards, a police
force of 200 officials, coolies, domestic servants, with numbers of
women and children. And for the entertainment of these, and to obtain a
share of the wealth from the sea, there are jugglers, fakirs,
gamblers, beggars, female dancers, loose characters, with every
allurement that appeals to the sons of Brahma, Buddha or Mohammed.
Natives from the seaport towns of India are there in thousands; the
slender-limbed and delicate-featured Cingalese with their scant attire
and unique head-dress ; energetic Arabs from the Persian Gulf; burly
Moormen, sturdy Kandyans, outcast Veddahs, Chinese, Jews, Portuguese,
Dutch, half-castes, the scum of the East and the riffraff of the
Asiatic littoral, the whole making up a temporary city of forty
thousand or more inhabitants.1
1 The report of the Chief of Police at the out occupation in their own country, made
1905 fishery states : " In the camp there their way to Marichchukkadi with the hope
were 40,000 to 50,000persons, of whom it may of making money to gamble in oysters."
be said that not less than a tenth were ("Reports on the Pearl Fisheries for 1905,"
gamblers, vagrants, and rogues, who, with- Colombo, p. 17.)
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