Pearlsofnature - pearl hunting & farming

Pearl hunting and pearl farming:

For thousands of years, most saltwater pearls were retrieved by divers working in the Indian Ocean, in areas like the Persian Gulf, Red Sea and the Gulf of Mannar.

Starting in the Han Dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD), the Chinese hunted extensively for saltwater pearls in the South China Sea.

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they discovered that around the islands of Cubagua and Margarita, some 200 km north of the Venezuelan coast, was an extensive pearl bed. One discovered and named pearl, La Peregrina, was offered to the Spanish queen. According to Garcilasso de la Vega, who says that he saw La Peregrina at Seville in 1507, (Garcilasso, “Historie des Incas, Rois du Perou,” Amsterdam, 1704, Vol. II, P. 352.) this was found at Panama in 1560 by a Negro who was rewarded with his liberty, and his owner with the office of alcalde of Panama.

Margarita pearls are extremely difficult to find today and are known for their unique yellowish colour. The most famous Margarita necklace that any one can see today is the one that then Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt gave to Jacqueline Kennedy when she and her husband, President John F. Kennedy paid an official visit to Venezuela.

Before the beginning of the 20th Century, pearl hunting was the most common way of harvesting pearls, divers manually pulled oysters from ocean floors and river bottoms then checked them individually for pearls. However, not all mussels and oysters produce pearls, in a fishing haul of three tons only three or four oysters will produce perfect pearls.

The development of pearl farming:

Today, the cultured pearls on the market can be divided into two categories. The first category covers the beaded cultured pearls, including Akoya, South Sea and Tahiti. These pearls are gonad grown, and there is usually one pearl grown at a time. This limits the number of pearls at a harvest period. The pearls are usually harvested after one year for Akoya, 2–4 years for Tahitian and South Sea, and 2–7 years for freshwater. This process was first developed by the British biologist William Saville-Kent who passed the information along to Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa from Japan. The second category includes the non-beaded freshwater cultured pearls, as the Biwa or Chinese pearls. As they grow in the mantle, where on each wing up to 25 grafts can be implanted, these pearls are much more frequent and do saturate the market completely. An impressive improvement of quality has taken place in the last ten years when the former rice grain-shaped pebbles are compared with the near round pearls of today.

The nucleus bead in a beaded cultured pearl is generally a polished sphere made from freshwater mussel shell. Along with a small piece of mantle tissue from another mollusc (donor shell) to serve as a catalyst for the pearl sac, it is surgically implanted into the gonad (reproductive organ) of a saltwater mollusc. In freshwater pearl formation, only the piece of tissue is used in most cases, and is inserted into the fleshy mantle of the host mussel. South Sea and Tahitian pearl oysters, also known as Pinctada maxima and Pinctada margaritifera, which survive the subsequent surgery to remove the finished pearl, are often implanted with a new, larger beads as part of the same procedure and then returned to the water for another 2–3 years of growth.

Despite the common misperception, Mikimoto did not discover the process of pearl culture. The accepted process of pearl culture was developed by the British Biologist William Saville-Kent in Australia and brought to Japan by Tokichi Nishikawa and Tatsuhei Mise. Nishikawa was granted the patent in 1916, and married the daughter of Mikimoto. Mikimoto was able to use Nishikawa’s technology. After the patent was granted in 1916, the technology was immediately commercially applied to akoya pearl oysters in Japan in 1916. Mise’s brother was the first to produce a commercial crop of pearls in the Akoya oyster. Mitsubishi’s Baron Iwasaki immediately applied the technology to the south sea pearl oyster in 1917 in the Philippines, and later in Buton, and Palau. Mitsubishi was the first to produce a cultured south sea pearl – although it was not until 1928 that the first small commercial crop of pearls was successfully produced.

The original Japanese cultured pearls, known as Akoya pearls, are produced by a species of small pearl oyster, Pinctada fucata martensii, which is no bigger than 6 to 8 cm in size, hence Akoya pearls larger than 10 mm in diameter are extremely rare and highly prized. Today, a hybrid mollusc is used in both Japan and China in the production of Akoya pearls. It is a cross between the original Japanese species, and the Chinese species Pinctada chemnitzii.

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