Pearl Diving Off New Guinea.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 31, 6 February 1937, Page 7 (Supplement)

Pearl Diving Off New Guinea.

HAZARDS THE NATIVE DIVER FACES.

/{ » DEEP-WATER pearl diver can't A drink!" said Percy Leigh, as we ** sat watching the Samarai Pass, •n-hcre so many good divers have lost their lives. ••Liquor and' diving don't ro together," he said. "A man needs to be jnft right if he works on the bottom." ■\Ve had come to Samarai to 11ml Leigh, to ask him about pearls in the Torres Straits farther on. wrote Bruce and SliirWay Fahnestock from (heir yacht Director at Samarai, Papua, recently to the N'ev York '-Tribune.-' From liligh Entrance to Carpentaria. Leigh is known anion" the pearlers as the most cxperirnml°of them all. For years he has almost lived on the bottom "walking on riches." He has been thousands of hours amon" coral heads, wrecked ships, broad T earl teds, deep into current-twisted Samarai Pass. Leigh knows as much about pearls and pearl shell as any man down this way. The waters of Torres Straits support the greatest licet of luggers in the world little wooden ships under sail and Diesel which light monsoon and trade winds to keep over the men who walk all day beneath them on the floor of the sea. The centre of this fabulous business has always been at Thursday Island.

Most Divers Are Coloured. There arc more coloured divers in the dangerous trade than whites. Malays, Australian aborigines, Japanese, Javanese, Macuo Portuguese, Polynesians— divers and line tenders from everywhere, watermen of the world gravitate toward penrl shell. Buttons are made of it—very unromantic, but if you could see where your stud started and what it went through before it took on the job of holding your collar together, you would be tied 'in knots of excitement. There are three pearl shell areas in the world which produce nine-tenths of tho world supply. Virtually all perfect large pearls come from these three. They are tho Paumotus, the Torres Straits and the Persian Gulf. In the Paumotus—low-lying atolls ,"500 miles from Tahiti—are found the largest pearls of all. They aro found in deep water in "black lipped" shell as wide across as dinner plates. (A diver or pearl Imyer never says shells.) The shell from Torres Straits, which separates Papua from Capo York Peninsula, Australia, is usually gold or silver-lipped, and produces many medium-priced perfect pearls of fine lustre. The seed pearls of the world come from the Persian Gulf, as well as occasional large blacks.

More Valuable Than Pearl. More valuable than pearl shell at the conical, not flat like the pearl ovster. It brills the diver 4.")0 dollars a" ton, and it "only "takes 13 potato bags of trocas to inakc a ton. Orccn "snail shell is worth 200 dollars a ton, nnii when the. diver finds a bed of it his job is nine-tenths finished. But tho real thing—pearl shell—is what divers with any imagination search for. There is. ever that chance of finding what Paumotu divers call a "baby." and what Torres men rail a "birr stone." Tho big pearl dangles before the diver's eyes from the moment he steps into fiiell water. If he ever finds it, lie ran sell his little lunger, live in sniifhiiic and fresh air the rpst of his life and laugh at the memory of his former hazardous existence. One find like last year's biggest Panmotuan "baby" would "make a man wealthy for ever. Chances Against Divers. Xot bad pay —if you forget sharks, bends, mushroom coral, rnantas, nohus, says octopii) and careless lifeline tenders. Your chance of getting through give to flyers in wartime—about 70 to 1 against you.

rSY want to cut down the trees in Leicester Square to brighten it for the Coronation. The idea of trying to brighten Leicester Square is a shock to anybody ivlio is elderly or middleaged. Leicester Square, which always stood for all that was bright and gay in the night life of London—Leicester Square, of which the soldiers sang when they went io war, and to which Florrie Forde sent her kind regards—the part of London which everybody in the world knew, and which, in the 'eighties, the 'nineties, and early nineteen hundreds iva.s hardly ever mentioned without a wink or a leer—it was very gay and naughty. Yet in this year of grace 1030 theV talk of brightening it! They want to cut down the trees which shade the statue of Shakespeare; those trees under the shade of which the whole of Bohemian London has passed for generations—the onlv green oasis in a forest of brick. If they do this the last link With the old Leicester Square, which in f pitc of its foreign surroundings and Population, was, so essentially English, Will indeed be gone. Where Genee Danced. The Leicester Lounge is now part of a toper's. Those steep brass-bound stairs, down which so many a reveller rolled, "e no more. The Empire, once the last ford in naughtiness, is a picture theatre. Gono long since is that famous promenade, which was one of the sights of the world. The, Empire, first resort of -very returning exile, the last resort of - v ery outward-bound traveller, has become respectable. American Him stars flicker where once Genee danced. To-day w e get our ballet from Russia. But who will forget those years between 1003 ami 1007 when Adeline Genee appeared in that wonderful scries of ballets— '■Cinderella," "Coppelia," "The Debutante," "Sir Roger de Coverley," "The B «l'e of the Ball" and "The Dryad"? Another sensation came from the Empire in those days, when Fred Farren and Ida Crispi introduced "The Apache" dance, over which all London went mad. The Empire's rival, the Alhnmbra. now resounds to the pick of the houseweaker. There was a promenade there,