CURIOSITIES IN PEARLS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIV, Issue VII, 16 February 1895, Page 163

CURIOSITIES IN PEARLS.

The value of pearls has been in all ages commensurate with their beauty. In the East, especially, they have been greatly admired, and enormous sums of money have been paid for them. Pliny observes that pearls are the most valuable and excellent of all precious stones ; and from our Saviour’s comparing the kingdom of heaven to a pearl, it is evident they must have been held in very high estimation at that time. It is said that Julius Casar gave a pearl to the mother of Marcus Brutus that was valued at £48,417 10s of our present money ; and Cleopatra dissolved one worth £250,000 in vinegar, which she drank at the supper with Marc Antony. From time immemorial there have been fisheries of pearl in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and in the bays of Ceylon, and when Columbus arrived in the Gulf of Paria on his first voyage to America be was astonished to find the precious gems abounding there in unparalled quantities. His men landed, and saw the Indian women adorned with splendid pearls round their arms, as well as round their necks ; but their possessors seem to have been perfectly ignorant of the true value of the gems, as it recorded that an Indian woman gave one of the sailors four rows of her pearls merely in exchange for a broken eartberuware plate. The Spanish king forbade anyone to go within fifty leagues of the place where such riches were found without royal permission, and took possession of the fisheries for himself ; but so cruelly did the Spaniards behave to the natives, making them perforce dive for them, and brutally ill-treating them when they were unsuccessful in pearl finding, that * one morning at dawn the Indians assailed the Spaniards, made a sanguinary slaughter of them, and, with dancing and leaping, ate them, both monks and laymen.’