later when the Spaniards invaded America. At their first coming the
natives gave them freely large quantities of pearls and gleefully
traded magnificent gems for broken pieces of gaudily painted and
varnished porcelain. As one to-day might take a new acquaintance for
a day's fishing to a well-stocked stream, so the Indians took the
Spaniards to the pearl banks to show them how they obtained their
pearls. With pleasure and probably some amusement, they watched the
eagerness with which the strangers sought the pearls, and doubtless
wondered at the gratification displayed when they found any.
The Egyptians and Asiatics being more highly civilized undoubtedly
valued their pearls more than the South American Indians did, but
naturally they would not appreciate them so highly as they did after
foreign desire had depleted their hoards and established a constant
demand for them, greater than the yield of their fisheries.
That this condition prevailed in Egypt and Asia prior to the advent
of Europeans, is indicated by the apparent ignorance of the writer of
the book of Job concerning pearls. The word used in Chapter XXVIII.
18 is simply the translator's sign for an unknown quantity, and as
the pearl is an apt symbol and illustration of many ideas connected
with or embodied in the cult of the Jewish Church, the fact that the
Jewish writers did not so use it, though the precious metals and other
precious stones were so used, and though their books were written
in various countries, suggests that the pearl in those days was not
reckoned of equal importance with gold and silver and stones like those
set in the Jewish High Priest's breastplate for instance.
That a very considerable change in the world's estimate of the pearl
took place during the four centuries B.C. is illustrated by the
references made to pearls in the New Testament. Rome had made of the
"white bones from a shell-fish" of the fourth century B.C., a gem for
the rich and powerful and so generally established it in the public
estimation that the sacred writers used it to illustrate their greatest
conceptions of beauty and spiritual worth.
The Saviour likened the Kingdom of Heaven to "a pearl of great price:"
under the similitude of pearls He counseled the reservation of holy
things from men incapable of appreciating them. Paul and John numbered
them among the costly adornments in the pride of life and with
the most precious articles of merchandise. From that day, with the
extension of commerce, and the growth of Western nations in affluence
and refinement, the demand for pearls grew and spread until even the
rude island of Britain learned to appreciate them.
The quantities of large and beautiful pearls stored in the
treasure-houses of Hindu princes suggest that they have existed as
jewels in India for a very long period, but for how many centuries
cannot be definitely stated. The probability is that in very remote
ages, rude fishermen of tropic seas all over the world, while fishing
for food were attracted by the lustrous objects found occasionally in
the oysters which they gathered and that they saved them as things
likely to please some maid or matron of their affections. A favor for
them once established, they would be sought, and with the growth of
intelligence and refinement would come increased appreciation. There is
a close analogy in all things between the development of the individual
and nations, and even of the world. Each progresses on the same lines,
the difference consists in the magnitude and duration of the processes
only.
To the child, pearls are playthings; to youth, pretty baubles; to
mature years, important gems; to age, most beautiful and wonderful
creations, and the more intelligent and refined the individual, the
more quickly are these stages of regard reached.
So probably, in countries where they were found, pearls have risen
with the evolution of a great nation out of a primitive race, from the
rude favor of toilers of the sea, to a high place in the esteem of the
princes of a cultivated people. It is quite probable that when the
Aryans from the north spread over India, they found pearls among the
possessions of the natives of the Madras and Malabar coasts, if not of
the interior and north, as Spain found them among the natives of South
America. Having a higher order of intelligence, they would naturally
estimate the gem as of greater value than the aborigines would.
As the invaders in the course of centuries gradually divided themselves
into castes, the gem would come largely into the hands of the highest
and its value would increase with the affluence of the ruling class,
according to the ratio existing between their wealth and that of the
average community; for the centralization of wealth establishes a price
for its imperishable forms which debars the masses from ownership. So,
probably, the Aryans from the north acquired the pearls they found in
the possession of the Dasyus. When the shepherd invaders were settled
in the territory they had conquered and became divided into castes
of Vaisyas, Kshattriya and Brahman, pearls gravitated to the upper
classes, to be garnered later by their princes as the government
assumed a tyrannical form; and so it is that the great pearls of India
found in ancient times are among the jewels of the princes of India, or
of the Shah of Persia and the Afghan Ameers, who in turn looted some of
the richest treasuries of India.
In countries east of India one can only imagine the history of pearls
for there are no records of them. Year after year, for centuries and
cycles, in undiscovered deeps, the beds of the sea were strewn with
noble gems that through all their years of beauty lay neglected: the
soft luster of succeeding charms appealed in vain for eyes which never
came, and when the slow processes of time had brought decay they passed
unseen to the catacombs of Nature.
So it was in many a tropic sea, on unknown shores and about islands
holding strange creatures and stranger men. In the still, clear waters
of far-away lagoons, treasures of pearls, released by the death of
their creators, have rolled to a resting-place on coral reefs, to lie
there until the sea, atom by atom, devoured them. Could all the pearls
hoarded by every nation on earth be gathered together, the mighty sum
would be small compared with the number of those which lie buried
beneath the ocean.
But, one by one, slant-eyed Celestials, Maoris, Malays, Papuans,
Polynesians and others, discovering, learned to prize and hoard the
pearl. Then came men from far-off wonderlands, whose great ships spread
their sails to the winds of the deep waters and who could endure for
many days the solitudes of the great seas. These in the early days made
war to plunder, but were replaced as the centuries passed, by others
who gave gaudy beads and cloths of many colors and water that fired the
soul and other wonderful things, in exchange for the white beads of the
sea, and so the pearls of the unenlightened children of the South Seas
passed to the princes of the West, even as the same restless spirits,
spreading their sails to the winds of the great seas in the opposite
direction, brought them east from more barbarous shores far away to the
westward.
Our knowledge of pearls reaches back about twenty-three hundred years,
through the writings of Pliny, who nearly nineteen hundred years ago
gathered the facts of his day and the rumors of traditions concerning
them. Beyond that we can only surmise that in prehistoric ages, with
the dawn of intelligence in the infantile period of the race, men
dwelling near tropic seas were attracted by them as children are by
bright and pretty baubles; and that as humanity by families, tribes and
nations, grew out of savagery to the mental stature of a man, so pearls
grew to be jewels very precious.
THE FASHION OF PEARLS
Although the pearl like all other jewels, has had its periods of
extreme and general public favor, unlike other gems if it is once
appreciated by an individual or a nation it is never utterly discarded
by either. If not the fashion, pearls are always in fashion. Far as we
can look back among the dim, uncertain figures of the mystic past whose
shades stand where the unknown multitudes have fallen, we find pearls.
The princes of India through all their generations, the dynasties of
Egypt, the royalties of Persia, the wild chiefs of Arab tribes, the
potentates of Greece, Rome and Venice, the houris of Turkey, the Queens
of every European court, from the time they found a place in history
until now, all wear pearls. At first thought this seems strange, for
of all gems the origin of the pearl is most humble. No titanic forces,
groaning in the travail of subterranean convulsions, crushed and ground
and fired its particles to shape and beauty. It grew, a few fathoms
deep, where the waters are at peace, in the embrace of a mollusk and
out of its exudations.
[Illustration: PRINCESS ABAMALEK LAZAREFF
( _From the painting by Vitelleschi _)]
From this lowly parentage it rises at once to a place among the
noblest, for it is the aristocrat of gems and finds its warmest
admirers among the aristocrats of all nations. The favorites of fortune
the world over in all ages have succumbed to the modest beauty of the
pearl. Its ascendancy marks not alone the refinement of the individuals
with whom it finds favor, but the high status of the nation where it
is widely appreciated. The pearl is the favorite of those who are
surfeited with jewels. One may become tired of the diamond's splendor,
but those who learn to appreciate the unobtrusive loveliness of the
pearl, seldom lose that fondness for them which it develops. It is
the one gem which does not satiate. The love of pearls usually marks
a connoisseur of gems and one accustomed to the possession of jewels.
Diamonds emblazon the gates of luxury but pearls are the familiars of
the luxurious. Glittering gems are admired by all classes but usually
the pearl is fully appreciated only by old countries and persons "to
the manor born." It is in the treasure-houses of the princes of the
Orient and among the jewels of great and noble families that one must
look for the pearls gathered during the centuries. Except in Italy and
Arabia, where all classes prize them, the pearl is not a jewel of the
people, but of the gentry and the very rich who come in contact with
them.
It is essentially a jewel for the wealthy. Unostentatious, exquisite,
it is insufficient for those who have no other jewels and unfit for
common wear. Of a nature too delicate for rough usage, it must be well
cared for and properly housed. Even then the hand of time bears heavily
upon it for it is susceptible to many influences which do not affect
other gems. Comparatively soft, the lustrous skin is injured by rough
and careless contact with other jewels. The gold of the setting, in
time, cuts into the surface where it binds, or if it is pierced and
strung, the rings of nacre about the orifices gradually peel away. Hot
water injures it; gases discolor it. As the cheek of beauty grows dim
with age, so gradually the brilliancy of youth fades from the pearl
and the complexion of it is changed. And yet it retains a certain
loveliness which may well be compared to the exquisite serenity with
which the maturer years of some women are adorned.
The pearl, therefore, being essentially a jewel of the rich, is not
affected as others by the whims of fashion. In Oriental countries,
where the lives of the masses and what little property they hold are
practically at the mercy of their rulers, the centuries make little
change in conditions and less in fashions. The nobles have always
possessed the jewels of the various eastern countries and the fashion
continues through generations and dynasties, to accumulate and hold
them until some stronger power takes them away by force. As the people
hammered heavy bracelets and anklets out of the precious metals, not
alone for display, but also to hoard them, so their princes hoarded
jewels.
In the old times these hoards of the precious metals were periodically
gathered by the requisitions of the princes on the people, and of
jewels by the demands of a successful invader upon the princes; but
while the possessors changed, the fashion remained always the same, and
whether the Shah of Persia, the Ameer of Afghanistan, or the Mogul,
there has been no variation in the constant desire to obtain more
jewels, pearls among them, and to display them after the same fashion
through all the generations.
To some extent this is true of pearls in the Occident also. Since
Rome set the fashion there has not been a time in the history of any
European nation, once it had risen to the pearl-wearing eminence, when
the upper classes did not wear pearls. There is this difference between
the East and the West however; whereas the men of the East wear them,
in the West, pearls are worn almost entirely by women alone. The more
rugged life of European men, the coarser fabrics of their garments to
suit climatic needs, and their virile distaste for effeminate display,
all combine to bar them from a jewel suited only to soft silks and
linens or the touch of softer flesh.
In ancient times, among Asiatics, fashion probably did not culminate
in any direction, as to-day, in a vogue. The inability of the masses
to follow a fashion of the upper classes, both for lack of means and
permission to do so; the absence of all rapid methods of communication
between sections of country within and without national borders,
with the consequent limitations of a knowledge of men and things to
community affairs, and the paucity of manufacturing possibilities,
all combined to make fashions permanent. With the awakening of the
vigorous barbarian tribes of Europe to a knowledge of their power, and
their rapid civilization, came the frenzied desire of men new to the
situation, to crowd as much as possible into the span of life.
Rome rioted in the accumulations of ages. With an appetite whetted by
an heredity of unsatisfied desire, she drank the finest vintages and
gourmandized the choicest morsels of the world, immune from present
punishment for excess by a long ancestry of hard and simple life. Every
land that she could reach, sent to her the best of all their products,
and from the incoming tide of things new to her experience, she
adopted many fashions, among them that of wearing pearls. For several
centuries they were in vogue, so much so that edicts were issued
restricting them to certain classes. Since that time, the very general
use of them by persons of high station in Europe, beyond all other
gems, seems to have been confined to the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries and is now being revived at the opening of the twentieth.
There is one fashion of wearing pearls which is common to all ages
and races, viz. strung as beads in chains to hang about the neck. The
mound-builders of North America, the Indians of the Mississippi Valley,
of Virginia, of the coasts of Florida, of the lands around the Gulf
of Mexico and everywhere in New Spain, all wore them so. Egyptians,
Persians, Arabians, Hindus, Singhalese and South Sea islanders, many of
them without knowledge of countries or peoples beyond their own or very
near territory, alike adopted this fashion. And it has been followed by
every newer people, as they acquired by trade or the sword, the pearls
with which to so adorn themselves.
In lands of tropic heat the women wound these strings of pearls about
their arms, wrists and ankles also. Nor was the fashion confined to
women. When the Spaniards first reached these shores, the caciques of
Florida and the incas of Peru, on occasions of State, wore ropes of
pearls around their necks, and so to this day do the rajahs and princes
of India and the eastern islands. The more civilized peoples used round
pearls, and became more critical about the quality and perfection of
the gems as they grew in wealth and refinement.
The necklaces found in the Indian mounds are made principally of
baroques, some of them rounded, but many of them long, slender pieces,
bored a short distance from the thinner end, so that they hung in
pendant festoons. As with all primitive races, the magnificence of
size appealed to the Indians of this hemisphere, as it did also to
the Spanish adventurers who first landed on the coasts of America. A
chronicler of events during the time when De Soto was governor of the
province which now forms several of the Southern States, mentions that
a cacique brought as a present to the governor at the town of Ichiaha,
a string of pearls as large as filberts, five feet long.
It is noticeable, that in all the accounts given of the wealth of
pearls discovered in the possession of the natives, the Spaniards
rarely say anything about the shape or quality of the pearls seen
or taken, but always mention the size when large. They do, however,
constantly deplore the discoloration caused by the use of fire in
the process of boring them. One may imagine the chagrin of these
freebooters on finding heaps of royal gems wrecked by the ignorance
of the plundered; the value burned out of them, like bank notes for
millions mutilated beyond redemption. The pearls composing this
five-foot string were all discolored,—good enough for Indians, but of
little value in Spain and Europe.
Round baroques are strung for necklaces to this day, especially
in Italy, where the peasantry save from their small earnings the
equivalent of two to three hundred dollars, to them an enormous sum,
to buy the coveted necklace of pearls. These necklaces are composed
usually of several strands of small rounded baroques weighing about
one to two grains each and connected by bars. Usually there are three
to five strands, but some are made with as many as eleven or twelve.
Necklaces are made also in the same way, of small round pearls, and the
bars, of which there are generally four, including that containing the
clasp, are studded with diamonds.
The Asiatics prefer strings of large pearls, graduating in size on
either side from a large central one. A number of these of increasing
length and fastened together at the clasp are worn by Oriental
royalties, so that each string festoons below the preceding one, the
lowest and longest string sometimes hanging to the waist. There are few
however even among the Hindu princes whose store of large pearls is
equal to such prodigality.
When pearl necklaces were adopted by the Romans after their conquests
in Egypt, Persia and India, they vied with the monarchs they had
conquered, some of their rulers acquiring pearls of enormous value. The
wife of Caligula owned pearls worth two million dollars, but Oriental
treasure-houses held greater accumulations. The pearls of the late Rana
of Dholpur in Upper India, were valued at seven and a half million
dollars. From Rome the fashion spread with the advance of civilization
through all the nations of Europe and followed their colonizations
westward. Only in the last decade has the use of pearls in the United
States become sufficiently general to place them in the list of things
that are a fashion.
Many large pearls of pear, egg, or drop shape, and some round, are used
as pendants, to be hung on slender gold neck chains, or suspended from
brooches of diamonds. They are bored at the smaller end to a depth of
about one-eighth of an inch, the hole is filled with a composition
which hardens rapidly, and in this a gold wire, looped at one end for
connecting, is inserted. Formerly the pearl was drilled quite through
and the suspending wire riveted, but this is rarely done now as it
lessens the value of the pearl and destroys the perfect pendant effect.
This is a European fashion. The Chinese mount pearls by boring into
the body of the pearl at two, three or four points and inserting the
bent ends of spreading wires so that the gem is clasped as by spreading
finger tips.
Pear-shaped pearls were used in Rome for pendant purposes as now and
were known as "elenchi." After the Roman fashion of "crotalia" or
"castanet" eardrops had passed, drop pearls continued in more or less
favor throughout succeeding centuries as eardrops, the matching of one
nearly doubling the value of both. Of late, egg and pear-shaped pearls
have been used largely as heads for scarf pins. They are drilled and
set on a gold wire or "pegged" as it is called, in the manner described
for pendants but with the smaller end resting upon a light gold ring
soldered to the scarf pin, or in a small cup, so that the pressure,
while inserting the pin, is distributed over the body of the pearl and
upon the end, instead of upon the inner wall in contact with the end of
the pin.
The Persians used pearls largely in the jewelling of royal headgear,
for Pompey is said to have brought home twenty crowns of pearls with
the loot from his eastern raid. Hindu princes strung them on straight
wires of equal length and bound a number of them together, to be
fastened as pompons or aigrettes, to their turbans. They encrusted and
edged their robes with them as also did the royalties and nobles of
Europe during the middle ages. Seed pearls were strung in lengths of
four to six feet and the strands twisted together like a rope. This
fashion continues to this day, such ropes of pearls sometimes measuring
five feet in length.
The semi-barbarous Indian tribes of America did not confine the use
of pearls altogether to personal adornment. They decorated their
idols, state canoes, the handles of the paddles, and the figures in
their temples with them, and they buried enormous quantities in the
sepulchres with their dead. There is no evidence that this latter form
of extravagance was at any time general in Asia or Europe, but Julius
Cæsar made a buckler of British pearls which he hung up in the temple
of Venus Genetrix after dedicating it to her.
Among the ancients it does not appear that pearls were used in
connection with the precious metals to a great extent. Collars of gold
and silver with large pearls as pendants were sometimes seen upon the
necks of Indians by the Spaniards when they landed on this continent,
but in Asia, Africa, and upon their first introduction into Europe,
pearls were not used with the metals as freely as other gems. As the
art of the jeweller developed however, they came into more general
use and are now utilized with gold in every form of jewelry. Round
and button pearls with diamonds or other stones, or alone, are set in
gold as brooches, ear-rings, finger-rings, bracelets, hair-ornaments,
scarf-pins, dress-pins, studs, cuff and dress buttons, etc., and
baroques are also used for the same purposes. Brooches, lockets and
pendants are paved with solid masses of half pearls.
Some ancient swords of Hindu warriors betray a curious custom. A groove
with over-lapping edges was sunk in the blade and into this pearls were
introduced from the hilt end to represent the tears of enemies. There
are blades so constructed in the collection of Indian swords presented
to King Edward of England when, as the Prince of Wales, he visited
India.
Jewellers frequently avail themselves of the odd shapes in which
baroques occur to construct unique jewels. Nature frequently gives them
a resemblance to animals, and sometimes to the human figure and face,
which may be accentuated by the jeweller's art so as to make the
resemblance striking. In one notable instance lately, a baroque was
so mounted that it might easily pass as a modelled portrait of Queen
Victoria. Baroques resembling bird's wings are common and are often
made effective by mounting them on a bird of gold. Others remind one
of fish, birds, insects, and beasts of various kinds. Clustered pearls
enveloped together sometimes look like dog's heads, in which two of
the enveloped pearls near the surface pass for eyes. Long, slender
baroques are set to resemble the petals of a chrysanthemum, and others,
mounted singly in sepals of gold, are suggestive of the buds of various
flowers, roses, lilies, etc.
[Illustration: VARYING FORMS OF PEARLS
1-5 Abalone Baroques. 6 Blister. 7-10 Twinned Pearls. 11-21 Baroques.
22-29 Round Baroques. 30-31 Wing Pearls. 32-35 Button Pearls. 36-37
Colored Round Pearls. 38-41 White Round Pearls. 42 Jockey Cap.]