DIVING FOR PEARLS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 238, 6 April 1912, Page 2 (Supplement)

DIVING FOR PEARLS.

PERILS AND PRIZES OF THE GREAT REEF. The first of the white diivers who are to replace the Japanese in the Australian pearl fisheries have arrived from England. The divore are being sent to Broome, ths headquadters of the West Australian Fishery, by Messrs C. E. Heinke and Co., the famous London firm of submarine engineers, who manufactured most of the apparatus which is used in the pearling industry. They form the first batch of ex-Navy men who will take the places of the colored divers, and their trial is is the nature of an experiment. In pursuance of their "White Australia" policy, the Commonwealth Government have practically decreed that from the end of next years every diver and every tender in the Broome and Thursday Island luggers shall be a white man. Notice has been given to the boat owners that no lugger carrying Japanese divers will be licensed for the 1913 season.

The pearl-fishers question whether

white men will be able to sustain the arduous and perilous work of diving. The Japanese diver has peculiar qualifications. He has tremendous endurance

and a. fatalistic temperament. Experiences which shatter the nerves of the ordinary man have no effect upon him. In the past Japanese, Kanaka and Malay divers were largely engaged in pearling, but the Japanese had ousted them all. In the early days the pearl fisheries rivalled the Spanish Main of Elizabethan times. It was a by-word that there was a bigger collection of cut-throat scoundrels and more vice to the square yard on Thursday Island than in any other portion of the globe of equal area. Times have changed; the fisheries are stringently regulated; but if there is little poaching and no more bloodthirsty fights for shell, pearling is still well-nigh the moist adventurous life in the world. ,

Mother of pearl fetches about £260 per ton in the London market. This is the object of the pearler's search; the pearls are the lucky accidents. Eaeh lugger carries a diver, his tender, a crew of half a dozen Malays or Timor boys, and a white "shell opener." Five tons of shell per season—which lasts from March to November—is a good haul for one lugger. The oysters lie on the bottom sometimes hare, sometimes almost buried in the sand, or hidden in coral formations, and the depth varies from ten to twenty fathoms in the Broome fisheries to forty-ifive fathoms (270 ft) in the Darnley Island fishery. j

The excitement is always intense. The diver may bring up ten oysters or not one. One shell may contain a fortune in the shape of a pearl or a "pearl-blister," or the whole lot may contain nothing. As a matter of fact, pearls are so rare that on the Thursday Island boats, which do not carry a "shell-opener," they are the diver's perquisite. Only the other day a Japanese brought up a pearl which was sold for £llOO.

The "shell-opener" sails in the lugger as a check on the honesty of the diver and the «rew. He receives the shell and the pearls on account of the owner of the boat, and it can be readily imagined that if by chance a fortune is fished up in some lucky shell he must sleep with one eye on his native crew until he gets to port, perhaps a month hence. Although the pay is only £l6 per month, there is ne la»k of young Englishmen for this hazardous occupation.