Since the posting about diamonds I’ve had people asking me if there was any other precious stone I was interested in from the historical point of view. Well, yes there is, but it is a precious jewel, not a precious stone. Here are a few pointers about pearls. The first part is about how the pearls are made by the creatures that make them. If you are only interested in celebrity pearls just scroll down to The Abernethy Pearl where I mention brief histories of some of the pearls famous to pearl lovers, including the Elizabeth Taylor Pearl.
The number in parentheses after the title is the number of articles posted so far. Those not on this page are available in the archives. I shall put numbers on in future posts.
Most of the famous, popular, and valuable gemstones such as diamonds, emeralds and amethysts were created inside the laboratory of the Earth under specific conditions of heat and pressure. Then they are cut and faceted by experts to make them appear brilliant. Only specialists know much about how they came to be.
But pearls are quite different. Everybody knows they are made by oysters: and other little animal pearl factories of the mollusk family. All of them have soft bodies and hard shells, or as one grizzly bear said to another after eating a motor cyclist, ’Crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside,’ and include oysters, clams and snails for example. Some live in the sea, some in fresh water, and some on land. The evidence of the rocks is that the history of this group goes back about 530 million years, with approximately 100,000 species of mollusks still alive today. They come from an ancient and very successful family, a great deal older, I am impelled to say, than the 5000 or so years allowed by the fundamentalist writers of science curricula.
As hinted above it’s not just oysters that make pearls. ANY mollusk that can make a shell can make a pearl, even a snail. But naturally occurring pearls are very rare. Estimates are in the range of one of every 10,000 animals. But we’ve had the cultured pearl industry involved more and more over the last hundred years, and more pearls are produced now than at any time in human history.
Many years ago when I taught high school biology, I taught that natural pearls were made when a piece of sand or grit got into the oyster, which then covered it with stuff that became the pearl. That isn’t so, though it was then, and still is commonly believed. The irritant is usually a wandering food particle. The mollusk, which we usually think of as an oyster, then covers the offending particle with layers of a calcium compound called aragonite.
The name comes from Aragon in Spain, not Aragorn of Lord of the Rings fame. The six sided crystals of aragonite are cemented together in layers by an organic cement with giant molecules. It is called conchiolin. These two combined substances are what the oyster uses to make its shell, like bricks and mortar.
The combination is called nacre, or mother of pearl, a regular answer in crossword puzzles. And incidentally, since one of the two is organic, there is no truth in the story that Cleopatra dissolved a pearl in vinegar or wine, and drank it to impress Mark Antony. Neither liquid would dissolve the conchiolin. If she drank something that would dissolve the pearl it would dissolve her stomach lining too. Even Coca-cola would take several days to do the job.
Since the natural pearl is made by an animal, not a machine, natural pearls aren’t mathematically perfect spheres. A machine would make sure that the nacre went all way around the irritant every time to form a perfect sphere. The oyster doesn’t do that. Some sides get more nacre than others. So natural pearls can often be distinguished from cultured pearls by moving them across the edge of your teeth. The tiny irregularities in the natural pearl can be felt this way. Cultured pearls are much smoother. Natural pearls are affected by the temperature, salinity, weather patterns affecting ocean currents, pollution, and much else that could affect the pearl making mollusk.
Pearls come in a wide range of colors, ranging from white through gold, purple and black. A pearl's color depends on both the species of mollusk that produced the pearl and where the creature was living at the time. Crystals of aragonite are usually white or colorless. The natural color of a pearl is mostly due to the conchiolin, which contains organic pigments. It’s these concentric layers of nacre that gives the pearl its apparent inner glow, as the outside acts like a convex mirror. The many layers can also produce iridescence, what pearl devotees call the ‘orient,’another cross word clue. It works just like the rainbows seen on the surface of a bubble.
Since different colored pearls are valued by different people, there is a strong market for colored pearls. And they are easy to fake. If you drop a whitish pearl into a mixture of silver nitrate in dilute ammonia the conchiolin goes a beautiful black. And black pearls are particularly valued. Those of you who did high school biology will remember the dye eosin, used to bring out contrasts in microscope slides of cells. It also turns pearls a pretty pink color. Off-color pearls are often bleached to make them whiter. Your chances of getting a perfect, natural pearl from a store nowadays are close to zero.
You will hear stories of people finding great pearls in the oyster in a restaurant. These stories are urban legends. The oysters you can eat and the pearl making oysters are different creatures. Edible oysters can indeed produce pearls. They look like bits of gravel. The fact that the word oysters is used for both creatures is like people using the word hemp for marijuana…always misleading, and often deliberately so.
As in the case of many other rare items, people have created cheaper substitutes for the real thing, in the case of pearls for thousands of years. The ancient Romans valued real pearls and also made imitation pearls. One reason Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 B.C. was because of the famous British freshwater pearls. And staying in Britain for a moment, you can see from any portrait of the 16th century Queen Elizabeth I of England, that just like the current Royal Family, she was devoted to pearl necklaces. She actually started an artificial pearl industry to ensure her supply.
The techniques for manufacturing imitation pearls for costume jewelry have varied over the centuries, and today include coating glass beads with a mixture of varnish and fish scales or flakes of the mineral mica. In the more expensive imitations this is done on the inside of a glass bead, which is then filled with wax. On the cheaper kinds the mixture is applied on the outside.
Throughout the ages, humans have loved pearls and the beauty of the shells of the mollusks they come from. Archaeological evidence indicates that almost 6,000 years ago in the Persian Gulf region, people were sometimes buried with a pierced pearl resting in the right hand. Maybe it was to pay the fee at the toll booth of the after life, and was threaded onto the necklace of the appropriate goddess.
Ancient Middle Eastern cultures were apparently the first to value pearls and pearl shells. Interest in pearls later spread to the Mediterranean; in Persia, they were said to be worth their weight in gold. By 100 B.C., the Mediterranean enthusiasm for pearls had become a craze, and objects decorated with pearls have been found at archaeological sites across the Roman Empire, from Syria to North Africa and northern France. And as I mentioned before, one of the reasons Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 B.C. was to obtain freshwater pearls.
Throughout history, certain cultures have placed little or no value on the pearls and have focused instead on the mother-of-pearl from mollusk shells. Before the 19th century, Japanese shell divers who found pearls didn’t bother to keep them. Polynesian children used pearls as marbles. I feel for them when I go to antique stores and see the stuff I threw away years ago with enormous price tags on it.
These and other peoples harvested pearl oysters for their shells, using the mother-of-pearl for decoration. Abalone was also popular with many groups, including those in the Americas. People ate the meat of the mollusks and used pieces of colorful abalone shell as inlay on carved objects made of wood, ivory and bone.
Historically, in 1492, when Christopher Columbus tried for a new route to the East, pearls were the item most desired by Queen Isabella. Though he never reached Asia, Columbus did land upon the Venezuelan coast in 1498, passing the pearl-rich islands of Margarita and Cubagua. ‘Margarites’ is Greek for pearl, and ‘Margarita’ is Spanish for pearl. The island was named for the jewel.
Over the next century, millions of natural pearls from the region's Atlantic Pearl Oysters were shipped to Europe to satisfy the craze for these gems, bringing the Atlantic Pearl Oyster close to extinction. Some things haven’t changed over the centuries; greed for example. The pearl oyster beds have never fully recovered. We are doing the same thing with oil, but oysters can recover somewhat, given a few years. Empty oil wells do not fill up again if you leave them alone.
Ongoing exploration of the Americas and newly established trade routes to the East made pearls available as never before in Renaissance Europe beginning in the 1500s. The new centers of the pearl trade were Lisbon and Seville. They overflowed with pearls from India, the Persian Gulf and the Caribbean.
The upper classes adorned themselves lavishly in these jewels, which became the symbol of wealth, status and taste in an age of splendor. Irregularly shaped, or baroque, pearls were especially admired. By the late 1600s, however, people began to favor less extravagant displays of pearls as a result of a changing religious and political climate, combined with a decline in pearls arriving from the New World.
With pearls so abundant in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Mannar (between India and Sri Lanka), Indian and Middle Eastern cultures have a long history of using pearls. Throughout the Muslim and Hindu worlds, both men and women have traditionally worn pearls. During the 1700s and 1800s, some of the world's finest collections of pearls, typically from the Black-lipped Pearl Oyster and Ceylon Pearl Oyster, were owned by rulers in these regions.
Both Islamic and Hindu philosophies celebrate pearls: in Islamic thought, pearls represent perfection and completeness. For Hindus, the pearl is one of the planetary gems, associated with the moon and second only to the diamond in esteem. Kashmir Shaivites talk about the vision of the Blue Pearl as an indication of spiritual advancement. Christian scriptures mention pearls as being very valuable. ‘The pearl of great price’ is still in common speech, as is the injunction “Cast not your pearls before swine.”
In contrast to much of Western Europe, Russia carried on many Byzantine traditions well into the 18th century—particularly the lavish use of freshwater pearls. At the same time, Russia was influenced by Western styles, particularly from the reign of Peter the Great (ruled 1682-1725) through the end of the Romanov dynasty in 1917.
Both the Russian aristocracy and the gentry owned pearl jewelry and clothing decorated with the gems. Russian noblewomen often wore large headdresses, or kokoshniki, decorated with pearls, lace and colored gemstones. Royal workshops created a wide range of luxurious pearl objects, often adding pearl embroidery to rich textiles. On many of the pieces, the designers used pearls to create floral designs and scroll-like patterns, with the pearls serving as borders.
And these pearls came from freshwater pearl mussels that live in lakes, rivers and streams. They can produce pearls to rival those from sea-water mollusks in quality and color. Some species of freshwater pearl mussels can produce dozens of pearls at a time. Many North American pearl mussels produce high-quality pearls. People here knew this centuries before the invasion of the Europeans.
Use of these pearls for jewelry and decorative objects dates back at least 2,000 years, to the Hopewell culture in Ohio. But for a long time American freshwater pearls went almost unnoticed until the mid-1800s, when several people reported finding spectacular pearls in rivers and streams around the United States. Those discoveries triggered the beginning of large-scale harvesting—first for pearls, later for mother-of-pearl to be used in buttons, and today for shells to produce nuclei for cultured pearls.
For most of the 1800s, people harvested freshwater pearls from the pearl mussels. Then in 1887, an energetic German button maker, John Frederick Boepple, arrived in the United States and settled in the Mississippi River town of Muscatine, Iowa. Here he opened a mother-of-pearl button factory in 1891, supplied by an abundance of thick-shelled American pearl mussels from nearby rivers and streams. By 1900, this small Iowa town had earned the right to call itself the "Pearl Button Capital of the World," out-producing more established button-making centers in Europe, where buttons were made primarily from the shells of Indo-Pacific marine mollusks.
By 1905 button makers in Muscatine, Iowa, alone produced 1.5 billion buttons, almost 40 percent of the buttons produced in the entire world. And in 1916, the peak year of button production, U.S. factories, primarily based in Iowa, New York and New Jersey, turned out six billion buttons worth some $12.5 million.
The industry employed 9,500 factory workers and 9,700 mussel fishers. Part of the reason for the domination of the Muscatine operatives was the supply of cheap labor. Do the arithmetic. Six billion buttons worth $12.5 million, and that includes profit and labor costs for collecting the shells and making the buttons. Around 2/10 cents a button.
By the 1950’s most of Muscatine's button makers had gone out of business, because of the growth of the plastic button industry. The birth of a new product often signals the death of an old one. The slide rule used to be an essential tool for every engineer. The advent of the pocket scientific calculator made the slide rule obsolete. I remember it happening around 1972 when Hewlett Packard sent all the mathematicians in my group an advertisement for their scientific calculator, a really great deal at $400. Now those calculators are around $12 and everyone focuses on calculators that can draw graphs. Anyway, back to the mussels. Nowadays mussel fishers across the Midwest send their shells by the ton to foreign factories that use them to make bead nuclei for use in pearl culturing.
As early as the 1920s, Japanese pearl culturing farms were importing several hundred tons of pearl mussel shells each year to be cut into nuclei for implanting into marine pearl oysters. So the old grit theory of pearl formation is true in the pearl gardens.
Shell material, is basically identical to nacre, so it is ideally suited for this purpose because of its whiteness and because it can be easily drilled. By 1960, pearl mussel shells had become a major export for states along the Mississippi River. At its height in 1993, the industry exported nearly 7,000 tons of shells. That’s an awful lot of mussels. These states are the major source of nuclei for use in pearl culturing worldwide.
In 1914 Japanese pearl farmers began culturing freshwater pearls using the pearl mussels native to Lake Biwa, their largest lake, near Kyoto. You may have heard of Biwa pearls because of the success of this enterprise. In1971 the Biwa pearl farmers produced six tons of cultured pearls. Think about that in terms of six tons of pearl necklaces.
Since then, pollution and over-harvesting (greed) have brought about the virtual extinction of this animal. Undeterred, Japanese pearl farmers now culture a hybrid pearl mussel—a cross between the last remaining Biwa Pearl Mussels and a closely related species from China—in other Japanese lakes.
Akoya is another name you may know. Mother-of-pearl from the shells of Akoya Pearl Oysters has long been valued in Japan for decorative inlay, but until recently pearls held little appeal for the Japanese. Akoya pearls became popular in Japan only after they began to be cultured for export in the 1920s. By the 1950s, Akoya pearls had become very popular. The single strand of Akoya pearls was what well-dressed women wore, all over the world.
You may have seen too the little pearl Buddhas from China. The Chinese have placed tin molds with tiny Buddha images in freshwater Cockscomb Pearl Mussels to create Buddha blister pearls, since AD 500—the world's first cultured pearls. Blister pearls are those attached to the shell of the mollusk. The Chinese have been exporting these Buddhas for 1500 years, without changing the model every three years to create a new fashion.
When I lived in London in the 50’s the public was still familiar with the Cockney Pearly Kings and Queens. These were husband and wife teams who were street vendors selling fruits and vegetables—in England they are called costermongers. Around 1880 such people began decorating their trousers and jackets with rows of mother-of-pearl buttons. Henry Croft, a street sweeper, became the first real Pearly, completely covering his clothing with buttons, including hat and bow tie. Soon London had 300 Pearly kings and queens "ruling" its various districts. Street peddling has declined but the Pearlies still continue to appear in full regalia, with their horses and carts to raise money for hospitals and orphanages at special events.
But the famous and the big, best-known sources of pearls are marine mollusks, especially the pearl oysters, conchs and abalone found worldwide. Each species has a unique form, ecology and history.
The largest living pearl oyster, Pinctada maxima can reach close to a foot across. This species has been harvested for more than a century in the South Pacific for its mother-of-pearl. Though cultured as early as the late 1800s, these pearls became widely distributed only in the 1970s.
Even with the best of care pearls perish over time, owing to the decay of the organic constituent, conchiolin. Pearls that have been discovered in ancient tombs crumbled to dust at a touch, and those once in ancient rings have vanished or only remain as a brown powder, while the garnets, diamonds, or other stones set with them are unaffected by the passing of the centuries.
For those unafraid of numbers here are some. Pearls are measured in several ways. A carat is a unit of weight for diamonds and most other gemstones. One carat equals 200 milligrams (0.200 grams). There are 453 grams in a pound. So a pearl weighing a grocery pound would be 2265 carats. Therefore, if your husband weighs 170 pounds, you have a 385,050-carat husband using the same measures!
As an aside for ring owners. A karat, is not be confused with carat. When used with gold, it is a unit of purity-- 24-karat gold is pure gold, but usually you mix gold with a metal like copper or silver to make jewelry (because pure gold is too soft). Each karat indicates 1/24th of the whole. So if a piece of jewelry is made of metal that is 18 parts gold and 6 parts copper, that is 18-karat gold.
Cultured pears are usually weighed in carats or measured in millimeters, but natural pearls are nearly always been weighed in grains. A grain corresponds to a quarter of a carat (or 0.05 grams). Consequently, a carat is equal to 4 grains and a gram to 5 carats or 20 grains. Gems and gold are weighed in troy ounces. To distinguish our ordinary ounces from troy ounces I call them grocery ounces.
The round cultured pearls are the ones most often classified on the basis of their diameter (in millimetres).
As in the case of diamonds there are famous pearls, and several have the usual curse story associated with stones so valuable that owners are often murdered for them. One owner even had his name on a diamond and a pearl. Here are a few of the most famous.
The Abernethy Pearl
The Abernethy is the most famous and perhaps most perfect specimen of a Scottish freshwater pearl, weighing 44 grains, which would be about 2200 mg. The pearl was collected by Bill Abernethy, a professional pearl diver, from an “odd-shaped mussel” in the River Tay in 1967. Not only was it huge, for a freshwater specimen, it was also of an amazing quality. The Abernethy Pearl was on display in a store in Cairncross, Scotland, for nearly 30 years, but was sold in 1992 for an undisclosed amount. Scots have searched for pearls in the River Tay for hundreds of years, and many rivers in Scotland were sources of freshwater pearls until the ‘progress’ of the Industrial Revolution polluted the waterways and killed the mussels.
The Hope Pearl
Possibly the most famous pearl, the Hope is a white drop-shaped freshwater, blister pearl weighing 90,000 mg or 450 carats or 2.98 troy ounces, or 90 grams,or 3.17 grocery ounces. Take your pick . It measures approximately two by four inches in size and ranges in color from white on one end to greenish-gold on the other. The Hope Pearl was first owned by Henry Philip Hope, the banker collector who also once owned the Hope Diamond, in the 19th century. You can see the Pearl in the British Museum of Natural History. In both cases he made it a condition of sale that his name stay affixed to the stone, whoever bought it. A simple way to keep his name alive.
The Big Pink Pearl
This pearl was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest known natural abalone pearl. Abalone is a mollusk, related to a sea snail. People who eat them say they are similar in flavor to a clam. On a Japanese menu it would be Awabi and in Latin America would be called Loco. The pearl weighs 470 carats, or 94,000 mg. This is 3.3 grocery ounces. It is classified as baroque, which means unusually shaped. It is said to be owned by a pearl diver in California, and it was last valued in the early 1990s at $4.7 million. It was found at California’s Salt Point State Park in 1990.
La Pellegrina Pearl
The La Pellegrina, or "The Incomparable,” pearl weighs 111.5 grains.0.232 troy ounces. This perfectly round silver pearl was found off the coast of South America and was once part of the Spanish crown jewels. It was brought to Russia from India in the 18th century, and was known as the Zozima Pearl, after the Czar’s jeweler. It was lost for a while, but resurfaced and was sold by Christie’s auction house in 1987 for $463,800.
Gogibus Pearl
This pearl was the largest known specimen in Europe during the early 17th century. It was found off the coast of the West Indies, and is pear-shaped. It weighed 126 carats, or 25,200 mg…close to a grocery ounce. Spain’s King Philip IV bought it from a merchant named Gogibus in 1620. Apparently he wore it as a button on his cap.
La Peregrina Pearl (Elizabeth Taylor’s Pearl)
The La Peregrina, or “The Pilgrim” pearl, has a long history that started in the Spanish possession of Panama in the mid 16th century and ended up in Hollywood, California in 1969. . The pearl is white and weighs 203.84 grains 0.425 troy ounces. It was found off the coast of Panama and was given to King Phillip II, of Spain, who in turn gave it to his wife Mary as a wedding present. It moved around among other members of Spanish royalty, and also among the French Bonapartes. The British Marquis of Abercorn bought it from the son of French emperor Napoleon III. For a while it was even owned by Mary Tudor, the daughter of the often married English King Henry VIII.. In 1969 the Welsh actor Richard Burton paid $37,000 for it and gave it to his English wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who still owns it. She nearly lost it, in both senses, when her dog thought it was something to play with. It was rescued slightly damaged, from the jaws of the beast.
Mancini Pearls
These two large drop-shaped pearls are set in earrings and were owned at first by the de Medicis, ruling family of Florence. Maria de Medici brought them to France when she married the French king Henry the IV in 1600, and they then went to her daughter, Henrietta Maria, when she married King Charles I of England. Christie's auction house sold the earrings for $333,000 in 1969. Some Royal marriages seem to have been based on the dowry of precious jewels that came with the lady.
Pearl of Allah
The Pearl of Allah is the largest pearl on record. It was removed from a giant claim that weighed 160 pounds by a fearless pearl diver off Palawan Island in the Philippines in 1934. This pearl is 23.8 cm long, that’s nearly 9½ inches, and weighs about 14 pounds. It is now called the Pearl of Lao-tze, named after the Taoist philosopher. A Palawan chieftain gave it to Wilbur Dowell Cobb in 1936 as a reward for saving the life of his son. In 1980, Cobb's heirs sold it to a Beverly Hills jeweler for $200,000. The San Francisco Gem Laboratory estimates that it is currently worth $40 million.
La Régente Pearl
The La Régente pearl is an oval pearl that weighs 337 grains (0.702 troy ounces). Napoleon bought it in 1811 for his second wife, Empress Marie Louise, to be set in her imperial tiara. It was sold at auction in 1887 with most of the French Crown Jewels to the famous Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé. It was sold by Christie's auction house for $859,100 in 1988.
There is a great deal written about the mystical and metaphysical properties of pearls. Most, if not all of it is goobledygook. You can look up the usual suspects in the book I recommended in a previous posting, The Book of Sacred Stones: Fact and Fallacy in the Crystal World by Barbara G. Walker. Highly recommended as being by a genuine lover of gems and crystals, who knows them well enough to recognize fiction for what it is, and is fearless in telling it like it is.
