to Mr. Murray's informer, who told him, " that a lady on the Conway nets nearly a thousand a-year by the pearls of that river, under a charter." In Cumberland, the famous circumnavigator, Sir John Hawkins, had a patent for fishing the Irt, a river which Drayton dwells upon at more than his usual length :

Irt, of all the rest, though small, the richest girl,
Her costly bosom strew'd with precious orient pearl,
Bred in her shining shells, which to the deaw doth yawn,
Which deaw they sucking in, conceive that lusty spawn,
Of which when they grow great, and to their fulness swell,
They cast, which those at hand there gathering, dearly sell!" +

In Scotland, Drummond sings of " the pearly Don;" and the recollection of the ancient celebrity of the Spey and the rivers of Perthshire has been kept alive by some modern attempts to revive the fishery, which at one time was so considerable that the historian has deemed it worthy his notice. "It is singular," says Mr. Tytler, "to find so pretious an article as pearls amongst the subjects of Scottish trade, yet the fact rests on good authority. The Scottish pearls in the possession of Alexander I. were celebrated in distant countries for their extreme size and beauty; and, as early as the twelfth century, there is evidence of a foreign demand for this species of luxury. As the commercial intercourse with the east increased, the rich oriental pearl, from its superior brilliancy, and more perfect form, excluded the Scottish pearls from the jewel-market; and by a statute of the Parisian goldsmiths, in the year 1355, we find it enacted that no worker in gold or silver shall set any Scottish pearls with oriental ones, except in large ornaments or jewels for churches." A vestige of this trade remained until a comparatively recent period; for we find that between the years 1761 and 1799, pearls to the amount of 10,000l. worth were sent from the Tay and Ila to London; and I believe there are still a few idlers on the banks of some of the large rivers of Scotland who procure a precarious livelihood by fishing the pearl-mussel. There were similar fisheries in the north of Ireland about a century and a half ago, carried on with considerable profit. Sir Robert Redding has given a good account of the mode in which the fishery was conducted; and notwithstanding the wearisome length of these details, you must permit me to give two short extracts from his paper, detailing the method of capture, and the kind of shell which indicated a margaritiferous fish. "The manner of

Mag. Nat. Hist. iii. 451.

+ See also Fuller's Worthies, i. 337. Hist. of Scotland, ii. 306.

their fishing is not extraordinary. The poor people, in the warm months before harvest is ripe, whilst the rivers are low and clear, go into the water: some with their toes, some with wooden tongs, and some by putting a sharpened stick into the opening of the shell, take them up. And although by common estimate not above one shell in a hundred may have a pearl, and of those pearls not above one in a hundred be tolerably clear, yet a vast number of fair merchantable pearls, and too good for the apothecary, are offered to sale by these people every summer assize.""The shells that have the best pearls are wrinkled, twisted, or bunched, and not smooth and equal as those that have none." "And the crafty fellows will guess so well by the shell, that though you watch them never so carefully, they will open such shells under the water, and put the pearls in their mouths, or otherwise conceal them. That same person told me, that when they have been taking up shells, I believed by such signs as I have mentioned, that they were sure of good purchase, and refused good sums for their shares, that yet they found no pearl at all in many of them. Upon discourse with an old man that had been longest at this trade, he advised me to seek not only when the waters were low, but in a dusky gloomy day also, lest, said he, the fish see you, for then he will shed his pearl in the sand of which I believed no more than that some mussels had voided their pearls, and such are often found in the sands."*

After the discovery of America, the traffic in pearls passed, in a great measure, from the east to the shores of the western world. The first Spaniards who landed in terra firma found the savages decked with pearl necklaces and bracelets; and among the civilised people of Mexico and Peru they saw pearls of a beautiful form as eagerly sought after as in Europe. The hint was taken; the stations of the oysters were sought out; and cities rose into splendour and affluence in their vicinity, all supported by the profits on these seaborn gems. The first city which owed its rise to this cause was New Cadiz, in the little island of Cubagua; and the writers of that period discourse eloquently of the riches of the first planters, and the luxury they displayed; but now

* Phil. Trans. an. 1693, xvii. 660–662. It is a singular fact that Humboldt never heard of pearls being found in the fresh-water shells of South America, though several species of the genus Unio abound in the rivers of Peru.-Pers. Nar. ii. 282. They are to be found in those of North America. Gould's Invert. Massach. 115. In the Lach. Lapponica of Linnæus, ii. 104-107, the reader will find an account of a pearl-fishery in Lapland similar to our Scottish one.

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not a vestige of the city remains, and downs of shifting sand cover the desolate island. The same fate soon overtook the other cities; for, from various causes, and particularly from the never ceasing and indiscriminate destruction of the Meleagrinæ, the banks became exhausted, and towards the end of the sixteenth century this traffic in pearls had dwindled into insignificance. Of its value, when first established, the following extract will give you some notion :-" The quint, which the king's officers drew from the produce of pearls, amounted to 15,000 ducats; which, according to the value of the metals in those times, and the extensiveness of the contraband trade, might be considered as a very considerable sum. It appears that till 1530 the value of the pearls sent to Europe amounted yearly, on an average, to more than 800,000 piastres. In order to judge of the importance of this branch of commerce to Seville, Toledo, Antwerp, and Genoa, we should recollect that at the same period the whole of the mines of America did not furnish two millions of piastres, and that the fleet of Ovando seemed to be of immense wealth, because it contained nearly 2,600 marks of silver. Pearls were so much the more sought after, as the luxury of Asia had been introduced into Europe by two ways diametrically opposite; that of Constantinople, where the Paleologi wore garments covered with strings of pearls; and that of Grenada, the residence of the Moorish kings, who displayed at their court all the luxury of the east. The pearls of the East Indies were preferred to those of the West; but the number of the latter which circulated in commerce was no less considerable in the times which immediately followed the discovery of America. In Italy, as well as in Spain, the islet of Cubagua, in the mouth of the Rio de la Hacha, became the object of numberless mercantile speculations."*

In the east the divers are hired labourers, bred up to their business, which, though a hard one, is voluntary, and appears to be less prejudicial to health than is sometimes asserted. It was far otherwise in the west, where, according to an historian, who has been accused of rather palliating than otherwise the cruelties of the Spanish adventurers, the Indians, unused to the practice, were compelled to dive for the oysters; and," he adds, "this dangerous and unhealthy employment was an additional calamity, which contributed not a little to the extinction of that devoted race."† It is when the memory of these forced labours and cruelties * Humboldt's Pers. Narrative, ii. 279.

+ Robertson's America, i. 190. 4to. See also Forbes in the Naturalist, iv. 313, &c.

come over us that our feelings rise against a trade which has seemingly no other object than

"To spangle the attires, and deck the amorous brows"

of our fair; and then we are disposed to sympathize in the sentiment which Mrs. Hemans has embodied in the following beautiful verses to the pearl-diver.

"Thou hast been where the rocks of coral grow,
Thou hast fought with eddying waves;

Thy check is pale and thy heart beats low,
Thou searcher of ocean's caves!

Thou hast look'd on the gleamy wealth of old,
Midst wrecks where the brave have striven;
The deep is a strong and a fearful hold,

But thou its bars hast riven.

A wild and weary life is thine,
A wasting toil and lone !

Though the treasure-grots for thee may shine,
To all besides unknown.

A weary life!-but a swift decay,

Soon, soon shall set thee free;

Thou art passing fast from the strife away—
Thou wrestler with the sea!

In thy dim eye, on thy hollow check,
Well are the death-signs read:
Go! for the pearl in its cavern seek,
Ere hope and power be fled!
And bright in beauty's coronal
That glistening gem shall be;
A star to all in the festive hall,—
But who shall think on thee?

None!-as it gleams from the queen-like head,
Not one midst throngs will say,

A life hath been like a rain-drop shed,
For that pale, quivering ray."
"*

The pearl-fishery of South America has of late years been revived, with what degree of success is unknown to me, though I believe it has been small. I have, indeed, seen it somewhere asserted that the value of the new trade is very considerable, and that Congress had, in 1823, granted the exclusive right of the Colombian fishery to Rundell, Bridge, and Rundell, of London, for the term of ten years. The "General Pearl and Coral Fishery Association" of London,

"The Pearl-Wearer," a short poem by Mr. Proctor, has a similar tendency and moral. It is quoted by Dr. Baird in his tract entitled "Pearls and Pearl-Fisheries," which every reader interested in the subject should consult.—Chambers's Misc. Usef. and Entert. Tracts, No. 167.

in the year 1825, commissioned Lieutenant Hardy, an officer of great zeal and integrity, to establish a pearl-fishery in the gulf of California, but the speculation proved an entire and ruinous failure; not from any deficiency on the part of their clever agent, but from the deficiency of oysters, and their unproductiveness in the sought-for prize. The pearloysters of this gulf, and of South America in general, are not found in beds or banks, but always in the cracks and crevices of rocks; and so "firmly does the oyster fix himself to the rock, that, in order to tear him away, it is necessary to get a purchase' upon him, by placing the feet on the bottom. The excessive difficulty of doing this is incredible; it requires the muscular strength of the whole body to overcome the resistance of the water's buoyancy." † And when at length a great number of shells were collected in the Gulf of Moléxa, alas! six very small pearls were all that the large number produced. The divers, too, seem to be exposed to greater danger than they are in the Indian Ocean from the attacks of sharks and other fish, to guard against which, they arm themselves with a stick about nine inches long, pointed at both ends. "The diver grasps it in the middle, and when attacked by a shark, he thrusts it into the monster's expanded jaws in such a position, that, in attempting to seize his victim, the jaws close upon the two sharp points; thus secured, he can do no mischief, but swims away with his martyrdom; the diver rises, and seeks a new weapon of defence." Lieutenant Hardy spiritedly describes the marvellous adventure of one of these divers, but the story is too long for me to transcribe in this place; and I hasten to finish this general survey of the pearl-fishery by noticing that which is now carried on to some extent in the Australasian seas. Captain Beechy tells us that there one vessel "sometimes collected seventeen hundred of these shells in one day;" and afterwards he mentions that the Queen of Otaheite, "seeing the estimation in which the

* "For one branch of commerce, the pearl-fishery, California has been famed from its first discovery. The glory and the riches derived from this source are, however, almost traditional: at least, the actual amount of the trade is insignificant. Nevertheless it is by no means certain that the sources of a beneficial commerce in this respect do not yet exist, provided proper means were taken for pursuing it with effect."-A. Forbes on the PearlFishery of Lower California in the Naturalist, iv. 312, &c.

+ Quart. Review, xlii. 344. Lieut. Hardy adds, "I have no doubt that, by means of its long beard, the oyster has the power of locomotion, and that it changes its situation according to its pleasure or convenience." Licut. Hardy is entirely wrong here; the beard is a chain or cable which the animal cannot unfix.