Diving for Pearls is now closed. No further entries will be added to it, but the quotations gathered will stay here, and can be browsed by author or category.
Precious the bounteous widow’s mite;
And precious, for extreme delight,
The largesse from the churl:
Precious the ruby’s blushing blaze,
And alba’s blest imperial rays,
And pure cerulean pearl.
Precious the pentitential tear …
Christopher Smart, ‘A Song to David’ (1763), stanza (and line)
One of a series of Cheltenham & Gloucester advertisements from the 1990s/200s, featuring a boy pearl diver. The series was initiated in 1995, filmed by underwater camera specialist Mike Portelly.
Whether on earth, in air, or main,
Sure ev’ry thing alive is vain!
Does not the hawk all fowls survey,
As destin’d only for his prey?
And do not tyrants, prouder things,
Think men were born for slaves to kings?
When the crab views the pearly strands,
Or Tagus bright with golden sands,
Or crawls beside the coral grove,
And hears the ocean roll above,
“Nature is too profuse,” says he,
“Who gave all these to pleasure me!”
When bord’ring pinks and roses bloom,
And ev’ry garden breathes perfume,
When peaches glow with sunny dyes
Like Laura‘s cheek when blushes rise,
When with huge figs the branches bend,
When clusters from the vine depend,
The snail looks round on flow’r and tree,
And cries, “All these were made for me!”
John Gay, Fable XLIX: The Man and the Flea (1727), first stanza
To gratify him, Miriam looked round at the specimens in marble or plaster, of which there were several in the room, comprising originals or casts of most of the designs that Kenyon had thus far produced. He was still too young to have accumulated a large gallery of such things. What he had to show were chiefly the attempts and experiments, in various directions, of a beginner in art, acting as a stern tutor to himself, and profiting more by his failures than by any successes of which he was yet capable. Some of them, however, had great merit; and in the pure, fine glow of the new marble, it may be, they dazzled the judgment into awarding them higher praise than they deserved. Miriam admired the statue of a beautiful youth, a pearlfisher; who had got entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the sea, and lay dead among the pearl-oysters, the rich shells, and the seaweeds, all of like value to him now.
“The poor young man has perished among the prizes that he sought,” remarked she. “But what a strange efficacy there is in death! If we cannot all win pearls, it causes an empty shell to satisfy us just as well. I like this statue, though it is too cold and stern in its moral lesson; and, physically, the form has not settled itself into sufficient repose.”
…
As he attended her through the antechamber, she pointed to the statue of the pearl-diver.
“My secret is not a pearl,” said she; “yet a man might drown himself in plunging after it.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860), extracts from chapters XIII and XIV.
An infant when it gazes on a light,
A child the moment when it drains the breast,
A devotee when soars the Host in sight,
An Arab with a stranger for a guest,
A sailor when the prize has struck in fight,
A miser filling his most hoarded chest,
Feel rapture; but not such true joy are reaping
As they who watch o’er what they love while sleeping.
For there it lies so tranquil, so beloved,
All that it hath of life with us is living;
So gentle, stirless, helpless, and unmoved,
And all unconscious of the joy ‘t is giving;
All it hath felt, inflicted, pass’d, and proved,
Hush’d into depths beyond the watcher’s diving:
There lies the thing we love with all its errors
And all its charms, like death without its terrors.
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the Second, two stanzas (1819-1824)
I dive down into the depth of the ocean of forms,
hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the formless.
No more sailing from harbor to harbor with this my weather-beaten boat.
The days are long passed when my sport was to be tossed on waves.
And now I am eager to die into the deathless.
Into the audience hall by the fathomless abyss
where swells up the music of toneless strings
I shall take this harp of my life.
I shall tune it to the notes of forever,
and when it has sobbed out its last utterance,
lay down my silent harp at the feet of the silent.
Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Ocean of Forms,’ from Gitanjali (1913)
Far and strange are the refuges in which such an imagination seeks oblivion of the immediate and the ugly. His life was that of a pearl-diver, breathless in the thick element while he groped for the priceless word, and condemned to plunge again and again.
Henry James, from his essay ‘Gustave Flaubert’ (1893).
Barkwell. You shan’t have her at all. Fifteen thousand pounds! – if I thought my Niece would ever think of thee as a Husband now, I’d put one half of her fortune into each pocket, drive to Dover, and leap into the Sea to disappoint thee.
Evergreen. Why we’d fish thee up again, like a pearl oyster, for the sake of your riches. Neither Earth, Sea, or Air, in this happy age, can keep Curiosities from us now.
Hannah Cowley, More Ways Than One (1783), Act V Scene i, extract
Hannah Cowley (1743-1809) was a British playwright and poet. More Ways Than One is loosely based on Moliere’s L’école des femmes (The School for Wives).
One day when Amry the diver had come to sell to the court jeweller the pearls for which he had sought under the golden waters of Bahrein, the lovely Anouba, wife of the Caliph, caused her palanquin to stop at the merchant’s door and showed him a beautiful black pearl with golden lights.
“Can you show me a pearl like this?” she said.
The merchant took the pearl, placed it on his silken cushion, and contemplated it, his two hands crossed on his breast like a brahmin in the act of worshipping. But he soon shook his head discouragingly and said: “There are not two pearls like this in the whole world.”
Amry, who had approached, repeated the merchant’s words in a low voice.
“So,” said the lovely Anouba, “you will not even try to gain the twenty thousand sequins which I am offering for this jewel?”
“Princess,” said the merchant, bowing to the ground, “ask me for emeralds as large as pigeons’ eggs, for branching agates, for topaz sparkling like the eyes of the tiger, for rubies of Ceylon which emit tongues of fire in the night. Your humble slave will lay all these treasures at your feet. But the stars will fall in a golden rain on the dome of your palace before another pearl like this one shall have been found.”
While he was speaking, the Princess had been looking from under her veil at Amry, who had remained leaning against a bamboo pillar, his eyes fixed on the pearl.
“Is this man one of your slaves?” she asked the merchant.
Amry proudly raised his head and said: “I am Amry, the pearl fisher; the son of my mother is free.”
“Amry,” said Anouba, “do you wish to gain the twenty thousand sequins?”
“Ask me rather if I wish to die,” replied the fisherman in a solemn voice.
“What do you mean?”
“In the bay of the Island of Bahrein,” replied Amry, “at a depth of two hundred fathoms, there is a bank of coral on which old Phangar, the most famous fisherman in the Gulf, found in his youth the black pearl worn by Prince Mescheb in the hilt of his dagger; but Phangar has never descended again to this abyss, and he grows pale and shivers with terror when he passes in his boat over the bank where he found the precious pearl.”
“What did he see there?” asked the beautiful Anouba, with eager curiosity.
“When Phangar, with his right foot in the loop of the rope, gave the signal to his comrades, and the leaden weight attached to the line dragged him down into the abyss, he went through a layer of emeralds which boiled and surged round him like lava from a volcano. When the line touched the bottom, the shock was so great that he fell on his hands and knees. The keen blades and points of the coral, which burn like red-hot irons, caused his blood to flow from a hundred wounds, but he could not think of these. He set to work, and had already collected some twenty shell-fish in his canvas pocket, when it seemed to him that part of the bank near him rose up, and that a floating mass, greyish in colour, like the corals, was slowly advancing, waving long flexible branches like creepers. One of the branches slid on to his breast and fastened there, but Phangar could not cry out. A gigantic sea-spider was floating two fathoms from his face, fixing upon him its pale green eyes from which darted two rays of light.
“When Phangar’s companions, who had remained in the boat, suddenly felt the signal line grow taut, they hastened to pull it up. The fisherman had lost consciousness and his sides bore the marks of the monster’s embrace. Three days afterwards, when he opened the pearl oysters which he had gathered, he found in one of them a superb black pearl, which he sold for a hundred pieces of gold to Prince Mescheb.”
“Well,” said the Caliph’s wife, “since you know exactly where black pearls are to be found, you must dive in the Bahrein Gulf, kill the monster who guards the treasures and bring back to me the pearl which I desire to possess.”
Amry replied: “I have an old and infirm mother whom I support by my work, I have a bride, an orphan whom I must love and protect … besides, I should risk my life in vain to satisfy your desire, in all the oceans of the world there are not two pearls alike.”
Anouba looked at the fisherman for a moment between the folds of her yashmak, and said to him: “Come to the Palace to-morrow at the fifth hour.”
Then she returned to her palanquin.
The next day, Amry, clothed in his festal robes, went to the Caliph’s Palace. A black mute, who was awaiting him at the door of the gardens, led him to the Princess’s apartment. Anouba, still veiled, was reclining on cushions. She made a sign to the black man, who bowed low and vanished.
“Approach,” said the Princess to the fisherman.
The latter took two steps forward and knelt before her.
“You say,” Anouba continued, “that nature cannot produce two pearls alike; behold!”
Her arm, loaded with sounding bracelets, passed across her face, and the silk gauze which had veiled it fell away.
Amry uttered a cry of admiration and remained motionless as a statue. It was not with mere mortal eyes that the Princess seemed to gaze at him, but rather with two black diamonds set in the face of an enchantress, polished like ivory, whiter and purer than a lily bathed in the rays of the moon. The brilliance which had dazzled Amry was gradually dimmed, as though veiled by a cloud, and he saw no more than two soft, gazelle-like orbs, suffused with an intoxicating warmth, which looked into his very heart.
Anouba opened her lips to speak; but Amry, stretching his arms towards her, whispered in a broken voice: “I will go and seek the pearl in the depths of the abyss of Bahrein, and I will leave my flesh and my blood on the jagged points of the corals, as I leave here my heart and my soul!”
The next day, at the earliest dawn, Amry took his boat and steered for the place where he knew the treasure was to be found. When he had descended to the depths of the sea he hastened to fill his canvas pocket with the finest shell-fish. He was about to return to the surface, when he saw in a fissure of a rock, an oyster of extraordinary size. He seized it. But, at the same moment a monster which he had not previously seen, darted towards him and twined itself round him, seeking to suffocate him. Amry struggled with all his might, he felt life flowing from him from numerous wounds; at last, with a supreme effort, he freed his right hand and plunged his dagger between the eyes of the gigantic spider.
He pulled the signal cord and his comrades hastened to draw him up; but when he reached the light of day he lost so much blood through his eyes, nose and mouth, that he fainted and only regained consciousness several hours later, in the palace of the Caliph’s wife, who had caused him to be brought thither.
When he came to himself, he was greatly surprised to find himself in this strange place, and above all to see the lovely Princess, with unveiled face, alone in his company.
“Well,” she said in her melodious voice, “have you been succesful?”
“Yes,” replied Amry, “the monster has drunk my blood, but I killed him, and here is the treasure which he was guarding in the depths of the sea.” He held out to her the open oyster in which lay a marvelous pearl, more beautiful even then that owned by Prince Mescheb.
The Princess uttered a cry of admiration and remained in an ecstasy before this incomparable work of nature.
“Tell me, what is it you desire?” she said to him; “if you wish it, my fortune is yours.”
But Amry, prostrate at her feet, replied:
“Princess, keep your riches, Amry would not know what to do with them. You have taken from him his heart and his soul; the poor fisherman cannot hope for your love, so he prefers to die.”
And quicker than thought, he plunged his dagger into his heart.
Arabian text, 10th century
One of the historic texts cited on Leonard Rosenthal’s classic collection on the history of pearls, Au Royaume de la Pearle (1919), illustrated by Edmund Dulac in the 1920 edition. According to the notes in an English edition, the citation for this Arabian text is M. Devic, Adja ib Al-Hind (The Marvels of India). Alphonse Lemerre, Paris.
Diving for Pearls 