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History of Pearls
“Perfected by nature and
requiring no art to enhance their beauty, pearls were naturally the earliest
gems known to man” (Kunz, The Book of Pearls, 1908).
There are many stories about
the discovery of pearls but most likely the first person was a prehistoric man
who chipped his tooth when he bit into an oyster that contained a pearl.
Ancient Chinese literature refer to pearls as
originating in the brain of a dragon and being so lustrous as to be visible
from a thousand yards.
Cleopatra waggered her lover, Marc Antony, that she could give the most
expensive banquet in history. He
accepted her bet and during the dinner, Cleopatra took one of her pearl
earrings which were extremely large and rare and valuable (at that time supposedly
worth the value of 15 countries) and crushed it and dissolved it in vinegar and
drank it. Marc Anthony conceded that she
won the wager.
Ancient Greeks refer to
pearls as being produced by small shell fish and used to make necklaces of
great value. The Ancient Romans
considered pearls a great treasure and used them in triumphal processions. Pliny records that in 61 BC at the triumphal
procession of Pompey, there were 33 crowns of pearls and numerous pearl
ornaments. The emperor Caligula loved
pearls so much that he decorated his favorite horse with a pearl necklace and
wore slippers embroidered with pearls.
From the Eighth to Eleventh
century AD, pearls were mostly used as ecclesiastical decorations.
The returning Crusaders in
the Twelfth and Thirteenth century had much to do with spreading the use of
pearls as personal decorations. The
clothes of men and women were encrusted with pearls. The cutting and faceting of stones that we
are familiar with today did not exist in this time so pearls were in great
demand. In fact, unless you were of a
certain social stature, you were not even allowed to own pearls let alone wear
them.
Perhaps the best known lover of pearls was Queen Elizabeth 1
(1533-1603). She was said to always wear 7 ropes of pearls that reached to her
knees and had over three thousand pearl-embroider dresses.
Pearls in America were first found in the Pacific coast of
Mexico and the coast of Lower California.
“These pearls are noted for the great variety of colors they
display. A large percentage are black,
others are white, brown, peacock green etc.
Generally they are small and of irregular form” (Kunz, The Book of
Pearls, 1908). Europeans knew of these
pearls from the explorations of Hernando Cortés. Companies were set up by various European
countries to trade in the Mexican pearls.
The local natives were used to dive for them. These pearls became so popular that after a
certain amount of time the area had to be abandoned due to the lack of new
mollusks.
In the 1800’s many freshwater
pearls were found in the rivers of the US.
The most famous one was found in 1857 in PattersonN.J. A carpenter named Jacob Quackenback
discovered it and sold it to a jeweler named Charles L. Tiffany for $1500. This pearl was later sold to the Empress
Eugenia of France
for $2500.
News of this spread and freshwater rivers
throughout the country were besieged with people opening local mollusks in hopes
of finding valuable pearls. 52nd street
and 5th Avenue
exchanged the building for a two strand pearl necklace that his wife Mae
admired. The necklace at that time was
valued at $1,000,000 and the building is now known as the Cartier building.
Bejeweled facade, Nov. 2003 Also in the
early twentieth century many famous European necklaces and pieces of jewelry
were sold to wealthy American entrepreneurs.
One of the most famous was the “Thier’s pearls”. It belonged to the widow of the first
President of France. In 1924 it was
auctioned off at the Louvre and sold for the equivalent of $700,000.
In 1917, Morton Plant who owned a building on 52nd street and 5th
Avenue exchanged the building for a two strand pearl necklace that his wife Mae
admired. The necklace at that time was valued at $1,000,000 and the building is
now known as the Cartier building.
From this brief window of
history we can see that no other stone or metal has captivated people more than
the Natural pearl, a gem that is beautiful and elegant without doing anything
to it, a true gift of nature.
The origins of natural pearls was always the subject of
conjecture. The most common belief that
was held for many centuries was that at certain times of the year, oysters rose
to the surface of the water in the morning and opened their shells to take in
dew drops which became pearls. In the 15th
to 17th century the popular belief was that pearls are the eggs of
oysters. In the 18th century
the conclusion was that pearls were the result of the intrusion of a hard
substance or a parasite into the oyster.
This leads us to our next topic, the formation of natural and cultured
pearls.
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