Columbus's Pearls

by Neil H. Landman, Paula M. Mikkelsen, Rudiger Bieler, Bennet Bronson

The discovery of vast oyster beds in the New World generated a "pearl rush" whose bounty flooded European markets.

Inspired by greed, a messianic desire to convert the world to Christianity, and fierce competition with the oceangoing Portuguese, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain sponsored the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus in an "enterprise of the Indies": finding a new route to the riches of the Orient. Under the contract, Columbus, as Admiral of the Ocean Sea, was granted authority over all the lands he discovered, as well as 10 percent of the value of all goods obtained. In turn, the monarchs made a list of what they expected. By chance or design, pearls were the first item on this list.

Columbus set sail westward in 1492, made landfall in the Bahamas, and then explored the coasts of Cuba and of Hispaniola (the island comprising modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). After establishing the settlement of La Navidad on Hispaniola, Columbus returned to Spain in triumph, with gold, cotton, and Indians to be baptized, but without pearls. Not until his third trip, in 1498, when he reached the South American mainland, did Columbus finally find the long-sought supply of pearls--in what is now Venezuela, along the Gulf of Paria near the mouth of the Orinoco River. Noticing that the women at one Indian village there wore bracelets of "pearls or baroque pearls of high quality," Columbus bartered for these ornaments with needles, buttons, scissors, and broken majolica plates and asked about the source of the pearls. The natives gestured to the north and west.

He sailed on, passing the islands of Cubagua and Margarita, sites of what would ultimately become known as the Pearl Coast, the richest pearl grounds in the Americas. By coincidence, he gave Isla de Margarita that name--the Greco-Latin word for "pearl"--to honor Infanta Margarita of Austria, who was engaged to marry the heir to the Spanish throne. Once back in Hispaniola, Columbus became so embroiled in mediating colonial politics that he sent two ships back to Spain on their own, carrying letters that mentioned nothing about the Venezuelan pearls.

His returning sailors, however, privately sold the pearls they had acquired, and the news of this reached the Spanish court. Possibly suspecting that Columbus had kept other pearls for himself and disgruntled with his inept handling of the political situation on Hispaniola, his transport of slaves to Spain, and his reported cruelty to the sailors and West Indian natives, Ferdinand and Isabella had Columbus put in chains and returned to Spain in 1500. Released the following year, Columbus embarked on his fourth and last voyage in 1502. This time he followed the east coast of Central America, stopping en route in what are now Panama and Honduras but returning to Spain in 1504, again without pearls.

By the time Columbus died in 1506, his voyages had already initiated a "pearl rush" that was to last for the next 150 years. The first to profit were his sailors, among them Peralonso Nino, former pilot of the ship Santa Maria, who in 1499 received royal permission to explore the Pearl Coast, in clear contravention of the agreement giving Columbus exclusive authority. The chronicler Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, chaplain to Ferdinand and Isabella, recorded that Nino brought back "96 pounds of pearls, some as large as hazelnuts, very clear and beautiful, though poorly strung."

At about the same time, Alonso de Ojeda, who had sailed on the first expedition, somehow obtained Columbus's map of the South American mainland and, accompanied by a then-unknown Italian, Amerigo Vespucci (whose account of the voyage would later give the continent his name), returned to the Pearl Coast. He landed on Isla de Margarita and explored Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao before moving on to Hispaniola and the Bahamas, obtaining about sixty pounds of pearls.

The quest for pearls soon expanded. Vasco Nunez de Balboa of Spain sailed still farther west, crossing the Isthmus of Panama in 1513. Upon reaching the Pacific coast, he encountered natives wearing pearls. When asked about the source of these riches, the chief responded that the best pearls came from Tararequi in the Gulf of Panama, now called the Archipielago de las Perlas. As word of Balboa's discovery spread, other Spaniards headed for the Gulf of Panama and returned with sackfuls of pearls. Like those from Venezuela, most Panamanian pearls were destined for Spain.

Once the supply of pearls available through trade was exhausted, the Spanish began organizing pearl-harvesting ventures involving the use of slaves as pearl divers. When Christopher Columbus's son Diego became governor of Hispaniola in 1508, he established the first permanent pearl-fishing settlement on Isla Cubagua. Pearl fishing quickly expanded into other areas of the region, including Isla de Margarita and Isla Coche and eventually all the way to Cabo de la Vela in present-day Colombia. In 1535 Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, in his Natural History of the West Indies, gave the most complete description of pearl diving in the region at that time:

   Many Indians working in groups ... leave the island of Cubagua ... and go
   out in a dugout or boat early in the day to where they think they will find
   a large quantity of pearls. There they anchor the boat, in which one Indian
   remains, and he keeps the boat as still as he can. The others dive to the
   bottom. After some time, an Indian will return to the surface and deposit
   in the boat the oysters in which the pearls are found. He rests a while,
   takes a bite to eat, and once more he enters the water to stay as long as
   he can, finally returning with more oysters.... Sometimes when the sea is
   rougher than the pearl fisher would like--and also because naturally when a
   man is working underwater at a great depth, a diver's feet want to rise--it
   is only with difficulty that the worker can remain on the bottom any length
   of time. Under such conditions, the Indians use two large stones tied
   together with a cord, which they place over their shoulders, one on each
   side, and enter the water.... When he wants to rise to the surface, he
   merely drops the stones.

Working conditions were extremely harsh. Diving bosses, known as rancheros or patrones, employed teams of four to seven divers per canoe under the supervision of a majordomo. They dived to depths of eight fathoms (forty-eight feet). A diver did not last long on the Pearl Coast, especially in the early years. In 1516 Spain's new king, Carlos V, responding to appeals by the priest Bartolomeo de Las Casas for more humane treatment of the Indians, issued regulations including the maximum hours and depth of diving per day and the minimum requirements for food and lodging. These rules were ignored often enough that further royal edicts became necessary. One such edict imposed the death penalty on anyone forcing a free Indian to become a pearl diver:

   Because report has been made to us that, owing to the pearl fisheries not
   having been conducted in a proper manner, deaths of many Indians and
   Negroes have ensued, We command that no free Indian be taken to the said
   fishery under pain of death.... If, however, it should appear to them that
   the risk of death cannot be avoided by the said Indians and Negroes, let
   the fishing of the said pearls cease, since we value much more highly (as
   is right) the preservation of their lives than the gain which may come to
   us from the pearls.

Many millions of Venezuelan pearls were collected in the first half of the sixteenth century, virtually flooding European markets. From the ports of Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and Havana, vessels laden with their precious cargoes of pearls and gold set sail for Spain, a trip fraught with danger from several sources. Some ships sank at sea in tropical hurricanes. Other ships were preyed upon by pirates, whose numbers increased during the sixteenth century. Seville became the center of the pearl market, a position Venice had claimed in previous centuries. Garcilaso de la Vega wrote that pearls from the West Indies were so abundant in Seville "that they were sold in a heap in the India [custom] house ... just as if they were some kind of seed."