Rescuing “That Tired Irregular Pearl from Such Lengthy Isolation”

The conclusion considers the enduring lessons of two centuries of continuity and change in pearl production and circulation. Two hundred years after the Caribbean pearl fisheries’ heyday, the widespread interest in the diversity of form and function that pearls had come to symbolize endured in the personal and imperial imagination. This early American experiment in wealth production honed the governing impulse to contain and categorize objects and subjects by their perceived nature. But neither pearls nor people could ever be easily or entirely controlled. Like pearls, people offer an infinitely varied expression of a single unifying identity and their subjective judgment—as evidenced in assessments of pearl’s value—remained beyond the purview of imperial authority. This essential independence of imagination is embodied by the baroque pearl transformed by a jeweler into exquisite art and the enduring utility of the term beyond pearls as a metaphor for unbounded and irregular expression. Even as many of pearls’ classical associations endured—their sensuality and their association with death, unnatural pairings, and maritime peril—the global connections forged in the post-Columbus years transformed the core of pearls’ identity from simplicity to multiplicity.

“A Few More or Less Make No Difference”

This chapter considers how pearls’ subjective beauty, their complex and mysterious origins, and their powerful association with mastery of the seas allowed them to remain a powerful heuristic device for the expression of ideas about mutability, worth, and the nature of different places and peoples around the world. As empires moved to objectify profit and regulate the role of subjects in new ways, pearls continued to serve as a useful index (elenco in Spanish, a word Pliny the Elder employed to denote an elongated pearl but that, by the early seventeenth century, had come to stand for the very impulse to order and compartmentalize that the jewel provoked) of peoples’ highly independent and contingent calculations of worth. Through a consideration of crown-sponsored pearl-fishing interventions in the Scottish Highlands and along Swedish rivers close to the city of Gothenburg, this chapter traces how pearls continued to facilitate the expression of distinct approaches to resource husbandry at scales personal and imperial. The chapter further explores the late-seventeenth-century market for pearls in London and the jewel’s unstable political and economic value as expressed in private correspondence as well as in portraits of women and enslaved bodies whose value was considered impermanent and for purchase..

“Even The Black Women Wear Strands of Pearls”

This chapter considers the enduring significance of the Caribbean pearl-fishing settlements in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the wake of a devastating tsunami in 1541, the Pearl Coast never again reached the pearl-producing heights of the 1520s and 1530s, yet its complex political economy demanded constant crown attention and recognition of the centrality of black pearl divers to the region’s identity, as evidenced by the royal coat of arms granted to Margarita Island in 1600. This era coincided with the political merger of Portugal and Spain, a contentious political union with profound repercussions for the rules governing the movement of people and products within and beyond Iberian realms. Pearls and pearl fishing, meanwhile, continued to evoke maritime wealth and power beyond Spain, explored in art by painters charged with conveying the wonders of a world in transformation. As royal chroniclers reflected on the early history of the American pearl fisheries with an eye to assessing the errors and accomplishments of the past, crown officials sought to improve their management of these unruly settlements. Meanwhile, enslaved laborers in Venezuela and diplomats in England and Italy continued to use pearls to navigate the changing parameters of their lives.

Pearls and a Political Ecology of Empire, 1498–1541

This chapter traces how the Caribbean fisheries were embedded in global Iberian merchant networks that spanned the Atlantic and stretched into the Indian Ocean and beyond, connecting traders, laborers, and religious missionaries from the Americas to Asia. In the first four decades of the Venezuelan pearl-fishing settlements’ existence (their most lucrative ones), residents put forth their vision of an emerging American political economy, one which had a living ecology at its heart. The expertise of Warao, Guaquerí, and Arawak communities profoundly shaped vernacular practices of wealth husbandry along the Pearl Coast. So, too, did the skills of enslaved West Africans and indigenous peoples from around the Caribbean basin, all of whom labored in increasing numbers and various capacities alongside the motley assortment of European who came to settle, trade, and conduct slave-raiding in the region.

“Regardless of Gender, Class, Color, and Condition”

This chapter turns to pearl consumption practices in the seventeenth century and considers what they reveal about the overlap between personal and imperial approaches to the custodianship of value. Drawing on personal correspondence of high-ranking diplomats, smugglers, widows, and children in Spain, as well as Inquisition records from Lima and Cartagena, the inventories of London goldsmiths, and Amsterdam-based Sephardic jewelers’ ledgers, it shows that the use and exchange of pearls among families, friends, and business associates reflected highly contextual assessments of value and worth. The personal political economies that pearls illuminated were often, if not always, at odds with official assessments of the jewel, which tried to remove them from their context and assign them arbitrary financial valuations. In art, pearls could be used to explore the supposed nature of different types of subjects, but in reality they figured in the socially embedded wealth husbandry practices of people of diverse backgrounds and means. The sixteen thousand smuggled pearls discovered in a small lead box that sank in 1622 with the Spanish galleon Santa Margarita illustrate the tremendous variety of the jewel, their subjective appeal, and their accessibility.

Making “A Machine of Pearls” in the Seventeenth Century

This chapter considers the place of pearls and pearl fisheries in the context of Iberian crisis of the seventeenth century. As arbitristas, or experts, proposed all sorts of solutions intended to address Iberia’s financial and political woes, this zeitgeist of improvement shaped plans for, and reflections on, pearl fishing around the globe. These pearl-fishing proposals drew on a mixture of custom and innovation. As observers of pearl diving in the Caribbean continued to report horrific suffering alongside remarkably autonomous practices by enslaved workers, the Spanish crown supported proposals for Pacific coast fisheries that relied on diverse skilled crew as well as new diving technologies designed to render enslaved workers unnecessary. The chapter focuses on the Cardona Company voyages to California, which included black laborers as well as levantisco, or Levantine, divers and elaborate diving suits. The chapter also considers how the vexing yet appealing complexity of pearls and pearl-fishing settlements were reflected in a 1680 account of Sri Lankan pearl fishing written by Portuguese author João de Ribeiro and in the 1681 Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias (the reissue of the body of laws) governing the Spanish Indies.

Sex, Death, and the Sea

This chapter considers the late medieval cultural and legal contexts that shaped ideas about pearls and laws governing their harvesting and use in Iberia and Europe more generally. It focuses on two sources in particular. The first is Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and its emphasis on pearls’ sensual, maritime origin as the product of living organisms (oysters) associated with female sexuality as well as the allure and danger of the sea. The second work at the chapter’s heart is the thirteenth-century Spanish law code known as the Siete Partidas, which would form the basis of the capitulaciones (or sailing orders) that Columbus agreed upon with Spain’s monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel before sailing in 1492. The chapter also considers the words for pearls that were in circulation in Spain in 1492 and contained within Antonio de Nebrija’s Castilian Grammar, published that year. As Nebrija acknowledged explicitly, the Grammar stood as a testament to the growing importance of vernacular language and the centrality of language itself to the extension of power. Vernacular language (including the words for pearls) and practice would be transformed by the encounter with the Americas.

Introduction

Pearls call to mind a simple, feminine beauty in the modern imagination, but this was not always the case. In the early modern period, they evoked the excitement and uncertainty of distant places and unfamiliar peoples. Pearls were one of the earliest sources of American wealth to be exploited by the Spanish and their associates in the wake of Columbus’s voyages; the Venezuelan pearl fisheries provided critical lessons in the meaning of maritime empire. The webs of free and unfree labor that produced this early Caribbean pearl bonanza embedded the Americas in global networks of migration and commerce.