A bottle of chutney or pickles was considered a specially valuable
delicacy. No money was ever given to the divers as wages whilst at
sea, remuneration in kind being always given instead. Each
expedition would be absent perhaps six hours, and on its return
each diver generally had between twenty and forty shells to hand
over to me. These I arranged in long rows on the deck, and allowed
them to remain there all night. Next day I cleaned them by
scraping off the coral from the shells, and then opened them with
an ordinary dinner-knife. Of course, every oyster did not produce
a pearl; in fact, I have opened as many as a hundred consecutive
shells without finding a single pearl. The gems are hidden away in
the fleshy part of the oyster, and have to be removed by pressure
of the thumb. The empty shells are then thrown in a heap on one
side, and afterwards carefully stowed away in the hold, as they
constitute a valuable cargo in themselves, being worth--at that
time, at any rate (1864)--from 200 pounds to 250 pounds, and even
350 pounds a ton. All the pearls I found I placed in a walnut
jewel-case, measuring about fourteen inches by eight inches by six
inches. The value of the treasure increased day by day, until it
amounted to many thousands of pounds; but of this more hereafter.
I did not know much of the value of pearls then--how could I,
having had no previous experience?

Captain Jensen, however, assured me at the end of the season that
we had something like 50,000 pounds worth of pearls aboard, to say
nothing about the value of the shells, of which we had about thirty
tons. It must be clearly understood that this is Captain Jensen's
estimate--I am utterly unable to give one. The oysters themselves
we found very poor eating, and no one on board cared about them.
Some of the shells contained one pearl, others two, three, and even