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(More customer reviews)The cover of "Pearls of Pearl Harbor" shows a handful of black pearls from French Polynesia, but after this false start naturalist Michael Walther proceeds to tell a little-known story about Hawaii.
In the process of putting together this little guide, Walther (with the help of a Honolulu newspaper columnist) set out to find any surviving Hawaiian pearls.
The pearl oysters of Pearl Harbor are no more. Industrialization reduced their numbers, and most of the rest fell victim to the pollution from ships sunk on Dec. 7, 1941.
Walther and Vicki Viotti's newspaper search did turn up a cross made of 21 small Pearl Harbor pearls, made in 1860.
Walther says he was surprised to learn that the biggest and best pearl jewel ever found in the islands is still on Maui, hwere it was found in 1937.
The owner wanted his identity protected, but the marble-sized jewel was authenticated by X-rays./
Paulion Iborraga, a fisherman, dredged up a Pinctada margaritifera oyster in his fishing net, with a large pearl inside it. It may have been the only one -- almost certainly the only large gem -- ever recovered from Maui.
In the late 1920s, however, Pearl and Hermes Reef in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands was heavily fished for P. margaritifera, more commonly known by the name "black-lipped shell," which appears often in accounts of South Seas trading during windjammer days.
(Pearls and Hermes Reef was named for two ships that wrecked there; that there were pearls there was coincidence.)
The reef oysters have never recovered, apparently because the spat require large adult shells to settle on, and these were almost all removed.;
At Pearl Harbor, the much smaller Pinctata radiata was done in by dredging and chemicals.
Not only the oysters are gone. Apparently very few of the pearls of either variety have survived.
Walther, trained as an anthropologist as well as a biologist, traces the history of island pearls back to the nacre eyes in Hawaiian gods and statues. The best known is Kukaiilimoku, the war god of Kamehemeha.
The Hawaiians used the pearl shells for tools and for decoration but apparently paid little attention to the little pearls.
"Pearls of Pearl Harbor" is an interesting, well-illustrated look at a minor aspect of island history, but it would be misleading to call it a book. The text is more comparable to a National Geographic magazine article, including the same quality of illustrations.
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Pearls of Pearl Harbor and Other Islands of Hawaii: The History and Cultivation of Hawaiian Pearls
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