When Europeans arrived in the Caribbean, they were stunned to watch indigenous peoples dive for pearls, often submerging for lengths of time that seemed unimaginable to the visitors.
There was nothing mysterious about the allure of pearls. Peoples across the Atlantic basin valued these naturally forming gems, which took shape in bivalves such as mollusks. Native peoples of the West Indies knew where to find them. That, at least, was what the naturalist and governor of Santo Domingo GoNZALO Fernandez de Oviedo Y Valdes wrote in his chronicle, which was first published in 1526 (and appeared in an English-language edition by Richard Willes in 1577). According to this account, groups of up to seven islanders paddled out in canoes to spots where they knew bivalves could be found “& there they plunge themselves under the water, even unto the bottom, saving one that remaineth in the Canoa or boat, which he keepeth still in one place as near he can, looking for their return out of the water.” When they surfaced, they dumped oysters into the canoe, and during their rest periods they ate some of them. For the most part they put the creatures aside until they returned home, and then gave them to a trustworthy man who pried them apart, “and they find in every of them pearls, other great or small, two, or three, or four, and sometimes five or six, and many small grains, according to the liberality of nature.” Oviedo added that when the water was deep and it was difficult to reach the bottom and remain there “these Indian fishers use to tie two great stones about them with a cord” and could then reach their destination. The men who participated in this pursuit were talented swimmers, but Oviedo believed that the key to their success lay in their remarkable capacity to hold their breath. Some, he wrote rather implausibly, “can stand in the bottom of the water for the space of one whole hour, and some more or less, according as one is more apt hereunto than another.”
Oviedo’s readers would have been fascinated by such tales of human endurance, but the account contained other information that was even more enticing. The Natives told him that they returned frequently to the same diving spots and “find them again as full of Oysters as though they had never been fished.” Oviedo speculated that the oysters must migrate to take the position of those that were captured or perhaps just proliferated in specific areas. In any event, there was little doubt of the bounty, and at times the actual pearls brought to the surface were remarkable. He claimed that in Panama he purchased a pearl that was 26 carats, which cost him 650 times the cash as he would have paid for an equal amount of gold. Oviedo identified specific islands where pearls were most abundant.
At the end of the 16th century, the anonymous author of the Drake Manuscript also described the quest for pearls. But this writer recognized that there had been a shift in the labor force. “Pearls are being fished in the ocean between the main-land and Isla de Margarita, approximately ten leagues, in three or four fathoms of water by the negroes who dive into the sea,” the manuscript noted, “holding a hoop-net to descend to the bottom where they scrape the soil where the oysters are, in order to find the pearls.” According to this natural history, “the deeper they descend in the water, the larger are the pearls they find.” These divers, who were possibly slaves (see slavery), remained (according to the author) under the water for up to 15 minutes at a time and sought pearls for an entire day.
Needless to say, such accounts fueled European desires to establish colonies in the Caribbean, and prompted those seeking wealth to try their luck in the islands.
Further reading: The Drake Manuscrip-t in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Histoire Naturelle des Indes (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996); Richard Willes, The History of Tra-vayle in the West and East Indies (London: 1577).
Peckham, Sir George (?-1608) writer Sir George Peckham, a close associate of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, promoted the English colonization of North America and hoped to profit from the establishment of trading posts in current-day Newfoundland as well as from his lands at Narragansett Bay.
Little is known of the early life of Sir George Peckham. By the late 1570s he had become a familiar of Gilbert, but unlike his friend Peckham did not engage in any serious military engagements either in Ireland or on the Continent. Unlike most of the English who dreamed of colonizing North America, Peckham was a Catholic who had hoped to establish a refuge in the Western Hemisphere for his coreligionists in England, who were suffering persecution as a result of the Protestant Reformation and its spread to Britain. That plan eventually failed, but Peckham continued to try to promote colonization, especially after Gilbert had given him an extensive tract of land along Narragansett Bay, an area that would later become crucial for the English fur trade with the indigenous peoples of coastal New England.
Despite the presumed demise of Gilbert in 1583, Peckham wrote a book about his patron’s efforts to create a colony in Newfoundland. Entitled A True Reporte of the Late Discoveries and Possession, Taken in the Right of the Crown of Englande, of the Newfound Landes: by That Valliant and Worthye Gentleman, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the book was published in London in 1583. Peckham hoped that his book would inspire English settlement in the Western Hemisphere. With that goal in mind, he decided that the way to convince his fellow English to join the cause would be to demonstrate the obvious benefits of colonization. He thus likened the pursuit to the struggles of biblical times and drew on the Book of Joshua and other bits of Scripture to provide an ideological argument supporting the venture. He rhetorically dismissed the claims of the Spanish, believing, as other English promoters did, that the queen’s subjects had the right to lay claim to much of North America. He also noted that commerce with Native Americans would be crucial and profitable. He emphasized that such trade would be to the Indians’ benefit as well, in large part because the presence of Protestants in the area would mean that Indians could, as he put it, “be brought from falsehood to truth, from darknes to lyght, from the hieway of death, to the path of life, from superstitious idolatry, to sincere Christianity, from the devill to Christ, from hell to Heaven.” To make sure that others would accept the challenge, he told his readers about the commodities to be found in North America and assured them that the passage to the northeast would be safe since the ships would not have to cross “the burnt line, whereby commonly both beverage and victuall are corrupted and mens health very much impaired, nor doo we passe the frozen Seas, which yeelde sundrey extreme daungers.” Confident that his enticements would work, Peckham went on to lay out a feudal (see feudalism) type of society in which those who invested in the establishment of the colony would have legal as well as economic authority over others who arrived later. Although such legal arrangements had already become archaic in England, Peckham believed such a system would be an ideal way to administer the new settlements. Peckham lived long enough to hear about the origins of Jamestown in 1607, but not long enough to know that the plans of Europeans often meant little on the ground in North America.
Further reading: Peter C. Mancall, ed., Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580-1640 (New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Sir George Peckham, A True Reporte of the Late Discoveries and Possession, Taken in the Right of the Crown of Englande, of the Newfound Landes: by That Valiant and Worthye Gentleman, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in New American World, 5 vols., ed. David Beers Quinn and Alison O. Quinn (London: Macmillan, 1979), 3:34-60.
World History
