01 How they went down for them
In the nineteenth century the basic kit was completed with grease on the body to hold in warmth and greased cotton in the ears. Some used a tortoiseshell nose clip. On shallow beds the oysters lay at a metre and a half or two; on the deep ones, the dive was extremely dangerous.
02 Who was on the boat
A pearling boat's crew was organised with surprising precision. There were divers (ghaws), a captain (nakhuda), rope-pullers who hauled the diver up (seeb) and their assistants. And then trades you would not expect: singers (naham), cooks (tabbakh), bookkeepers (kuttab), shell-openers (jallas), boatswains and helmsmen.
The pay system explains a good deal of what followed: divers were not paid by the day but received a share of whatever the whole season produced. If the season went badly, there was no wage to claim. That arrangement, combined with the advances taken to get through the winter, chained many men to a cycle of debt there was no way out of.
03 1912, the Year of Superabundance
The industry reached its peak around 1912, a year recorded as "the Year of Superabundance". At that moment it is estimated that a quarter of the population living along the Persian Gulf littoral was involved one way or another in the pearl trade.
One in four people on that coast lived off an industry based on holding your breath.
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04 The patent
Here one has to be careful, because the popular version is told wrong. The modern pearl-culturing technique was developed by the British biologist William Saville-Kent, who passed the information to Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa of Japan. Nishikawa's patent was granted in 1916, and that same year it was commercially applied to akoya oysters in Japan.
The name everyone associates with the cultured pearl, Kōkichi Mikimoto, was able to use Nishikawa's technology from that patent onwards. He was the one who popularised and promoted it commercially, but he was not the one who invented it. Mise's brother was the first to produce a commercial akoya crop.
The rest was quick. In 1917 Mitsubishi applied the technique to South Sea pearl oysters in the Philippines, and in 1928 the first small commercial crop of South Sea pearls was obtained. Today more than 99% of the pearls sold worldwide are cultured.
05 What came afterwards
The blow did not come alone. Competition from cultured pearls was joined by the Great Depression of 1929, which wiped out demand for a luxury good. Together, in under twenty years, the two left an entire fleet without economic purpose.
What to hold on to is the order of events, because it is almost always told backwards: the pearling industry was not killed by oil. When the first oil concession was signed, in 1936, the natural pearl market had already collapsed. Oil came afterwards, and it came to a place that had been without an economy for two decades.
The oil dates, to place it: the concession in 1936; the first offshore find in 1958, in the Umm Shaif field, at 2,669 metres depth; the first onshore in 1959, at Murban No. 3; then Bu Hasa in 1962 and Lower Zakum in 1963.
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It is worth keeping in mind when you look at the water from the corniche. That same shallow, turquoise, apparently harmless gulf supported an entire population for centuries, and stopped doing so because of a laboratory decision taken nine thousand kilometres away.
Tamorlan ToledoAlmost none of the damascene work you will see is steel.
Adam Harangozó TashkentUntil 2018 it was forbidden to photograph this metro.
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David McKelvey Hanoi