Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Is Incorrectly Alleged By Some Historians That The
Natives Of America Were Unacquainted With The Luxury Of Pearls.
The
first Spaniards who landed in Terra Firma found the savages decked
with pearl necklaces and bracelets; and among the civilized people
of Mexico and Peru, pearls of a beautiful form were extremely
sought after.
I have published a dissertation on the statue of a
Mexican priestess in basalt, whose head-dress, resembling the
calantica of the heads of Isis, is ornamented with pearls. Las
Casas and Benzoni have described, but not without some
exaggeration, the cruelties which were exercised on the unhappy
Indian slaves and negroes employed in the pearl fishery. At the
beginning of the conquest the island of Coche alone furnished
pearls amounting in value to fifteen hundred marks per month.
The quint which the king's officers drew from the produce of
pearls, amounted to fifteen thousand ducats; which, according to
the value of the precious metals in those times, and the
extensiveness of contraband trade, may be regarded as a very
considerable sum. It appears that till 1530 the value of the pearls
sent to Europe amounted yearly on an average to more than eight
hundred thousand piastres. In order to judge of the importance of
this branch of commerce to Seville, Toledo, Antwerp, and Genoa, we
should recollect that at the same period the whole of the mines of
America did not furnish two millions of piastres; and that the
fleet of Ovando was thought to contain immense wealth, because it
had on board nearly two thousand six hundred marks of silver.
Pearls were the more sought after, as the luxury of Asia had been
introduced into Europe by two ways diametrically opposite: that of
Constantinople, where the Palaeologi wore garments covered with
strings of pearls; and that of Grenada, the residence of the
Moorish kings, who displayed at their court all the luxury of the
East. The pearls of the East were preferred to those of the West;
but the number of the latter which circulated in commerce was
nevertheless considerable at the period immediately following the
discovery of America. In Italy as well as in Spain, the islet of
Cubagua became the object of numerous mercantile speculations.
Benzoni* relates the adventure of one Luigi Lampagnano, to whom
Charles the Fifth granted the privilege of proceeding with five
caravels to the coasts of Cumana to fish for pearls. (* La Hist.
del Mondo Nuovo page 34. Luigi Lampagnano, a relation of the
assassin of the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, could not pay
the merchants of Seville who had advanced the money for his voyage;
he remained five years at Cubagua, and died in a fit of insanity.)
The colonists sent him back with this bold message: "That the
emperor was too liberal of what was not his own, and that he had no
right to dispose of the oysters which live at the bottom of the
sea."
The pearl fishery diminished rapidly about the end of the sixteenth
century; and, according to Laet, it had long ceased in 1633.* (*
"Insularum Cubaguae et Coches quondam magna fuit dignitas, quum
Unionum captura floreret:
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