"Somerset, where we landed, is principally a pearl-fishing station, and the pearl fishers who live there are a very rough-looking lot. The business is very profitable, those engaged in it estimating that the pearls pay all the expenses of their enterprise and a little more, while the _nacre_, or mother-of-pearl, the smooth lining of the shells, is a clear profit. The exportation of shells from Queensland is worth, annually, about half a million dollars. The pearl shells sell ordinarily for about one thousand dollars a ton. They are gathered by black divers under the superintendence of white men.
"These white men own the sloops and schooners devoted to the pearl fishery, and they go out with these craft, taking along a lot of black men as divers. The diving is done in the same way as in pearl fisheries all over the world, so that there is no necessity of describing it. The shells are like large oyster shells; in fact, they are oyster shells and nothing else. They are about twenty inches long, and from twelve to fifteen inches from one side to the other; so, you see, it doesn't take many oysters to make a load for a diver. The divers are paid according to the number of shells they gather, and not by fixed wages. A man familiar with the business said, that if you paid the men regular wages, you would be lucky if you got one dive out of them daily.
"I tried to ascertain the value of some of the pearls obtained here," continued Harry, "but my information was not very definite. They told me that several pearls worth five thousand dollars each had been taken, but they were not very common, the value ordinarily running from a few dollars up to one hundred or two hundred dollars each. My informant said that the best pearls were found on the coast of West Australia, but that the fishery in that locality was more dangerous than on the coast of Queensland. He said that the sea in that locality was subject to hurricanes, and sometimes an entire fleet of pearl-fishing boats would be overwhelmed and sunk, hardly a man escaping. 'These disasters,' he said, 'do not deter those who survive from taking the risk over again, and there are always plenty of black men who go out as divers there whenever a boat is ready to start.'"