I think we’ve sent every cruiser we’ve met in Guaymas to visit Perlas del Mar. And each time they come back, I check out their new beauties, and dream about owning just one more pearl for myself.
Back in the old days—when this body of water was still called the Vermillion Sea, thanks to the red algae that also signals the spawning season for the oysters—people were said to catch Pearl Fever. Legends were born; of divers who lost their lives and maidens who sold their virtue, all in the search for that one special pearl.
So considering that Paula from Endurance hadn’t been to the pearl farm, and it’s my birthday week—we caught the Miramar bus at the Mercado and headed out to visit our friends Douglas, Manuel and Enrique at the farm.
We arrived too late for the last tour of the day (it ran at 2pm) but Douglas is a gracious host and Paula and the girls were shown the pearls and told how they are grown. This is when I also learned that I could buy pearls individually and either take them to a jeweller or have Manuel set them. So Douglas pulled out more pearls and we went to work. I learned about the different grades of pearls, what to look for and then finally selected two baroque pearls that would make up my (shockingly affordable) earrings.
choosing my own pearls
While Manuel worked to make my earrings, we chatted with Douglas— and he asked if we’d ever found nice ironwood (we asked him where to shop for carvings on our last visit and he recommended the market for its non-tourist prices). A few minutes later Douglas disappeared and then reappeared with a beautiful carving—a birthday gift.
Each day we’re in Guaymas, we get to know people a little better, and it makes the idea of leaving that much harder. But I think with Christmas approaching and my pearl fever growing more passionate we’d best get going…
It’s hard for me to let go of a story. Our friend Monica on S/V Savannah commented on this. She said when I find something I’m curious about I research it until I have the answers. But when she finds something she’s curious about she says, ‘interesting,’ and then kicks back and relaxes.
I’m sure she’s exaggerating, but I do get a bit obsessive, which is how we found ourselves at Perlas del Mar de Cortez talking to one of the owners and founders, Douglas McLaurin about black pearls in the Sea of Cortez. You may recall the story about the pearls Meri and I found in Santa Rosalia. Well, we dispatched with that mystery rather easily: A quick look under a long wave ultraviolet light proved they weren’t Cortez Pearls (Sea of Cortez pearls contain porphyrins which make them glow), a few other simple checks and it was confirmed--we own freshwater pearls from China, dyed using dubious methods and sold around the world…
The good news is McLaurin broke this bad news in the middle of a showroom that contains some of the most beautiful gems I’ve ever seen. And as he told us story of how the pearl showroom came to be, it was almost hard to concentrate on his words (I think I'm part magpie...).
a mabe pearl in a designer setting (they also have pearls in simple silver settings for people who don't have designer budgets...)
The story of Cortez Pearls almost sounds like a fairytale. In the 1990's Mclaurin and his partners Enrique Arizmendi and Manuel Nava Romo were graduate aquaculture students at Tec de Monterrey. They were instructed to create an aquaculture business that could be developed in a real life setting. Because their business would be on paper only—they decided to dream big: They would revive the mythical Sea of Cortez Pearl industry using a near-extinct native species and modern culturing methods.
A gem-quality cultivated pearl
The three students received a C- on their paper. They were told the species they wanted to grow, the Pteria Sterna had never been successfully cultivated, saltwater cultivation had never occurred successfully in North America and their business would fail.
The students decided that the only way they could respond to their poor grade was to prove their teachers wrong. With no resources and only a limited idea of what they were doing they began a research project—which to everyone’s shock yielded pearls.
The three continued to farm: learning by trial and error, one year loosing 90% of the farm to a hurricane.
Cortez Pearls employs 18 people, including several Yaqui--the original pearlers
The thing that struck me most (when I could take my eyes of the pearls) is the commitment the three men have to creating an ethical business--the pearls are the first in the world to be fair trade certified and the farm has helped reseed the once abundant bay with wild oysters.
The truth in this fairytale is the pearls themselves: During harvest in July and August the farmers open the oysters which have been growing for four years. Just a fraction contain pearls. Of that number only a fraction are gem quality (the rest are returned to the sea). And of those gems, once in a while one comes along that makes Mclaurin (who by now has seen more pearls than he can count) forget every other pearl he’s ever seen.
**I don’t normally make a pitch for a place this way, but this is a truly unique farm run by some very special people. If you have an attachment to the Sea and want to support what these guys are doing now is the time to buy a keepsake. Between the drug war cutting off tourists and the economic downturn, they are hurting. http://www.perlasshop.com/
The glass case was dusty, its contents looked half forgotten, but the shop keeper pulled out several of the pearl earrings for Meri and I to inspect. The pearls were black and iridescent, and based on the shape and texture they seemed real enough. The jewellery, the shop keeper told us, was made by prisoners in the Santa Rosalia jail. The pearls, he said, came from the Sea of Cortez.
The pearl is part of the Sea’s almost forgotten history. From 1500 to 1800 Mexico was the world's main source of black pearls. Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette both sported jewels that came from the Sea of Cortez. For almost 300 years ships came from Spain, England, Holland and Russia to trade for the jewels and in response native divers dove for the oysters, killing over a hundred of the creatures just to obtain 3-4 quality pearls.
‘Pearl fever’ outstripped the ability of the “Sea of Pearls” to naturally produce. And as supply dwindled, diving for pearls became progressively more dangerous. The divers forced themselves to go further and deeper, and they returned with fewer and fewer rewards. By 1800, or so, the industry had all but collapsed.
In 1893, the world’s first commercial cultivated pearl oyster farm was started on Isla Espiritu Santo, near La Paz. At its peak, the farm grew 10-million black-lipped pearl oysters and employed over a thousand workers. Compania Criadora de Concha y Perla was mainly in the business of producing mother of pearl—but a surprising by-product was discovered when it turned out that over 12% of the oysters also produced good-quality black pearls.
When the Mexican revolution came, the pearl farm was destroyed. In the decades that followed there were a few poorly executed efforts to rekindle the pearl industry. But for the most part Cortez pearls were forgotten. The oyster beds became extinct and the fabled black pearls of Tahiti (which are not as luminous or colourful as Cortez pearls) took their place in the market.
Knowing this history made me question what I was seeing in that half-empty Santa Rosalia shop that also sold discount flip fops, faded pool toys, and clothes pins. The pearls were imperfect, their shapes irregular and the colours ranged from grey-green to charcoal—but all had the same kind of glowing opalescence that once entranced royalty.
After checking online for pictures of the Cortez pearl, it seemed as though Meri and I had stumbled across something a bit mysterious. We questioned the shop keeper carefully—but all he knew, or could tell us, was that the pearls were local. Who harvested them and whether they were natural or cultivated, we never learned.
A few fishermen still find natural pearls, though not in the numbers they once did. Rumour is they guard their secret oyster beds and the best pearls quickly find their way to dealers of rare gems. Cultivated pearls are grown in two locations; there is a very small government facility near La Paz—with a production that’s said to be fairly poor--and there’s a larger commercial facility, Perlas del Mar de Cortez, near Guaymas (a ferry ride from Santa Rosalia). Perlas del Mar has been producing pearls commercially from rainbow-lipped Pteria sterna oysters for about 10 years. The farm only produces between 4000-5000 pearls a year, and most of the gems go to dealers and collectors.
The Santa Rosalia pearls though, they remain a mystery. They cost a fraction of the cultivated Perlas del Mar pearls and are not nearly as perfect. It also seems unlikely that they are natural pearls, there are too many of them. So we have no idea where they are actually coming from.
**The update is we were taken. The pearls are your standard issue Chinese freshwater pearl which are dyed using a variety of nasty techniques to look black.
