February 19 – Jeudi – Manihi

Ok, so the big, bad squall didn’t occur on the night of the 16th as I feared. No, those squalls were nice, almost a domestic variety that just make you grateful that the cistern is filling up from the rain. For someone who travels in a sailing ship in these waters, last night served as a good reminder of the fact that every squall is different, and that some of them produce, besides lots and lots of fresh water, pretty fierce winds. The big one hit at around 0200 this morning with a wind burst I could hear approaching from a distance – you know, to build up the anticipation just a little bit.

After the first minute or so and the discovery that the rain fly didn’t depart after all, I tried to just lie back and, in some sort of way, enjoy the show. The trouble was that the thing just kept ramping up, each wind gust a little harder than the next. The palm trees were moving pretty violently making my shelter strung between two of them alternately sink and rise. The darkness completed the illusion of a staysails only kind of night out at sea. At around 0300 the wind gusts started easing and I realized my little camp might live to see daylight and indeed the sun once again won the battle and climbed up to dry this soggy paradise right on schedule.

Otherwise the weather has not managed to interfere with anything in the past few days. The visit to the pearl farm was very interesting indeed, more so than I had anticipated. After wading over (I do so enjoy pointing out this mode of travel…) to the next motu, I met with the proprietor Fernand and his family hard at work on their farm. So, what exactly is a pearl farm you may ask at this juncture, and the question is a fair one. In their case it consists of a processing facility of three small huts on a dock stretching into the lagoon, a series of underwater racks tied to the dock pilings, and a series of anchored buoys connected to each other by long (100m+) lines, this last installation some quarter mile away from the shore inside the lagoon. The act of farming the pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera, in their case some 40,000 of them, consists of nursing the small freshly settled juvenile oysters to an adult size (some 15 cm across) in a series of steps moving them into progressively larger mesh pouches. In the last step the oyster is drilled and suspended on a line via a short monofilament pendant.

One last step. The nucleus of the pearl-to-be is inserted inside the mantle of the oyster via a small incision, together with a small piece of a mantle from another oyster. All this is meant to elicit a response from the oyster that is usually reserved as a defense against parasites penetrating the shell – the secretion of successive coats of new nacreous layer, this time manipulated to fall on the pearl nucleus. Nucleus. Sounds so small, doesn’t it? Just a little sand grain or some such, perhaps? The weird thing about the nucleus is this. It is about as big as the finished pearl (about 1mm, or a hair less than 1/32” smaller), and is a product of Mississippi. Yes, that Mississippi. Why does the Mississippi oyster shell make THE perfect nucleus for a Polynesian oyster is a perfect mystery to me. Perhaps it is the ultimate alien object in the universe of South Pacific lagoon bivalves and thus elicits a strong defensive response, a sort of aquatic version of the Ugly American abroad? Either way, a perfectly round, white, pearl-looking object is painstakingly surgically implanted in the tissue of the oyster, only to be recovered re-covered in a different color more than a year later.

Except that about 60% of the time it just doesn’t work. The penalty for the oysters failing to deliver? They are opened, eaten and their shells are cleaned and sold (for very little) to the local jewelry trade. The remaining 40% get another slightly larger nucleus and another year+ extension on their contract. Of course you don’t know who produced and who didn’t until you have painstakingly pried the oyster open and using a long scalpel and probe very carefully exposed the goods. Add to this all the occasional cleaning of the suspended oysters and the mesh pouches, and you start getting the picture that this is a pretty labor-intensive operation.

There is another layer of intrigue here. Circa 2003 the price of black pearls collapsed due to overproduction that had been building over the years. The government stepped in with an effort to stem the glut of pearls flooding the market. The method? A quality control step needed to obtain an export certificate, a now necessary piece of paper to sell your pearls abroad. The quality control step takes place in Papeete in a non-descript building in the industrial section of town.

There, the pearl is examined for roundness, color, and luster and given an x-ray. That’s right, every single pearl is x-rayed in an inspection step measuring the thickness of the nacreous layer on top of the nucleus. More than 400 µm is ok, less than that and the pearls are crushed. Crushed and sold as a powder to high-end cosmetics companies that try to convince women world-wide of the miraculous benefits of the South Seas Pearls to their complexion. The joke, of course, is that the powder is more than 99% re-packaged Mississippi river minerals.

So the farmer’s dilemma is when to ultimately harvest the pearl. Harvest it too early, and you lose the lot. Leaving it in for longer than necessary takes space on the farm you could use for the next generation of oysters. Selling to the local artisan market to make jewelry for domestic sales gets you a much lower price. Such are the headaches of the farmers still left in operation in Manihi. I have an opportunity to watch Fernand as he swiftly probes, judges, rejects or re-implants a stream of oysters prepared for the operation with the insertion of a wedge to force them open. Other family members are busy inserting the said wedges, shucking rejects and cleaning shell, or re-suspending the successful oysters for transport back to the lines in the lagoon. The culled oysters, by the way, are eaten.

This whole elaborate industry was borne of another, earlier one of simply harvesting the oysters from the seafloor. The target of this harvest was really the shell, as natural pearls (or keshi) are very rare. The shells went to making buttons, first in Europe then worldwide. By the 1960’s this industry was in big decline due to over-harvesting of the oysters (almost obliterated in many islands) and the emergence of the plastic alternative. In this void a Tahitian producer trained in Japan in pearl culture jumped in, and an industry was born.

For Fernand, the small farm still makes sense, given that the family also operates the village bakery and so doesn’t have to rely on the pearls alone. All told, this is aquaculture on a grand scale where the end product happens to be very valuable. Nothing is disturbed by this activity in the lagoon save some modest amount of underwater construction, so it seems like an environmentally sound operation as well. The downside is that the product is also a luxury good subject to the fickle tastes of the jewel-buying markets. I am also shown a white growth on many of the oyster shells, a disease that is killing upward of a half of all the oysters in the lagoon.

I wish all of Polynesia the best in this endeavor, as it is one of the very few hard exchange producing exports these islands have.

The coming of pearl farming did of course have a major impact on this island. It is difficult to imagine the transformation of Manihi from just another sleepy atoll to this pearl-making machine with tens of operating farms and millions of oysters. Many people around the Tuamotus and Tahiti came here for jobs, and those people needed housing and feeding. Plenty of abandoned homes dot the town as a testament to this earlier, busier phase of Manihi’s life. The build-up of the farming coincided with the decline in traditional fishing practices. Here, the village's permanent stone construction weir was destroyed by a cyclone in 1983 and never rebuilt. With ready employment in the pearl trade, the major fishing effort concentrated quickly, and today the sole operational weir provides the livelihood to only one family.

I talk to the operator of the weir, an elderly big gentleman with an air of reserve that makes my camera stay in its bag. According to his family memory, the stone construction weir was in operation for at least 100 years prior to its demise. Today he ships about 50 kg (or about 110 lbs) of fish from his weir daily by air to Papeete – or some 18 tons annually. This is an easy way of making a living for one family, and I can’t but help think that at some point other people will get in on the action. I have yet to hear about conflict regarding competing weirs, but conflict seems inevitable given the limited locations of good shallow areas around the pass where the fish travel the most. Seems like social de-evolution, doesn’t it? From cooperation to competition in one, short generation.

When I mention this scenario to Fernand and the weir owner, they both shrug their shoulders and rub their thumbs and forefingers together in that international sign for money. So, in the final analysis I don’t really know. Is pearl farming a low impact sustainable form of aquaculture? Or will the social de-stabilizing effects of this boom/bust-type of economic activity be felt by the whole island ecosystem as the employment rate plummets and people seek other sources of living?