by Larry Smith
Three interesting books landed on my desk this past week—two recently published, the other a reprint that is also available online as a free download.
Pieces of Eight was familiar to many Bahamians in the first half of the 20th century. It was written by Richard Le Gallienne - an English "man of letters" who died in 1947 at the age of 80. A minor romantic writer who lived in London, New York and Paris, Le Gallienne dabbled in journalism and publishing.
Published in 1918, Pieces of Eight is a work of fiction that purports to be "the authentic narrative of a treasure discovered in the Bahama Islands in 1903." According to one early reviewer, it is "A polite treasure hunt which, compared to R L Stevenson's handling of the same plot lacks the thrills of real buccaneering, but which is romantic and beautifully descriptive of the tropic Bahamas."
The book became a hot political issue under the old UBP regime (when it was a prescribed schooltext) for its generally disdainful references to black Bahamians and use of racially insulting language. However, it features some interesting descriptions of contemporary Bahamian life, and is perhaps best known today for one of the earliest references to that great Bahamian folk song, the John B Sails.
Actually, Le Gallienne made an even earlier reference to this famous song in an article he wrote for Harper's Magazine in 1916. This was an account of a visit to the Bahamas when he spent a week on a schooner sailing from Nassau to the Exuma Cays and Harbour Island - his journalistic cruise leading to production of the romantic novel.
In his Harper's Magazine article Le Gallienne refers to conch pearls. "In these conchs, buried in the flesh of them, is found a pink pearl - of some, if no great value - for which the natives, as they cut up their bait, are constantly on the watch, as half a dozen of them would seem like a small fortune to them."
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This brings us to my second volume, The Pink Pearl: A Natural Treasure of the Caribbean. This full-colour, coffee-table book was published in 2007 by Skira editore of Milan, Italy and documents the history of conch pearl jewelry. It is written by David Federmen, a journalist specialising in gemmology, and Dr Hubert Bari of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Photographer Christian Creutz "spent weeks following the daily activities of the conch fishermen" around the Caribbean.
The book opens with a 16th century still life by the Dutch painter de Heem, which prominently features a Queen conch shell. And we quickly learn that millions of these shells reached European ports as ballast on sailing ships during their return voyages from the Caribbean in the early years of exploration.
The odds of finding an acceptable conch pearl are in the order of one in every 10,000 shells collected. But the odds of a conch's survival are much worse - about two million to one, in fact. And such odds, combined with heavy overfishing, now threaten the conch with extinction.
"As late as the 1970s one could walk down to the beach of any Caribbean island and scoop conchs out of the ocean shallows by hand," the authors say. "Acres and acres of seabed were covered by huge herds of fully grown conchs, grazing on sea grass...This edible bounty must have seemed like an endless gift from the gods." But today, conch fishing is less romantic, with divers round the region using scuba gear or hookah rigs connected to air compressors on the boat to allow them to stay underwater for long periods.
"To return the conch merely to sustainable levels - forget plentiful ones - will most likely involve moratoria on the industry, not solely in the countries that produce conch, but also in those countries where the molluscs are processed and exported," the authors say. And replenishment may take decades. Conch harvesting was banned in Florida 20-odd years ago and is just beginning to show results.
But this book is not about conservation - it is about jewelry. In the 19th century scientists determined that conch pearls were produced when the conch enclosed a fragment of organic tissue - bacterial micro-porganisms, tiny crustaceans or worms - with shell material to avoid irritation or infection. Eventually this protective process forms a pearl with a shimmering porcelain-like appearance.
This book is richly illustrated with photos of individual pearls as well as pre-columbian artifacts featuring conch shell mosaics, and modern jewelry creations. Archaeologists have not found any ancient conch pearl jewelry, although they have found plenty of shell beads - some over 2,000 years old. Conch artistry did not reach its zenith until shells began arriving in Europe in the 16th century, when they were discovered by italian cameo makers.
Shell cameos have been in and out of fashion for hundreds of years, but the conch pearl was largely overlooked until the second half of the 19th century (although there is a brief mention of one in Columbus' logbook). The Philadelphia exposition in 1876 displayed conch pearl jewelry by Tiffany, and Queen Victoria was an early collector. An 1855 account referrred to a conch pearl necklace in stock at Tiffany for $4,000 - equivalent to $83,000 today.
Contemporary travel writing and fiction describes various aspects of the Bahamian and Florida conch trades. In 1844, the Nassau Guardian reported that the sum of 85 pounds was paid for "a beautiful conch pearl of large size" found by a boy breaking shells in the harbour. And in 1886 it was said that the annual yield of Bahamian conch pearls was the equivalent of a million dollars in today's money.
However, conch pearls eventually went out of fashion, and by 1918 (around the time of Richard Le Gallienne's visit) the Bahamas Marine Products Board noted that conch pearls had "passed as an object of commercial interest". By 1923 demand had collapsed and the sole remaining exporter was going out of business.
In fact, by the 1970s no-one seemed to know that the conch pearl had once been a prized jewel, and it was regarded merely as a curio with no commercial value. But gradually - through the efforts of an American marine archaeologist named Sue Hendrickson - interest among jewellers and celebrities began to rise. Henrickson's hobby turned into an occupation, and as she began to corner the market, her activities attracted the attention of others.
In 1985, a gem dealer sold an assortment of conch pearls to one of the world's top jewellers, who made them into a necklace that was famously worn by Liz Taylor and photographed for the September 1990 edition of Ladies Home Journal. It sold for $160,000, and the head of the famous Japanese firm, Mikimoto, was moved to describe conch pearls as "the best new thing I have seen in years". Over the next decade Mikimoto invested millions to begin a revival of the industry.
Today, the authors say, conch pearls fetch record amounts and Tiffany, which spearheaded conch pearl jewelry in the 19th century, is once again featuring these items in its stores around the world. In 2004 Tifany unveiled a 26-piece collection of conch pearl jewelry with prices as high as $275,000. And since Strombus gigas is now a vanishing species, it's a fair bet that the conch pearl will become rarer and pricier still.
The third book is unrelated to any of the foregoing. It's a very readable, self-published memoir by a youngish Bahamian doctor named Harold Munnings Jr.
The title - Westward: the Walk of a Bahamian Doctor - could easily refer to Munnings' journey from his humble beginnings in a little clapboard house on Mackey Street (which later became the first Checker's Restaurant), to a triplex on Lumumba Lane built on land that was once part of his grandffather's farm, to a plush home at WestWard Villas, and finally to the exclusive gated community of Old Fort, where he lives today with his wife Moneira and their children.
But it actually refers to our halting progress through life towards the eternal sunset - an eventuality which hopefully is many years away in Dr Munnings' case.
The book recounts the familiar trivia of childhood, interspersed with descriptions of his family's antecedents - the Munnings from Delancey Town in Nassau and the Careys from Tarpum Bay on Eleuthera. And the stories of his medical education and subsequent career as a leading gastroenterologist are accompanied by interesting snippets of history together with accounts of contemporary life in the Bahamas and elsewhere.
These stories range from the origin of the Rand Memorial Hospital in Freeport (James Rand was a noted American philanthropist who invented the defibrillator and retired to the Bahamas in 1960), to an account of Kevin Hanna's gruesome murder of his entire family in Dannotage Estates 25 years ago, just a short distance from the home of Harold Munnings Sr - the author's distinguished civil servant father.
And there is an amusing account of how his mother's cooking helped frame the 1964 Bahamian constitution. It seems that the former Gweneth Carey laid on a huge repast for the PLP delegation to the constitutional talks in London when they (Paul Adderley, Lynden Pindling, Orville Turnquest and Arthur Hanna) made a sidetrip to Brighton to visit Harold Senior, who was studying engineering. The author was three years old at the time.
Harold Junior's medical career was sparked in 1975, when he volunteered at the Princess Margaret Hospital blood bank, trailing a blood-drawing doctor through the wards and becoming a "voyeur to patients on the mend - or not." At 15 his collection of blood smears from the PMH lab numbered among his most prized possessions - right alongside his Fisher stereo system.
He recalls pleading with his boss at the PMH - pathologist Dr Joan Reed - to be allowed to observe an autopsy. Eventually, an attendant named Monkey Man snuck him into the mortuary, and it seemed to Munnings at the time that medical training was going to be a big problem. But later - at medical school - he wrote that "cutting up dead people proved to be no trouble at all, although it could get spooky if you were alone with the bodies laid out on dissecting tables."
During the 1980s, after finishing his medical training (at McGill University in Canada, UWI in Jamaica and the Bristol Royal Infirmary in England), Munnings interned at the PMH, where he joined the ranks of other young doctors who set out to transform healthcare in the Bahamas. They faced a daily grind against a backdrop of poor facilities and a lack of vital equipment.
In 1986 the Bahamas was in the throes of a massive drug epidemic that had sparked a surge of violent crime and was accompanied by an explosion of HIV disease. Munnings was on the firing line at the PMH where he was able to observe some interesting correlations. With a colleague, he wrote a paper on the occurrence of a severe muscle wasting disorder thought to be caused by freebasing cocaine that had never been reported before. But overwork caused him to delay finalising the paper, and the report of this medical first was made by an American team two years later.
Fast forward to 2004 when Munnings met an old friend from Bristol at a medical conference in New Orleans who reminded him of events long forgotten. It was this chance encounter that prompted him to write his memoir at a relatively young age: "I wondered how many other events in my life had become submerged to near the point of no recall," he says in the final pages of the book.
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"I don't say 'been there, done that' anymore without a measure of awe and gratitude because I believe that safe passage on our westward walk takes more than sound planning, and luck, upon which many too heavily depend, has a funny way of running out when you need it most...I believe that my mother was right from the very beginning, that I am blessed."
For those in the US:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17741
Posted by: drew Roberts | December 02, 2009 at 11:30 AM
To purchase "Westward" go to
http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=61993
Posted by: Judith Lindenau | December 03, 2009 at 07:24 AM