4a["Grim Tales of the Pearl Game", The Northern Standard (Darwin, NT), Friday 27 May 1932, page 3]

GRIM TALES OF THE PEARL GAME

WHERE GREED LAUGHS AT MURDER

(By Ernestine Hill in "The Sun" Sydney).

Died at Broome recently, Captain Harry Talboys, the man who lost a valuable pearl in the Indian Ocean--and found it again!

In 1909 Talboys, opening shell on one of his own luggers, discovered in the fish of the oyster a fair-sized pearl. Unwilling to let the colored men see it, he whistled to his white comrade, and was walking with casual air, ostensibly to wash his hands when the mucus-covered stone slipped from his fingers, hit the deck, and disappeared through the scuppers.

"What was it worth?" bawled the skipper, aghast.

"I didn't even see it," replied the mate.

A lifebuoy was flung overboard to mark the spot. By the time a diver was brought to the surface the lugger, in sail, had travelled 40 or 50 yards. Swiftly she put back, and the Jap, was sent down on the off-chance. Twenty anguished minutes and he reappeared, his left hand, miraculously enough, closed over the gem, which he had found, white and luminous, idly drifting down.

Two months later that pearl brought Talboys £1600 in the London markets!

In these breathless summer nights, when schooners and luggers "lie over" in Dampier Creek, safe from the sweeping fury of the hurricane, strange tales are told in the foreshore camps of Broome, alight with the lustre of living romance. In a industry that snaps shut on its secrets, close as an oyster, the best of them will never be written. Many are unknown, save to the old hands whose life on the pearling coast dates back to the black ivory days of wicked memory--old hands that one by one are setting sails for even further westward.

There died in the last few month P. P. Percy, policeman, publican, pearler, and patentee of a puzzle pearl-box, who in his young day chased Malay murderers and mutineers through the maze of the Timor Islands; "Frenchy" d'Antoine, from the Seychelles, who, with Harry Hunter, a silk hat manufacturer from London, blackbirded the coast from de Puch Is. to de Rougemont's Lacrosse, 21 bush natives in a 25-foot cutter, through uncharted seas, black divers for the Cossack fleets; Tommy Clarke, with gold rings in his ears, who, as a boy of 12 dry-shelling with an old gin on the reefs at low tide, found the Southern Cross pearl.

Sold ultimately for £34,000 and now in the possession of the Pope the Southern Cross was a gigantic hoax. Clarke himself admitted to the writer that it was broken when he found it. A remarkable arrangement of eight baroque pearls, in the form of an almost perfect cross, Clarke's father and Shiner Kelly of the Lacepedes sold it to one Frank Roy for £10 and a bottle of gin. From him Frank Craig, a Cossack publican, bought it for £40 and sold it to a Natal buyer for £100. Those who know say that it was Frank Craig, with a clever Roebourne pearl-jeweller, who mended the Cross and interposed the ninth pearl that was to make the gem the jewel sensation of a century.

Tommy Clarke led a charmed life. From early youth to old age, wandering among the natives of a wild coast, he knew the customs and tribal tongues of 200 miles. For ten years he walked the streets of Broome with a broken neck, a surgical marvel. A temperamental Irishman, last year he took poison. His wife it was that died, a gentle invalid who collapsed as a result of the shock, and Tommy was fined 5/-.

With a world of romance and adventure at his finger-tips, it was his pet vanity to avoid writing and writers, determined that "what I know will die with me" but, typically Irish, by a cautious stratagem of contradiction, mild and polite, he could be made to talk.

In 1904 there happened in Broome the Lieblid pearl murder, surely the strangest story ever told in a strange history, in which four men were sent to their deaths for a pearl that not one of them had seen.

On the fishing-grounds out from the Eighty-Mile Beach a Swedish pearler of that time found a pearl in his first year out. In amateurish delight he made for the nearest white man to celebrate his prize, a lugger owned by one Lilley, in company with Victor Nabos, a shrewd Manila diver.

Glass after glass of squareface was raised to the luck of the new beauty, and, when the Swede pulled off, practically incapable, in his dinghy, it was a bit of baroque that rattled reassuringly in his treasured tin matchbox. The pearl remained behind with Nabos who, for safe hiding, on his next night watch, wound it round and round in a strand of rope near the tiller. When Nabos returned to Broome the pearl had gone, but he was arrested and served a term of imprisonment for stealing it.

It was then that Lieblid, a Jewish traveller in [?gimcrack] jewellery, in reality a buyer of snides, heard of the missing pearl, offered £500 for it, and became the eager, credulous prey of Pablo, a Manilaman; Simeon, a Patagonian sailor of gorilla strength; and Charlie Hagen, a Scandinavian of sorts, barber, and saloon-keeper.

Clandestine meetings on the sandhills and the dark jetty, in which the glass marble stopper of a lemonade bottle masqueraded as the pearl, and Lieblid was killed by a slingshot in a cabin of the derelict schooner Mist, lying opposite Broome, his mangled body left by the tide in the mangroves. Mystery surrounded the murder until, through the influences of a priest in the confessional who refused absolution till the crime was disclosed, the Manilaman turned King's evidence, and the three murderers were hanged.

The pearl itself was never traced. Doubtless it was carried to Singapore in a cake of soap, the binding of a book, the elaborate construction of a Japanese woman's hair, or in the hollow of an Asiatic slipper, underneath the little toe-for all of these are time-honored hiding-places for stolen jewels of the sea.

Broome still has its gems of purest ray, the finest in the world, though seldom we hear of them. In the last year the price of stone, in Cryptic cable code, advanced from £850 to £1450 in three weeks. A few months ago, a perfect sphere, 43 grains of softly roseate light, lay in the writer's hand for a moment.

With the world still in the throes of war-convalescence, it is a poor season for pearl-buying, and its value is tentative, but it has been acknowledged by an expert the finest stone that the luggers have brought to shore in five years.

Sometimes--but not often--the buyers themselves make mistakes. An epic of Broome was when Gentleman James, a "character" of not so long ago, sold a French buyer his own pearl, cleverly represented as a perfect twin. It was aboard a Singapore steamer at the last moment and with his spot-cash £120, he promptly snouted champagne for the crowd.

The shore-bell rang.

"Your change, I think!" shouted Gentleman James to the amazed and hysterical buyer, handed over the residue of £94 16s with a grin, and made for the gangway. They have a great sense of humor in the pearling north-west.

notes:

Both the roseate pearl and the pearl lost overboard by Talboys found their way into Jack Idriess's "Forty Fathoms Deep".

4b[Eley, Barbara, 1995, Ion Idriess, ETT Imprint, Sydney, Chapter 17]

Chapter Seventeen

TOP GEAR

...

Before he left Perth, the writer Ernestine Hill called on him to offer whatever help she could to make his trip north easier. Jack failed to see how this would be possible. One Emily Meares, also concerned with his well-being, provided him with five introductions to station owners in the north. Jack didn't avail himself of the courtesy, all five notes written on blue linen paper, enclosed in their blue linen envelopes, remained sealed until I opened them myself some fifty-four years later.

It was Treadgold however who provided, as far as Jack was concerned, the most practical piece of equipment for a man proposing to travel through dangerous territory where the Aborigines, in many areas, could not be classed as friendly-he was given a Colt .44. Treadgold insisted Jack take it and not hesitate to use it if it became necessary.

The element of danger didn't concern Jack, this was what he had come for!

[http://henrietta.slwa.wa.gov.au/record=b1623340~S2]

Author Eley, Beverley.

Title Ion Idriess / Beverley Eley.

Imprint Sydney : ETT, 1995.

LOCATION CALL NO STATUS MESSAGE

1st Floor B/IDR

Public Library Stock B/IDR

...

3rd Floor Stack B/IDR NOT FOR LOAN REQUEST ITEM

Details

Call # B/IDR

Phys. Description 382 p. ; 24 cm.

Series Imprint lives

Subject Idriess, Ion L. (Ion Llewellyn), 1890-1979 -- Biography.

Authors, Australian -- 20th century -- Biography.

ISBN 1875892087 (pbk.)

4c[Eley, Barbara, 1995, Ion Idriess, ETT Imprint, Sydney, Chapter 18]

Chapter Eighteen

PERTH TO BROOME

When Ernestine Hill visited him yet again in Perth Jack took her for 'tea and cakes', but the lady did not tell him anything of interest. He wrote to Cousins that Ernestine's visit "ended up in my advising her on her book to be; she is a nice little sort though and as she has wandered quite a lot and has a good style of pen she ought to turn out a decent book. The little writing that I have seen of hers I like better than any other writer I know except for Davison's Man Shy. I've wondered why she did not keep our acquaintance in Sydney after Baume's introduction.'

...

As usual Jack was torn between moving on and staying to glean all the available material. If the police patrol he was to accompany did not leave for unknown country Jack determined he would leave Broome for Derby and take off with pack-horses into the Kimberley on his own. While he was reaching this decision, the wet moved in, and the lay-up season began in Broome.

The pearling fleet, its captains and crews, including the divers, were in port taking a well-earned three-month break. Jack found himself in the right place at the right time for he was able to collect material which otherwise would have stayed at sea for nine months.

He stopped fighting the urge to start another book. While putting together Forty Fathoms Deep, this 'Pearl' book, as he called it, developed into two. 'I couldn't resist the other, though I fought against it. It is incomparably easier to write than the Broome book. A straight hero right through, MacKenzie, second in command of James Clark (Pearl King) when they sailed for the Azores and opened up that Dutch possession,' he wrote to Cousins. The MacKenzie manuscript written at that time and intended as the second book after Forty Fathoms Deep, remains unpublished. By mid-February both books were three-quarters written, and he had settled into a comfortable routine in Broome. Getting into the Kimberley took second place.

Broome, lightly touched by the depression, lazed languidly on the left shoulder of Australia and casually carried on its great pearling industry. The inhabitants took as little notice of the rest of the continent as the southern states took of them. The climate was very hot. The most stimulation anyone was prepared to incorporate in any one day was the sight of the brilliant red and purple bougainvillea vines. Occasionally someone would take umbrage about being misrepresented by a southern newspaper, but, by the time the next mail was due to leave, the energy to write a Letter to the Editor in protest would have evaporated.

'This is a land where there ain't no schedule. The people simply don't know what it means to plan to get started on time, it isn't the custom. They won't travel in the wet at all and are adverse to helping any "mad" man to do so,' wrote Jack.

Broome bewitched him. Its people were polyglot. Malay divers, aristocratic Japanese, Chinese, Greeks, Indians and Europeans rubbed shoulders with European Australians and Aborigines. There were the wanderers, the white flotsam and jetsam, and there were the wives and children of the pearlers.

In the town the delightful streets were lined with shady trees. Every house with its windows latticed against the remorseless sun and flanked by dense gardens, lush with tropical plants thriving in the rich red soil, seemed a sanctuary of cool mystery. There were also questionable lanes, where it was advisable to 'watch your back'. Here the houses almost butted against each other, the shade was not cool and inviting but full of menace.

At night the air was thick with the scent of frangipani. Coconut palms cast deep, jagged, abstract-shaped shadows. Above, molten silver stars blazed in a blanket of electric blue. The night brought out jealous lovers and pearl thieves with the possibility of tribal fights between the imperturbable Chinese Tongs. To the casual observer all seemed idyllic, but beneath the beauty of tropical nights the air seemed to crackle with excitement.

A collection of exotic ships rode at anchor in the port. Chinese junks and all manner of strange craft from around the world rubbed planks with the Broome pearling fleet. The thirty eight foot tide regularly slipped back to the deep ocean, leaving all ships high and dry lying drunkenly on their sides.

An incurable romantic, Jack revelled in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the town. Broome with its harbour, silver town, pearl town and oyster town, was to Jack, as it has been for many others, the most fascinating place in all Australia. He loved all the different coloured races and the whites; none was subdued, they were all 'damn cheeky' and self-assured, there was work about and they were making good money. For Jack, his stay in Broome took on the aura of a Robert Louis Stevenson South Sea romance.

He wired Cousins: 'Copy excellent for book this district alone am seriously considering remain to collect it.' Cousins, received the wire with delight. The idea of having a ten-volume Idriess collection to offer for sale on an instalment plan was starting to become a real possibility.