Sea Day to Thailand - Day 81

Happy Birthday Lilah!
Pearls have been Treasured as gems for centuries, they take many forms and many colors. Finding them in the wild is rare; more than a ton of bivalves might yield only a handful of quality pearls. Throughout history, their scarcity made them the choice of kings and queens. While the purest of pearls are still considered the jewels of the very wealthy, those produced in modern-day pearl farms-where oysters are fortified with a substance that encourages growth of the calcium carbonate stone-make the pearl more affordable.
The coveted undersea jewel was hunted for millennia by pearl divers in coastal Indian Ocean waters. The South China Sea, too, drew fortune hunters during the Han Dynasties (206 BC-8 AD;
23-220 AD). Divers might have descended up to
125 feet to retrieve oysters from the seabed, a hazardous vocation that, in some parts of the world, was assigned to slaves. In the Sulu Archipelago in the southwestern Philippines, the law proclaimed that the largest stones in the sea were the property of the sultan, though underground markets often sold them to wealthy European nobility.
History's most famous pearl was discovered in 16th-century Panama by the African slave of a Spanish land owner. "La Peregrina Pearl," shaped and colored to perfection, was given to the future Phillip Il of Spain, who presented it to Mary I of England in anticipation of his marriage to her. After her death in 1558, the pearl was returned to the Spanish crown, and remained in royal collections of crown jewels until Richard Burton purchased it at auction for Elizabeth Taylor in 1969. In 2011, the stone was auctioned at Christie's in New York to a private buyer for a record price of $11 million.Read more