MANAMA, Bahrain — What makes the perfect pearl? Its roundness, color and size come to mind.
"No, it is when you can see the reflection of your eye in the pearl itself. That's when you know you've got one of the best," corrects Bahraini Ali Mohammed Ali Ibrahim, 85, an ex-pearl boat owner whose livelihood — like all Bahrainis — once relied on the pearl.
"Bahraini pearls are the most beautiful in the world."
Through his now-watery eyes, Ibrahim witnessed the golden era of this tiny Gulf state's pearl-diving industry back in the 1920s and its sad decline some 30 years later, influenced by the arrival of the cheaper Japanese cultured pearl.
The legend of the Bahraini pearl lives on, albeit in stories from aging men like Ibrahim, in a tiny downtown Manama pearl-diving museum and through a fledgling dive safari run by a Bahraini company.
Before crude oil, U.S. naval bases and souks selling electronics, the pearl was the lifeblood of Bahrain, an island of about 645,000 people in the Gulf east of Saudi Arabia. The pearl trade employed most Bahrainis as well as foreign workers from elsewhere in the Middle East and Asia.
Even though its economic importance has long waned, the pearl remains a national icon, with small numbers still sold in selected Manama jewelers and its image used in statues erected around the island.
Ex-pearl boat owners, like Ibrahim, paid divers by the day to plunge below the Gulf's seas on a lung full of air and fill string bags tied to their feet with as many oyster shells as their knives could tear from submerged rocks and the sea floor.
Bahraini pearls — once found, sorted by size and color, and sold by skippers to onshore buyers — could fetch high prices in the major pearl markets of Mumbai, India, and Paris, France. From there, they would be fashioned into jewelry and worn by the world's wealthy.
"In that time there was no other work in Bahrain. Everyone was either diving or traveling to work in other countries," says Ibrahim, who followed in his father's footsteps to become a boat owner and farm the island's rich waters during the annual four-month pearl season.
Ali bin Hamad al Salarti, who believes he is "about 90," says he first dove for pearls when he was just 8-years-old. "I spent about 70 years in the sea, diving for pearls, al Salarti says.
In the 1950s, Japanese businessmen began growing cultured pearls, which were being sold at a fraction of what the Bahraini pearl cost. This effectively killed off the Bahraini pearl industry.
The well-known Al-Fardan Jewelers in Manama's Sheraton complex still sells natural Bahraini pearls, with a top-of-the range pearl capable of fetching upward of $2,650. A necklace of cultured pearls, however, may cost about $80.
Since divers stopped scouring Bahrain's waters for pearls, the oyster population has grown dramatically, posing an ecological threat to the area, says Robin Bugeja, a diving instructor for a Manama dive company, Aquatique.
"Each oyster can reproduce twice a year and can spawn billions of babies every time it reproduces," says Bugeja, who hails from Australia.
"This definitely poses a biological and ecological problem for the area," she says. In some places, colonies of oysters piled up on each other cover 480 square yards of sea floor, sucking huge amounts of nutrients from the water and affecting other sea life, including sea grass and dugongs.
Partly because of this and partly due to a unique business opportunity, Aquatique recently began offering diving trips onto Bahraini oyster beds, during which divers can collect as many oyster shells as they can. Divers get to keep the pearls they find.
"Bahrain is the place where pearl diving began," Bugeja says. "And even though the industry is dead, it is cool to think that people can still get the chance to go diving and maybe find their own pearls."