Читать книгу Ocean Tramps онлайн

41 страница из 81

“Well, maybe,” said Davis, “we’ve no call to complain if the beds are all right. Let’s put out and look at them.”

They took the Douro’s boat and rowed out, Clayton steering and piloting them.

The beds ran north, acres of them, and one of the Kanakas Clayton had taken with them dived now and then and brought up a pair of shells as a sample.

Big molluscs they were, weighing maybe eight hundred to the ton, of the white shell like the Tahiti oysters.

Davis, who knew something of the business, reckoned that the shell alone was worth five hundred dollars a ton, but he said nothing as the boat, impelled by the sculls, passed through the crystal water.

Every lagoon would be a pearl lagoon but for the fact that the oyster of all sea creatures is the most difficult to suit with a breeding ground. The tides must not be too swift, the floor must be exactly right.

Javal Lagoon was ideal, a bar of reef delaying the floor current and the coral showing the long coach-whip fucus loved by the pearl-seeker. Davis declared himself satisfied, and they rowed back to inspect the mounds of shell and oysters rotting on the beach which were to be thrown in as part of the goodwill of the business.