April 2008 2008

Hello everyone,

A few years ago, one often could see cleanly dressed young men traveling in pairs through the most remote islands of Polynesia: they were missionaries, bringing the gospel, Mormon, or Jehovah's witnesses. Nowadays, it's a new religion that is taking over in these islands: the religion of the Black Pearl, and its cultivation has brought to the islands prosperity with huge 4WDs and luxurious furniture for the beautiful residences that are being built.

And the culture of the Black Pearl of Tahiti has attracted new silhouettes, in the Gambier islands, those of young, gracious Chinese girls that can be seen on the village's pathways, sheltering their white skin from the sun under small umbrellas: they have left their village in China to come here and graft the pears of Polynesian cultivators ( a few years ago, it was Japanese men who did the job, the arrival of these Chinese girls is rather recent). I have filmed and photographed to of them while they were dedicating two weeks to the grafting of close to ten thousand mother-of-pearl oysters, carefully inserting inside the huge oysters, which are grown, hanging in the sea from floats in Mangareva's lagoon, a "nucleus" a perfect sphere carved from a shell that grows at the bottom of the Mississippi : indeed, your Black Pearl of Tahiti is 99,99 % American made... but it is the mother of pearl that will deposit on this sphere that will give the pearl its value. These young women know perfectly the anatomy of the oyster ( which very few Polynesians have yet been able to study), and they know perfectly where to insert the nucleus, as well as small fragments of the flesh of another oyster known for the beautiful color it gives its pearls.

The setting in which this Sino-Polynesian grafting, you know it, it's Akamaru's lagoon, and the small fare of my friend Bertrand, who lives here with his wife Lucie and their two pretty daughters in a floating home he has built with his own two hands. Cultivating pearls is not a gold mine, it's a tough job, and the times for grafting and for gathering the pearls are are two of the most important times of this work.

I will tell you in detail next month my recent shooting for my sponsor Atol in South Africa; for the present, I have to fly back to France: I will preside to the opening of a great exhibition abot corals in danger at the Oceanopolis in Brest, in Brittany.

By for now