Testimony of 3 pearl farm pioneers

Bill REED

Australian William Reed is one of Tahiti’s black pearl pioneers, having started up Tahiti Perles, which he sold in 1975 to Robert Wan, who has made it Tahiti’s biggest private pearl producer today.

Reed worked in Tahiti from 1967-1973 as a biologist with the government’s Fisheries Department. His most recent visit to Tahiti was for the October 1996 Poe Rave Nui Auction, during which he bought one lot of 633 pearls for his company, Pearlconsult in Broome, Western Australia.

During that visit, Reed agreed to trace the history of pearl oyster and pearl culture experiments conducted in French Polynesia prior to 1975. In describing the background to Tahiti’s pearl culture
industry, Reed noted that «about 1900 Simon Grand, an oyster farmer from Arcachon, came to Tahiti and experimented in several lagoons and eventually in the Gambier Islands, where he had some success in collecting spat and growing Pinctada margaritifera.»

That was followed by the work of biologists Bouchon Brandely and Gilbert Ranson. Brandely’s work mainly involved the productivity of various lagoons. «He recommended a rational policy of lagoon management with controlled diving seasons in each lagoon, with certain areas to be closed for commercial diving,» Reed recalled.

Jean Domard, the head of the government’s Fisheries Department, «introduced signifi-
cant numbers of pearl oysters from certain lagoons into other lagoons, where the species did
not occur naturally. I was unable to find any accurate records of such transfers, but it appears
that the species did not establish itself in lagoons where it was not endemic,» Reed wrote.

Domard organized an experiment about 1963-1964 with Pearls Pty Ltd, an Australian pearl culture company that was already established at Kuri Bay in Western Australia. This involved two operations-- seeding a number of oysters at Hikueru, and then, at Bora Bora, seeding oysters that had been transferred there from Hikueru, Reed wrote.

«This was the first time that the Pinctada margaritifera had ever been seeded for pearls. The resulting pearls , two years later, were of reasonable quality. This sparked considerable interest in the culture of black pearls.»

About the same time that Domard left Tahiti in 1967, «a well-known local identity, Koko Chaze, experimented with the cultivation of «mabe» pearls at Rangiroa from 1966-1967, with mixed results,» according to Reed.

This is the time when Reed arrived in Tahiti, having been recruited by Jacques Rosenthal of the wellknown Rosenthal Freres pearl dealing company in Paris. Reed was a biologist with eight years of experience in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. That experience was mainly in spat collection and pearl oyster rearing.

Reed was brought to the Tuamotu atoll of Manihi to examine the feasibility of pearl farming. He spent several weeks there with Chaze, the two of them seeding about 2,000 oysters for «mabe».

The first thing Reed discovered was «the unreliability of obtaining sufficient quantities of good quality pearl oysters from the wild stocks.» As a result, he recommended to Rosenthal «that experiments be made in spat collecting in some of the main Tuamotu atolls.

Rosenthal passed along the recommendation to the government, which led to Reed being recruited under a special program (FIDES) «to attempt to collect spat and rear pearl oysters to form a solid basis for a
pearl culture industry.»

Reed recalled setting out «spat collectors in several lagoons, principally Manihi, Takapoto, Hikueru and in the Gambier Islands. The collectors were made from dried branches of the local shrub, ‘miki miki’.

«In those days, the only airstrip in the Tuamotus was at Rangiroa, and the logistics of making regular visits to check on the experiments did not allow for the proper management of the program. The results were variable, but they did prove that spat could be collected in significant quantities in lagoons where the parent stock of pearl oysters had not been overfished,» Reed recalled.

After training a number of islanders in the production of «mabe» pearls, Reed left the Fisheries Department in 1973 to form his own company, Tahiti Perles, and begin cultured pearl farming at Mangareva in the Gambier Islands.

About the same time Japanese biologist Keiichi Mizuno arrived in Tahiti to conduct pearl culture experiments at Takapoto for Asahi Optical Company of Japan.

Two years later, Reed sold his company to Wan. Reed left Tahiti soon after that to return to his pearl farming interests in Australia.

Jean-Claude Brouillet and Robert Wan

So Papeete journalist Koko Chaze, acting on advice from Dr. Domard, went to the Tuamotu atoll of Manihi with a mabe (a half pearl) glued on a shell. And that was how the first pearl farm in French Polynesia was born on Manihi in 1968 when Chaze was joined by Frenchmen Jacques and Hubert Rosenthal, grandsons of the renowned Paris jeweller, Leonard Rosenthal, who financed the operation. The farm’s
first round pearl was produced in 1970.

But there were several other pioneers to follow. In 1975, 50- year-old French businessman Jean-Claude Brouillet arrived in Tahiti. Among his many investments was the purchase of the Tuamotu atoll of South
Marutea, where he started up a pearl farm. Brouillet was the first to prove that high-end jewellery merchants could be approached with Tahitian black pearls. Until then these pearls were unknown to the international market.

After 15 years of work, Brouillet retired and sold his atoll and pearl farm in 1985 to another
pioneer, Robert Wan, the owner of Tahiti Perles. The rest is history. Today there are 14 large pearl companies that account for 50% of the Tahitian black pearl production. There are some 50 small and medium size pearl companies and a cooperative of 450 familyrun micro companies.