pearling

Lugger Ship type Article A lugger is a sailing vessel defined by its rig, using the lugsail on all of its one or several masts. They were widely used as working craft, particularly off the coasts of France, England, Ireland, and Scotland. Luggers varied extensively in size and design. Many were undecked, open boats, some of which operated from beach landings (such as Hastings or Deal). Others were fully decked craft (typified by the Zulu and many other sailing drifters). Some larger examples might carry lug topsails.[1] Reaper, a Fifie, a type of sailing drifter built in the Northeast of Scotland Luggers were used extensively for smuggling from the middle of the 18th century onwards; their fast hulls and powerful rigs regularly allowed them to outpace any Revenue vessel in service. The French three-masted luggers also served as privateers and in general trade. As smuggling declined about 1840, the mainmast of three-masted luggers tended to be discarded, with larger sails being set on the fore and mizzen. This gave more clear space in which to work fishing nets.[2]: 15–19  Australia Some of the early pearling luggers used off the northern coastline of Australia from about the 1870s, often ship's boats, carried a lugsail, but the purpose-built boats that were used from the 1880s stopped using it over time. The majority of these were gaff-rigged ketches, although they continued to be called pearling luggers until the present day. Source: wikidocumentaries-demo.wmflabs.org/Q783186?language=en

In one of the South Pacific Studies titled: "A Fleeting Aquapelago: A Theoretical Consideration of the Japanese Presence in the Torres Strait The 1880s-1940s by HAYWARD Philip and KONISHI Junko The lugger Trenton was mentioned as a place for exchanging cultural traditions between Japanese and Torres Strait people between pearling sessions: One of our 1999 informants, Yuzuru Kuhara, from Izumo village in Wakayama (now part of Kushimoto city), recalled that a group of his fellow Izumo crew members working on the lugger Trenton made a point of learning Torres Strait songs and dances and even performed these at festivals in Japan in the late 1940s after their repatriation from Australia.

Between the mid-1880s and World War One, Australian pearling was shaped by the floating station system, a way of working in which schooners of 100 tons or more served as mother ships for fleets of luggers from which full-dress helmet divers worked in deep water. This highly capitalised system offered producers significant advantages, not the least of which was mobility. It connected Australia’s two widely separated original arcs of pearling activity, the Torres Strait and the North West, and exerted a transforming influence on the other mother-of-pearl producing regions of the Indian Ocean. The system proved so efficient it was blamed for exhausting shelling grounds wherever it went and governments moved to outlaw it, although this response was motivated as much by political ideology as by concerns about resource depletion. Source: museum.wa.gov.au/museums/maritime/pearling-schooner-age-t...

In the mid-1800s, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace traveled for eight years through the archipelago that now forms Indonesia. It was Aru that dazzled him most. He wrote in his journal, “I think how many besides myself have longed to reach these almost fairy realms, and to see with their own eyes the many wonderful and beautiful things which I am daily encountering.” His six-month stay in Aru inspired his revolutionary ideas about how life evolved on Earth. He was co-credited with the theory of evolution by his more famous contemporary, Charles Darwin, who had a similar revelatory experience in the Galápagos Islands. In 1857, when Wallace arrived in Aru’s main town of Dobo, he found a bustling port connected to the world by ancient trade routes that gave it a distinctly global feel. Fine pearls and tortoiseshell made their way to Europe, while delicacies such as shark fins, birds’ nests and sea cucumbers went to China. Aru also exported greater bird-of-paradise feathers, silky yellow plumes that adorned the crowns of rulers in distant lands, from Spain to Nepal. Dobo was peopled by Buginese and Chinese merchants sailing in on wooden ships; traders from elsewhere in the Moluccas, as the region was then known; and Aruese bringing out exotic goods from the interior. “I dare say there are now near five hundred people in [Dobo] of various races,” Wallace wrote, “all met in this remote corner of the East, as they express it, ‘to look for their fortune’; to get money any way they can.” In the second half of the 20th century, the Indonesian government sought to settle the nomadic foragers living in Aru’s forests into permanent villages along rivers and coasts. Like indigenous peoples across the country, the Aruese were forced to convert to one of the six state-sanctioned religions; they mostly picked Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam. But while the government made some incursions into their lives — in the early 1990s, the navy angered villagers in southern Aru when it commandeered their lands for an air base — the Aruese were generally left alone. Numbering more than 60,000 people at the turn of the century, speaking 14 different indigenous languages and organized into clans spread across 117 villages, they governed themselves based on complex systems of traditional law. Even as they transitioned to a more settled lifestyle, they relied largely on nature, hunting deer, boar and wallabies and harvesting crabs, tree gum and other natural goods. They maintained a spiritual connection to the forest, believed to be inhabited by the souls of their ancestors. Source: news.mongabay.com/2019/10/saving-aru-the-epic-battle-to-s...