The Pearl fishery near Toute Couryn (Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu)

1732

Copper engraving on paper

Print size: 11 x 14.25 in (28 x 36.5 cm)
Sheet size: 13.75 x 17.25 in (35 x 44 cm)

The Pearle Fishery near Toute Couryn — a rare early-eighteenth-century view of labour, trade, and empire on the Coromandel Coast

This animated coastal view depicts the celebrated pearl fishery at Tuticorin, one of the most lucrative sites of natural resource extraction in the early modern Indian Ocean. Published in 1732 in the Churchills’ influential Collection of Voyages and Travels, the image translates seventeenth-century travel reportage—most notably associated with Johan Nieuhof—into a vivid visual account of labour, trade, and imperial oversight on the Coromandel Coast.

The composition presents the shoreline temporarily transformed into a regulated industrial encampment. Canvas tents shelter European officials and overseers, while groups of indigenous divers and labourers prepare equipment along the beach. Offshore, small boats shuttle to the pearl banks as larger vessels anchor in deeper water, integrating the fishery into wider maritime networks. The elevated, panoramic viewpoint allows the entire operation to be comprehended at once, conveying order, supervision, and productivity.

A numbered key at the upper left describes the various buildings and people, including "Governors house", "a Heap of Pearle Oyster Shells", "Marchants of divers Nations", and "Tents where all sorts of provisions are sold while ye Pearle Fishery Continues". A view of the coastline shows pearl fishermen unloading oysters in front of the provision tents, as traders look on. European buildings and many boats pulled up along the shore recede into the distance.

Historically, the Tuticorin fisheries were tightly controlled seasonal enterprises involving thousands of Parava and Tamil divers and yielding pearls that circulated through global luxury markets, from South Asian courts to Europe and the Middle East. The engraving’s emphasis on organisation rather than ethnographic spectacle reflects an early-eighteenth-century shift toward administrative clarity in European representations of colonial enterprise.

Valued today for its rarity and narrative richness, this print stands as a key visual document of early global capitalism on the Coromandel littoral, where natural wealth, labour, and empire converged.

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