Tararequi is within five degrees of the equator. It possessed a great fishery for pearls, which are the largest and best of the new world. Many of the pearls which the cacique gave were like filberts, others like nutmegs, and there was one of 26 and another of 31 carats, pear-shaped, very lustrous, and most perfect, which Peter of the Port, a shop-keeper, bought of Gaspar de Morales for 12,000 castilians. The purchaser could not sleep that night for thinking on the fact that he had given so much money for one stone, and so he sold it the very next day to Pedrarias de Avila, for his wife Donna Isabel de Bovadilla, at the same price, and afterwards the Bovadilla sold it to Donna Isabella the Empress. Pedrarias, who delighted in such fishery, requested the cacique to make his men fish for pearls in the presence of the Spaniards. The fishermen were great swimmers and divers, and seemed to have spent all their lives in that employment. They went in small boats when the sea was calm, and not in any other manner. They cast a stone for an anchor from each canoe, tied by strong, flexible withes like boughs of the hazel. They plunged to search for oysters each with a sack or bag at the neck, and returned loaded with them. They entered four, six, and even ten fathoms of water, for the shell is larger the deeper they go, and if at times the larger ones come in shallow water it is through storms, or because they go from one place to another in search for food, and having found their pasture they stay there until they have finished it. They perceive those who search for them, and stick so close to the rocks or ground, or one to another, that much strength is needed to detach them, and many times the fishermen cannot raise them and leave them, thinking they are stones. In this fishery many persons are drowned, either by remaining too long at the bottom, or because they become entwined or entangled in the cord, or such carnivorous fish as the shark devour them. This is the manner of fishing pearls in all the Indies, and many fishermen die from the dangers aforesaid, and from the excessive and constant labor, the little food, and the maltreatment they have. The emperor was led to enact a law among those whom Blasco Nunez Vela brought, which imposed the penalty of death upon him who should forcibly compel any free Indian to fish for pearls. He thought more of the lives of the men than of his interest in pearls, though they were of great value. The law was worthy of such a prince and of perpetual memory.[281] [Illustration: CLARA EUGENIA, DAUGHTER OF PHILIP II Painting by Gonzales, in the Galeria del Prado, Madrid Most of these pearls were doubtless from the early American fisheries ]