Blood for pearls 1498 ad to 1540 ad | Peter Von Perle

“Blood for Pearls”; the genocide of the sixteenth century…triggered by the third voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1498, and the discovery of the world’s richest pearl oyster beds aka “The Pearl Coast”. “The life of those divers was no life at all, disfigured by their labor, looked like a different race of men or monsters. There is no hellish and hopeless life on this earth that may be compared with it.” (Bartolomé de las Casas 1516) Blood for Pearls deals with the lives of the people immediately affected by the arrival of the Europeans, the Spaniards, the local natives, and the slaves from Africa and their intertwined relationships.