Diving for pearls had followed a regular system for hundreds of years. When the water was warm enough, from April to September, pearl divers worked to find these precious baubles every day from sunrise to sunset. Heavy stone weights attached to their feet would pull divers about 50-80 ft underwater, where they had a few minutes to collect as many oysters as possible, collecting them in their net baskets. They tugged at their ropes, signaling to their hauler that they were ready to come up. The haulers would pull them up, the divers would catch their breath for a few minutes, and then dive back down to harvest more pearls.

Although pearl diving had been a part of the Persian Gulf economy for centuries, the sudden popularity of pearls in the 19th century brought with it an expanded global market. Thousands of pearling boats would go searching for the precious baubles, amounting to over 64,000 men involved in the industry as a whole. The crews were diverse, and divers worked alongside haulers, assistants, and apprentices under the boat’s captain. About half were African, some were Persian or Arab, others were Baloch and Indian. Some were free, others were enslaved. The pearls they found traveled around the world, from the Indian Ocean world to Europe to the Americas, to East Asia and beyond.