Every June, the harbor at Muharraq emptied. Three hundred dhows — their hulls sealed with black tar, their crews provisioned for four months — filed out through the narrow channel into the open Gulf. The Ghaws al-Kabir, the Great Dive, was not a metaphor. It was an industry, a calendar, a contract system that bound pearl merchants to divers to captains in a chain of debt and obligation documented in the tawwash ledgers now preserved at the Bahrain National Museum.
The Tawwash Accounts
The financial structure of the pearl trade was legible in columns of ink on ruled paper. Each diver's catch was weighed, graded, and entered by the tawwash — the pearl merchant — in registers that tracked not just quantities but relationships. A nakhuda, or captain, who advanced provisions to his crew in April would settle accounts in October, deducting the cost of rice, water, and diving stones from the season's haul. The hijar, flat brass weights tied to a diver's feet, sank him to the oyster beds at depths of twelve to fifteen fathoms.