What is serendipity? It’s a Filipino fisherman discovering a mammoth pearl during a storm. Encounters with accidents are common in storms, but this unnamed fisherman, upon anchoring down and getting stuck on a rock, discovered a giant pearl more than a decade ago inside a massive clam after serendipity comes the next part – oblivion. The fact that the man did not realize the value of the priceless 34kg gem he found, considering it merely a lucky charm, is astounding. He stowed the nearly $100 million pearl under his bed. For years, the angler didn’t realize he had discovered what is believed to be the biggest pearl ever, found off Palawan Island.
The final part of this pearly tale is revelation. A fire at his home many years later forced the fisherman to clear out and move house. This led him, with the giant pearl in hand, to a stunned local tourism officer. There, the priceless rock was verified as a pearl, and the largest one at that.
Tourism officer Aileen Cynthia Amurao said, “The fisherman threw the anchor down and it got stuck on a rock during a storm. He noticed it was lodged on a shell and swam down to pull up the anchor, also bringing the shell with him. This was a decade ago, and he kept it at home, unaware of its worth, treating it as a simple good luck charm. We were amazed when he brought it to us. We now need help from gemologists to fully certify it. We’re waiting for authentication from the Gemologist Institute and other international authorities. But we believe Puerto Princesa is likely to earn another prestigious title and a record for having the world’s biggest natural giant pearl from a giant clam. We will keep this here in the Philippines, and I hope it will bring more tourists to the city.”
The second-largest record is held by the Pearl of Allah, aka the Pearl of Lao Tze, which was intriguingly found in Palawan, Philippines, in 1934. It is on exhibition at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in New York, according to the Daily Mail. Nature is full of incredible bounties, and every once in a while, bestows them upon unsuspecting humans. One lucky woman found a massive lump of whale vomit worth nearly $270,000 while walking outside her beach home in Thailand in 2021.
Another struggling Thai fisherman found the world’s biggest blob of whale vomit, worth a staggering $3.2 million, the year before that. That same year, in 2020, a family discovered ‘alien like’ rare sea creatures worth $65,000 washed up on a UK beach.
