gems, Taaffeite, B.W. Anderson, Prince Rudolph, Austro-Hungarian empire

Pollution had not yet caused the shutdown of the freshwater pearl industry in Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest freshwater lake, so in 1981 I took a boat tour of some of the remaining pearling sites. The sound of the wind and the Japanese-English of the guide prevented me from learning much about Hyriopsis schlegeli, the species of pearl mussel unique to the lake. When our boat made a course adjustment to avoid colliding with a sailboat that seemed to have no skipper, I muttered, “The Mary Celeste,” in reference to an intact sailing ship from New York that had been found near the Azores in late 1872 with nobody aboard. “Yes,” said the much older man sitting next to me, “but I didn’t know people your age still knew the story.” I explained that as a child I had a book on unsolved mysteries — the Mary Celeste, the bizarre death of Austria’s Crown Prince Rudolf at Mayerling, the Man in the Iron Mask, the elephant’s graveyard, the Oak Island treasure in Nova Scotia, and so on. I learned that my fellow passenger was Basil W. ‘BW’ Anderson (1901–1984), who in 1925 he had directed the world’s first gem-testing laboratory, set up in London in response to “trade problems with cultured pearls.” When he asked if I was still interested in “those mysteries,” I responded eagerly. “Well,” he said, “I can tell you something about the ‘incident at Mayerling’ that not many people know.” I was very interested. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, a member of the Habsburg dynasty, was the only son and third child of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria and Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria. He was heir apparent to the imperial throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from his birth in 1858 and died in mysterious circumstances at Mayerling, Austria on 30 January 1889.