Hold your breath. How long can you last? One minute, maybe two? Imagine holding your breath for fifteen minutes, underwater. The stakes are high. Breathe in, and you’ll inhale the sea. Leave it too long, and you’ll black out. Either way, you will drown. 

Freediving is exactly that: diving down into the depths of the ocean with nothing but the air in your lungs. On the coast of Kalamata in Greece there is an international championship once a year. Free divers from all over the globe gather to beat records, trying to go deeper for longer and often surfacing disappointed and bleeding from their eyes. 

From an outside perspective, freediving seems impossible. Respiration is a basic human need, after all; our bodies require oxygen to live. Part of the practice of freediving is challenging that need on both a physical and psychological level. In contemporary freediving vernacular, a phrase often used is ‘the Master Switch’. It refers to the major changes that occur in the body underwater. The first change a diver will encounter will happen within ten metres from the surface. The diver’s skin cools down, their heartbeat begins to slow. Heart rates have been proven to drop to below thirteen beats per minute. Further down still, their lungs will shrink and their chest will collapse to almost half its original size and begin to convulse from the build-up of carbon dioxide. On a psychological level, this can be the most difficult part. The diver must resist the urge to breathe. Instead, they must trust their spleen to release oxygen-rich blood, stopping the convulsions and giving them more time underwater.

Despite its current pretext as an extreme sport, freediving is in no way a new activity. Different kinds of freediving have been used in many cultures throughout history, often for pearl diving. In the 1800s in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, pearl season would last for six weeks beginning in February. Workers would flood to the northern province of Marichchukkaddi from all over the country. The fleet of boats could be over three hundred strong in all different sizes and colours. There are the black Jaffna handcrafted sailboats, Paumben luggers, copper-plated Tuticorin barges, small narrow canoes from neighbouring villages in yellows and reds, as well as huge three-masted canoes from Adirampattinam in pale blue. Divers would leave the shores at sunrise, not returning until sunset. They would tie a crescent-shaped rock around their middle by rope, and plummet more than thirty-five metres underwater. Held to the sea floor by the stone, they would use their hands and feet to collect as many molluscs as possible for as long as they could hold their breath. The divers would consult Pillal Karras before each day of diving, to protect them against shark attacks.

The Yawuru people in the Kimberley region of Australia also harvested molluscs in the 1800s. Uninterested in the pearls, they focused on the huge, flat pearl shell. Pearl shell is radiant and iridescent, its surface glowing pink, blue, green and yellow. The effect is created by a blend of minerals called nacre that is secreted by the oyster. They coat the inside of their shells to protect them from parasites and foreign objects. Pearls are created in much the same way: when an irritant is inside the shell it is also coated in nacre.

In the traditional practice of the Bardi and Nyulnyul peoples, the shells were used for both ornaments and trade. The designs engraved into pearl shell (Aalinggoon riji) were used by Yawuru peoples to document stories of history and country. Maps and ancient trade routes were carved into the shell, tracing networks across the continent of Australia.

The wealth of pearl shell in the region was noticed first in the 1720s by trepang fishermen of Indonesia. They traded with Indigenous peoples prior to the white colonisation of the region in 1829. Reports of the abundance of pearl shell soon attracted the European pearling industry, which sold the supply back to Europe for buttons and cutlery handles.

The coastlines of the Kimberley region are a place of extremes. Turquoise seas and bleached-white sand are set against orange cliffs. The area is tropical, with wet and dry seasons that see months of drought broken by thunderstorms and flash flooding. The balance of this region was intimately understood and respected by the Yawuru people, but this untouched place was soon overrun by European settlers looking for quick wealth. It wasn’t long before the inshore beds of pearl shell were depleted. This meant the hunt was extended to deeper and deeper waters.

Indigenous divers were enslaved through kidnapping and deception by the Europeans in a trade known as blackbirding. Female divers were especially favoured. The conditions were horrific. In what was then called ‘skin-diving’, the divers would plunge to the ocean floor without any kind of equipment. They would dive naked with only a string bag around their waist. If divers returned to the luggers with an empty or near-empty bag they would be hit with oars and forced to dive again. Deaths were common from drowning, sharks and paralysis. The cruelty was so notorious that in 1871 the West Australian colonial government legislated a Pearling Act, which prohibited the use of Indigenous women as pearl divers.

In 2010 a public ceremony in Roebuck Bay unveiled a bronze statue to commemorate this often unacknowledged history. Developed by West Australian sculptors Joan and Charlie Smith, the statue is of a Yawuru woman rising out of a wave with a pearl shell in her hand, her pregnant belly protruding. Nowadays, almost one hundred per cent of Australia’s pearls are from pearl farms. These pearls are known as ‘cultured’, which means that an irritant is artificially introduced into a mollusc to create the nacre process. 

In Japan, freediving is also women’s work. The Ama (海女) are an ancient culture of Japanese women who still exist today. Their name translates to ‘women of the sea’—a term first cited in 750 CE in the Man’yoshu collection of Japanese poetry. The Ama have passed down their freediving techniques from mother to daughter for more than twenty-five hundred years. Traditionally, they wore only a loincloth and a bandana around their hair, and dive for Japanese delicacies such as sea cucumber and abalone. With a steel rod secured in their loincloth, the Ama dive to depths of thirty metres or more. Abalone inhabit the crevices of reefs and undersides of rocks, taking on the colours of their surroundings. After locating one, the Ama must lever it loose with their steel bar without damaging the shell. All this with just a single breath of oxygen in their lungs.

Tens of thousands of Ama women once lined the coast of Japan, flourishing in their occupation. Girls would start as young as twelve or thirteen and continue until they were in their late eighties. More recently, the numbers of Ama have steadily dwindled. More and more daughters have decided not to continue in the family tradition, and some fear the Ama are at risk of dying out. In 2013, author and freediver James Nestor travelled to Japan to try and find the surviving Ama. He found one group in Nishina, outside of Omachi in the Nagano Prefecture. Their group was small: less than a dozen. The Ama were diving in freezing cold water, lead-grey in colour. While their heads bobbed to the surface and back down beneath the ocean, white fog almost obscured them from view.

Nestor spoke to Fukyo Manusanke, an eighty-two-year-old Ama who dives every day. She told him that women understand the rhythms of the sea. She told him, “When a man comes to the ocean, he exploits it and strips it. When a woman puts her hands in the ocean, that balance is restored.” Spirituality and balance is part of the Ama practice. They don’t see themselves as visitors to the ocean: they are part of it. 

Cultures all over the globe engage with freediving. There is the Bajau, a nomadic group of Malay origin who live at sea. They dive to depths of over thirty metres for pelagic fish and sea cucumbers, and only set foot on land for trade. In China, early fisherman dived to gather sponge as well as pearls. Recently freediving has become fashionable, and young Chinese people are practising it again as an endurance sport. Even as far back as the Scandinavian Stone Age, Ertobølle would dive for shellfish. While these oceans, cultures and times are vastly different, the act itself—of suspending the basic psychological and physical needs of the body to dive for something precious—remains the same. Permeating all these cultures is a primal human connection to the ocean. 

There is something magical about the ocean. As of the year 2000, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that as much as ninety-five per cent of the world’s oceans and ninety-nine per cent of the ocean floor are unexplored. Although freediving has extreme dangers, it also allows humans to share a basic and simple connection to this unknowable world. Because of the nitrogen narcosis effects on your brain and body, freediving makes the whole underwater world slow down. It puts the diver into a dreamlike state, where hallucinations are common. At around the fifteen-metre mark, something amazing happens. The pressure underwater changes. Instead of pushing the diver to the surface, the ocean begins to pull them down. Many divers close their eyes and relax as they are dragged deeper. In freediving vernacular, this pull of the ocean has a phrase that has been translated to many different languages, used in many different cultures. The English translation is ‘the doorway to the deep’.