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spr ing
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summer
What strikes you as most remarkable in your career?
The start of it was the most interesting and exciting. Going to the
asbestos mine in Quebec and buying these garnet specimens and finding
out there were museums all over the country that would trade for them.
Learning that I could make a living dealing with collectors and museums
in Canada, then the Smithsonian, the Museum of Natural History in
New York, the British Museum, the Sorbonne in Paris. I could trade what
I could find in Canada for specimens that they’d had in their collection
for over a hundred, a hundred and fifty years. If [museum directors] had
duplicates of something that was found in the Ural Mountains, say, a
hundred and fifty years ago, they would trade. And, with these, I’d take
them back and sell them to collectors and museums worldwide.
Do you have any
Indiana Jones
type adventures to relate?
Well, there have been times when I’d get a phone call in the middle
of the night that something was found and I’d have to give up my plans
over the next couple of weeks to get on an airplane and fly away to some
God-forsaken place, buy it up and bring it back. I remember several
[incidents] like that, but I can’t say I ever had to go in with a knife
between my teeth.
years. It would be a three-week trip. I still remember the price of that
ticket: it was $1,200 (Canadian).
Isn’t security a problem for someone searching the world for gems and
paying for them? The areas you mention are not listed among the safest
countries in the world.
You usually deal with people you’d get familiar with and you
develop close friends you could work with and they’d look after the
export for a [small] fee so that we wouldn’t have to carry the stuff. We’re
known in the trade, and once you build up a degree of paying your bills
you have no problem. Everything would be shipped and you paid thirty
days later. No problem anywhere in the world.
Traveling through Pakistan or Columbia, however, you
always needed to have an armed guard with you, or someone that
really knew the territory, because there were some areas that were
dangerous.
You made deals with tribal leaders to get you from one section to another,
correct?
It’s not that difficult. Everyone seemed eager to facilitate a deal.
Silverhorn’s extensive collection
of rarities, Mike explains, are all
found and remain in their natural
state, which is what makes them
so fascinating – and valuable – to
collectors