Cavalier Origins

How a kid alone in Hamburg became the man who started selling gems in Vancouver before anyone else in Canada knew what a tourmaline was.

The first thing my grandfather said when he set foot on Canadian soil, in 1950-something, in the port of Montreal, after weeks at sea from Hamburg, up the St. Lawrence in a passenger boat full of post-war Germans looking for somewhere that wasn’t post-war Germany, was this:

"I finally got off the boat and they was speaking god damn French. What a mess."

That’s the opening line of our family story.

He told it more or less the same way for the next sixty years, in his German-Canadian accent that never quite resolved one way or the other, with the same small grin every time, because he understood that the joke was on him. He had crossed an ocean to escape a country and arrived in another country with its own languages he didn’t speak.

The mess was the point.

His name was Christian Adams. We called him Boomsy. My Opa.

Tattoos on his arms, the ship’s anchor most prominently, from the Hamburg years. Born in 1930, somewhere in Germany, into a country that within nine years would become the worst country in the world to be born into. By the time the war ended, he was fifteen. He had been on his own since he was twelve.

The Hitler Youth came for him repeatedly. They came for every street kid they could find. He repeatedly disappeared.

Several members of his family did not survive the era, by various means including their own hand. The full accounting of what he saw between the ages of nine and fifteen is something he never quite told me and probably never told anyone, because there are some kinds of knowing that don’t translate.

What he did with that knowing for the next seven decades is the rest of this story.

Hamburg to Montreal

Boomsy learned to be an engineer on the boats in Hamburg. Marine engineering, mid-twentieth century, the practical kind that involves your hands and a wrench and a deep familiarity with the precise sound a turbine makes the second before something is about to go wrong.

It was the trade that got him out of Germany.

A man with a wrench could find work on a ship. A man on a ship could find his way to a port. And a man at a port could decide whether to get back on the ship or not.

Boomsy got off in Montreal.

He spoke no French. He didn’t speak much English either, but he knew enough English to know that English was not what he was hearing on the dock.

He stayed anyway.

Montreal was where the work was, and Montreal was where the family came together. My mother was born there in 1955. She was the fifth child.

He was twenty-five years old.

We have it pretty damn easy by comparison.

The family left Montreal about a decade later, as Quebec was changing around them. Boomsy used to say Pierre Trudeau came pretty close to ruining the country. I happen to think his son took a bang-up second crack at it.

History repeats. So does the family habit of having opinions about politicians who think they’re smarter than everyone else in the room.

They went west to Vancouver, where a lot of German immigrants of that era landed when they kept going west because the country kept going west until it stopped.

But Vancouver was not where the work was.

Ships, Cigarettes, and Brazil

By the late 1960s and into the early 70s, the work was on American ships. The Vietnam War was on. The US Navy needed engineers, and a German-trained marine engineer who could keep an engine running in a Pacific swell was a German-trained marine engineer who could keep an engine running in a Pacific swell.

Which is how my grandfather, born in Germany in 1930, found himself working on US Navy ships during the Vietnam War.

This is one of the small absurdities of the twentieth century, and his life was made of them.

The other thing about those ships was that cigarettes functioned as a kind of unofficial currency. A pack got you a favour. A carton got you something bigger.

My grandfather controlled the cigarettes.

I never asked him how. I should have.

When I asked my mother years later, the answer was essentially a shrug that meant of course he did, what did you expect?

He was a small, dense German with an engineer’s hands and the cold practicality of a child who had survived 1945.

What the ships gave him, beyond the cigarettes themselves, was contacts. Officers. Crew. Men he met whenever the ships put into port. By the time that work was winding down, he had a notebook full of names in a half-dozen countries, kept on actual paper because there was no other way to keep them, and a system of calling those people from payphones whenever the ships put in.

One of those countries was Brazil.

Through his time in Brazilian ports, Boomsy developed relationships with Brazilian Army officers. In 1973, as the post-Vietnam work was drying up, those contacts told him there was work available on oil rigs off the Brazilian coast.

He took it.

He brought my Uncle Harry, his oldest son, down to join him.

They lived in an apartment near Copacabana and worked rotations on the rigs, two weeks on, two weeks off. The rigs paid well. The work was hard, but a German marine engineer was not afraid of hard, and the off-time was Copacabana, which was a different sort of education than Hamburg had been.

He did this for roughly six years.

1973 to 1979.

And in the back of his head, the contacts ledger kept growing.

The First Parcel

On his trips home to Vancouver, some of Boomsy’s Brazilian contacts started asking him for a favour.

They had access to stones.

Minas Gerais was producing tourmaline, aquamarine, emerald, topaz, and other colored stones. Cutters in Teófilo Otoni and Governador Valadares were turning out parcels that needed buyers.

Could he take some back to Canada?

Could he see if anyone wanted them?

He could.

He did.

Canada had an established jewelry business and a mature diamond trade, but the colored-stone market Boomsy encountered was comparatively undeveloped. There was no internet. There was no standardized pricing manual for an oval green tourmaline from Minas Gerais.

There was the parcel, the buyer, and whatever you could negotiate in the room.

My grandfather started taking parcels home in his bag.

He visited jewelers in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, wherever he could get a meeting.

He started selling.

He had a system.

There was no published price for what he was carrying, so each sale helped establish the next one. If he sold a stone for a number in one shop, he raised the price slightly before walking into the next.

Then the next.

Then the next.

By the end of a trip, the parcel had effectively priced itself upward, and the man who bought the first stone never knew what the last one had sold for.

The dealers who figured this out eventually came to respect it rather than resent it.

He was charming about it.

He was also a German who had been on his own at twelve, and the dealers understood, in the way the trade understands these things, that the man across the desk was not playing for sport.

From Rigs to Gemstones

By the late seventies, the math was obvious.

The rigs paid well, but the rigs were the rigs.

You worked them. They paid you. You went home.

The gems paid better, and the gems were something he was building rather than renting his time to.

He said, and the family still quotes this in the exact words:

"Fuck the rigs, this is the business now."

That was the moment.

That was when Cavalier began, even though it wouldn’t be called Cavalier for years. There was no storefront. No card stock. No logo.

The decision to leave the rigs and chase the gems was the decision that started the family business.

Everything that has happened in our shop in Vancouver since, including this blog you are reading, is a consequence of that sentence.

Boomsy had another phrase he repeated whenever he was trying to teach me something about business:

"Eye on the ball."

He said it constantly.

Gem deals. Real estate. Which countries to fly into next. Which contacts were worth paying long-distance to maintain.

Eye on the ball.

The ball, for him, was always the same thing: the next move that built the next thing.

He didn’t get distracted. He didn’t sentimentalize.

He had been twelve years old and on his own in Germany in 1942.

He knew exactly what distraction cost.

Building the Network

From that pivot in the late seventies, the business did what businesses do when they’re started by the right person at the right time.

It grew.

Colombia opened up next.

The emerald trade in Bogotá was its own world, and through the late seventies and into the eighties, my grandfather added Bogotá to his rotation. The Brazilian sources stayed. The Colombian sources came on. The cutters in Teófilo Otoni who had been his entry point into the trade were now suppliers in a network running across the Americas.

Africa came next.

The Tanzanian and Kenyan deposits were opening up through the seventies. Tsavorite was being discovered. Tanzanite was being marketed internationally. The African colored-stone trade was forming around deposits that had been there all along, and the dealers operated within the same kind of relationship-based, handshake economy that the Brazilians had taught him.

He fit.

And then Thailand.

Bangkok in the late seventies and through the eighties was becoming one of the great centers of the global colored-stone trade. By the time my grandfather was a regular there, he had become a recognizable figure in the rooms: the German marine engineer turned Brazilian rig hand turned Canadian gem dealer with a notebook of contacts on three continents and a habit of ordering one extra whisky for the table.

The Wall, the bar in Silom that became an unofficial headquarters for the trade in that era, knew him.

The dealers knew him.

The cutters knew him.

By the time my grandfather had Thailand in the rotation, my Uncle Harry was old enough to be making the buying trips on his own. The trade was passing into the next generation while Boomsy was still actively running it, which is unusual in this business but exactly how Boomsy ran his business.

In Bangkok, Harry met Apisith Chuenchomlada.

We called him, and still call him, Uncle Johnny.

Johnny was a Thai dealer of approximately Harry’s age and approximately Harry’s disposition: a serious operator with a hand for the trade and an appetite for the longer game.

The partnership that formed between them, and eventually extended to Keith and me, became the spine of what Cavalier is in Asia.

Johnny was the access.

Johnny knew the cutters. Johnny knew the heating houses in Chanthaburi. Johnny knew which dealer was honest about provenance and which one was selling you a story.

He was, in the most literal sense, one of the reasons Cavalier could become a serious player in the colored-stone trade rather than a Canadian curiosity importing Brazilian goods.

He’s still in the business with us today.

Alongside Boomsy and Harry, he is one of the people without whom there is no Cavalier.

The Relay Race

There’s something about my grandfather I haven’t said anywhere else.

When I was a kid, I watched Romancing the Stone over and over at my grandfather’s house.

Michael Douglas chasing a giant emerald through Colombia.

I sat on the floor playing with small amethysts and inexpensive accent stones from Boomsy’s working trays while the movie played in the background.

I had no idea then that the movie was basically a Hollywood version of what my grandfather actually did for a living.

I had no idea that he was the man chasing the stone for real.

The movie has a whole different meaning to me now.

He smoked inside the house with the grandchildren on the floor. He had seen the worst of what the twentieth century could do, and he had decided, somewhere in his teens, that he was never going back to that.

Mark Manson eventually wrote a book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

My grandfather was the un-subtle prototype.

He didn’t give a fuck because he knew, in a way most people will mercifully never know, exactly what life could be at its worst. He was going to spend the rest of his time making sure his life, and ours, never went back to that post-war existence.

He saw me start to come into the business.

He saw Keith come into the business.

He saw the third generation begin to take it from him, which is the thing every founder hopes for and almost none get to live to see.

What I owe him, what Cavalier owes him, is the entire premise.

Without the man getting off the boat in Montreal in the early fifties, looking around at the French speakers and deciding to keep going, none of this exists.

Without the man taking the Navy job during Vietnam and running cigarettes on the ships, none of the contacts that opened Brazil exist.

Without the Brazilian Army officers handing him parcels and saying try this in Canada, the family trade doesn’t begin.

Every link in that chain is a place where the story could have stopped.

None of them did.

The trade is a relay race.

You receive what you can carry from the generation before you. You carry it as far as you can. You hand off what you can to the generation after.

The leg of the relay my grandfather ran was longer than mine will ever be, and it was run uphill in conditions that were, by any reasonable measure, terrible.

We are running our leg now.

Keith and I.

We are not going to make up the distance he covered. We are going to try to run our portion honestly, with our eye on the ball, the way he ran his.

The first thing he said when he got off the boat in 1950-something was:

"They was speaking god damn French. What a mess."

The first thing I think when I walk into the shop in the morning, knowing what the shop is, who built it, what it cost to build, and what we are doing with it now, is approximately the same thing in a different translation.

What a mess.

What a thing to inherit.

Let’s get to work.

Boomsy. Christian Adams. 1930–2020.

Engineer. Sailor. Rig hand. Gem dealer. Husband. Father. Grandfather.

Founder, without ever knowing the word, of the thing we now call Cavalier.