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MEN AND MINES
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the
banks of the Kistna, to be thriving with activity. There were something
like 60,000 men, women, and children laboring in the Kollur mines at
that time.
The
curious thing about Indian diamonds, Tavernier found, is that they all
were found in the river-beds. Geologists have tried to trace the
source of these gravels in hopes of finding diamonds in their original
matrix of lava. If they could do that—who knows? But they haven't been
able to do it. Today of course, the Indian mines don't provide much "in
the way of study. Since about 1860 they have been practically
exhausted. Only a hundred carats a year now come from this ancient
source, which during its twenty centuries of real activity contributed
twelve million carats to the world.
"
The next big producer was Brazil, land of jungles and blazing heat.
This was a Portuguese province. It was the year 1726. Men were panning
for gold in the interior uplands. A man named Bernardo da Fonesca Lobo
noticed that some of the stuff picked up by miners didn't look like
gold or like any other stones. (Historians today sometimes in
mentioning the discovery say that he exclaimed: "What bright pebbles!"
That is a wild fabrication because a diamond—well, suppose you go into
a cutting establishment today and look at a rough diamond before it has
been cut and polished. It is unattractive, it is flat, it is greasy, it
is dull. The fact is that Bernardo, who had been a worker in the Indian
mines, knew a diamond when he saw one. So he claimed it.)
The
news shot across the ocean to Lisbon. It was celebrated with high
masses, parades, and feasting, and the Portuguese Crown took immediate
steps to assume control of the fields. The Crown even ordered that the
town of Tejuco, where the diamond was found, be renamed Dia-
(23)
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