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MEN AND MINES
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xenotime
and other complex phosphate minerals. The pebbles found with Indian
diamonds are only quartz and variously colored jaspers.
About
the latter half of the eighteenth century new discoveries extended the
Brazilian fields from Diamantina north into the province of Bahia and
westward, and in all these fields the diamonds continued to be found in
the beds of present streams or in solid rocks. Meanwhile the
Portuguese crown jewels had grown to be a fabulously rich collection,
but revolutions were sweeping Brazil, and after producing about
sixteen million carats, the Brazilian mines declined. Today they turn
out little more—if_that—than 300,000 carats a year, and most of these
comprise carbonadoes, or, black diamonds, or industrials.
The
only other district in South America producing diamonds is British
Guiana on the north coast, but this production is comparatively small
and unimportant as to quality.
The
newest and greatest of all the fields, however, were to be found
eventually in south Africa beginning in the year 1866 when the children
of a poor Boer farmer named Jacobs, playing near their hovel at Hope
Town on the banks of the Orange River, picked up a bright
pebble, carried it home and dropped it on the farmhouse floor. Schalk
van Niekerk, a neighbor, asked Vrouw Jacobs next day if he might buy
the stone and she laughingly gave it to him! So van Niekerk gave it, in
turn, to a trader named John O'Reilly, asking him to find out if it had
any value. O'Reilly showed it to many of his friends on his way upriver
but none could tell him what it was. Finally he sent it to a noted
geologist, Dr. W. C. Atherstone, of Grahamstown, Union of South Africa,
and it was pronounced a diamond of 21 carats' weight and worth $25,000.
(25)
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