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FIRE IN THE EARTH
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There
was an excited search after that among the usually stolid Boers and
their black servants, but ten months passed before another one was
found—this time, thirty miles downstream from Hope Town, near the
junction of the Orange and Vaal rivers. The search went on for about
two years without any remarkable reward until, in March, 1869, a
diamond of 83-1/2 carats was picked up by a witch doctor on the banks
of the Orange. The same Schalk van Nie-kerk bought this stone for 500
sheep, 10 oxen, and a horse. He sold it for $55,000. It became the
famous "Star of South Africa,"
The
rush was now on in earnest. But not until the coming of Cecil John
Rhodes were efficient methods and engineering talent applied to the
production and handling of this most concentrated form of wealth. But
this deserves a chapter all its own because it concerns, also, the
formation of the greatest diamond producing organization in the world,
the De Beers Consolidated Mines. Ltd.. which, together with its
subsidiaries and associates, the Dia-mond Corporation and the London
Trading Company controIs" at least 95 per cent of the world's output.
It
is interesting and important to note, however, that in South Africa the
geological basis differed from that found in the discovery and mining
of diamonds in India and South America. True, the first diamonds were
found in river gravels—alluvials, they call them. But soon afterward
they were traced to a new and unsuspected source. Earlier, geologists
had doubted that South Africa would yield many diamonds, since the
geological conditions seemed different from those in India and Brazil.
But even then they did not realize that below the alluvial diggings
were the pipes that were to yield the real wealth in diamonds.
Mr. H. T. Dickinson, Technical Director of De Beers
(26)
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