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THE HOUSE IN CHARTERHOUSE STREET
Cullinan
I, a pendeloque or pear, 530 carats, now in the English scepter;
Cullinan II, 317 carats, now in the King's State Crown; Cullinan III, a
pendeloque or pear about 95 carats, in the finial of the Queen's State
Crown; Cullinan IV, a square, about 63.7 carats, in the band of the
Queen's State Crown.
The smaller gems are a heart shape, 18.85 carats; a marquise, 11.55 carats; a marquise, 8.77 carats;
an oblong brilliant, 6.80 carats; a pendeloque, 4.39 carats; also 96
diamonds of a total weight of 8 carats and a quantity of unpolished
fragments, good only for industrials, 9-1/2 carats.
The
second great stone is the Excelsior, found in 1893 by a workman in the
Jagersfontein mine, South Africa. It veighed 995.5 carats. Of exquisite
color, it was cut into 21 tones ranging from a fraction of a carat to
70 carats each. Ten of these weighed 10 carats or more. One of the
largest, veighing 18 carats, was displayed in the House of Jewels it
the New York World's Fair in 1939.
The
Jonker Diamond ranks third among South African tones (fourth among the
world's stones) although by no neans among the top diamonds in purity.
But it has an in-teresting story behind it, aside from the fact that it
is one of the most ballyhooed stones of modem times. If you look
through news £les long enough, you begin to get the idea that more
money was paid out to publicize the Jonker than to purchase it. The
suggestion is that the flamboyant, noisy spirit of Tavernier in the gem
world is not yet dead.
But
here is the prospector Jacobus Jonker, tall, spare, warded, for
eighteen years fighting hopelessly as a miner gainst poverty, at times
half drunk from worry and despair, with a wife and seven children to
support. One night in January, 1934, during a lashing rain-and-wind
storm, a native worker for Jonker notices that the earth has been up
tuned. Jonker has an idea, vague though it may be in his
(73)
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