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DIAMONDS IN LEGEND
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fatalities as a result of this stone, and their fate and even their existence is conjectural.
We leave conjecture and come now to fact. According to historical reports a man named Ramchund visited Thomas Pitt in 1701 and
showed him the stone. Pitt, greatgrandfather of William Pitt, the
orator who stood up in behalf of the Colonies, was then governor of
Fort George in Madras, which is now a presidency of British India. It
is said that the negotiations consumed three months, at the end of which Pitt purchased the diamond for 48,000 pagodas —a little more than $100,000. It was sent to England for safekeeping.
"It
is said" has been used advisedly in the above sentence because, after
Governor Pitt returned to England in 1710, there arose considerable
gossip about him and his possession of the stone. Many intimated that
he had obtained it by unfair, even foul, means. Furthermore, the
governor was so distracted by the notoriety that he traveled in
disguise and even left, after he died, a detailed statement of his
purchase of the diamond and an explanation of how he learned of it,
negotiated for it, and sold it. Meanwhile the stone was cut up into a
gem of 143.2 metric carats, a tremendous sacrifice but in its final
result worth it. It was a cushion-shaped brilliant cut—that is,
patterned somewhat as though a cutter had tried to combine the best
features of an emerald cut and a modern round cut. It is said that the
enormous cleavages and dust and chips which it discarded in the cutting
brought a total of $50,000.
Now
there was a man named John Law, he who later was to become a figure in
the famous "Mississippi Bubble," also known as "Law's Bubble," the
failure of which caused a tremendous amount of distress and financial
collapse in France. He had established in 1716, as an annex to the
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