GOLD RUSH

Evening Star, Issue 21638, 6 February 1934, Page 1

GOLD RUSH

PENNILESS PROSPECTOR'S FIND The gold standard is a by-word in tlie economics of nations to-day; yet lew of ns have ever heard the mellifluous name, Frederick Pine Theophilus Struben. Fred STruben was the pioneer prospector of the Witwatersrand goldllelds and the thunder of the world’s greatest gold mining industry. Porn in Pietermaritzburg on June 14, 1851, he was the son of a Dutch mariner who settled at the Cape and became Chief Magistrate for the Northern Districts of Natal. Struben spent a great deal of his youth trekking about the Transvaal with his family, collecting ivory from big-game hunters and trading with the natives, who were sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile. The country, back, in the ’sixties, was anything but pacific. Sometimes, writes Mr William Macdonald in ‘ The Romance of the Golden Rand/ the political party occupying Pretoria had no sooner departed in order to engage the enemy, in battle in the open country, than the rival army, lying in ambush a few miles outside the town, immediately took possession of it, and straightway commandeered all the live stock, food, and military supplies and formed a picturesque, if untidy, encampment in the centre of the market square. A HARDY LIFE. This hardy life, however, was the foundation of Struben’s subsequent success. “ Rilling hundreds of miles, out in all kinds of weather, in storm and sunshine, lying down on the kopje in God’s fresh air, with the water of the thunderstorm pouring over me, was daily making me a new man,” he could say in future years. Ho was first attached to diamond prospecting on the Lower Vaal River in the early ’seventies, when precious stones of great value were discovered in the most haphazard fashion. The child of .a poor Boer, for example, would rest for the moment at the loot of a tree, notice a beautiful pebble with pointed sides lyong on the ground, slip it into its pocket, and take it home to play with. It would turn out to be a 21carat diamond, worth, say, £SOO. Or news would come that a Griqua witchdoctor in the district possessed a wonderful stone with which he was reputed to perforin marvellous cures. It proved to he a pure white brilliant of 83 i carats, which eventually sold for £11,200, and was subsequently sold for £25,000 to the Earl of Dudley. No such luck came Struben’s way; his total finds for the first few months amounted to only three small diamonds worth £2. But he persevered until he found a 20-carat for which he could ask £I,OOO. In the end he abandoned his claim to the menace of camp fever, from which his brother nearly died. Then he became smitten with the gold-fever, lyud started panning, but again with sc.'mt initial success. It was a chance encounter with a Boer which first turned him in the direction of the Witwatersrand in 1883. Two days after he commenced operations there he discovered a reef which assayed on the surface tldwt and at 50ft reached almost 2oz per ton. But this, yet again, proved unsatisfactory. He trekked a few miles to another region, and there struck the famous “ Confidence Reef.” Breaking off a piece of surface rock, he took it at once to a near-by stream, crushed it, and panned it. Out of that fragment came almost a teaspoonful of gold. He set off rapidly to his' camp, tested it with chemicals, and also by heating. SOLITARY THOUGHTS. “It was then,” he confessed, “ I realised 1 had found a vein of remarkable richness and of great value. I stood at my tent door alone. There was no one to speak to in the vast solitude of the silent veld. Years of suffering, ridicule, and disappointment came before me in a flash at that moment. I re--membered that the only thing that was left to mo through it all was that strange, unconquerable confidence .within me that one day I would strike a rich goldfield. Then, as I looked over the barren veld and desolate kopjes I saw a vision of a gold-bearing formation that would bring millions of capital into South Africa, and provide work for thousands of miners.”

He was thinking of his first few months of diamond prospecting, when his clothers were in tatters, his worn-out socks protruded through the soles of his boots, and his weatherbeaten hat had 116 longer a top to it; when, in fact, he had not the necessary cash to pay the monthly wages of his native boys. But there the pluck of the born prospector showed itself. Instead of abandoning himself to despair he invested the money he had in a pair of bright new boots and a big sombrero to cheer himself up, and then sat down on an empty gin case to think out some new scheme. At that moment a Boer farmer rode up and said to him: “ Have you heard of the new discovery of diamonds on Vooruitzicht, De Beer’s farm. They are so plentiful that they are being ploughed up in the sand of the kopjes.” And that was the turn of the tide.

Struben became, in Mr Macdonald’s words, “ tlie greatest prospector that ever trod the Witwatersrand.” When he retired from the Band goldfields in 1888, at the early of thirty-seven, he was a rich man. Thereafter he lived in England, returning only occasionally to visit old friends. It is one of the romances of life, in a world which often brings frustration, to picture this hardy prospector living out his years as a country gentleman, owner of the beautiful Spitchwick Manor in the Devon parish of Widecombe.