DIAMOND DISCOVERER

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 August 1933, Page 8

DIAMOND DISCOVERER

* ( DEATH IN AFRICA. i Erasmus Stephanas Jacobs has died! at his farm near Coventry, poor and, obscure, and 82 years old. Much had < happened in his world since the day in. 1866 when, at his play, he came upon the “blinkie klippie” or shiny stone,] Africa’s first-known diamond (says Lhe ( “San Francisco Chronicle.”) j The farm on which the first diamond j was found did not belong to Erasmus s] father, a poor man, a squatter in tad. on the property of a somewhat richer Boer, Schalk Van Niekerk. A land, surveyor, Von Ludwig, came about] 1865 to measure Crown lands along the ] Orange River, which was then the frontier of Cape Colony. Every weekend he spent on Van Niekerk’s iarni, and there met the mother of Erasmus. « Von Ludwig, strangely enough, had • brought with him a book on precious stones (they were as yet entirely, unsuspected in Africa), and one day t when he had described an uncut, unpolished diamond, Mrs. Jacobs said her boy had something like that. 1 Erasmus was told to bring out the box in which he kept his treasures, “ and half as a joke Van Niekerk offered t to buy it. When an Irish trader, with t

his ox wagon full of native truck, came by a week or two later, Van Niekerk told him about the strange stone. ’ O’Reilly agreed to take it to the nearlost town, Colesburg, to have it tested j lor genuineness, and the outcome was ’that. Sir Philip Wodehouse, Governor 'of Cape Colonv bought the "pebble” ! for £5OO, of which Erasmus's mother’ . got one-third. | Since little Erasmus made his dis1 covery, 300 tons of diamonds worth, i £300,000,000, have been mined. Ami | most of the pioneers have died poor.