WHERE DIAMONDS ARE FOUND.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 763, 15 October 1886, Page 9

WHERE DIAMONDS ARE FOUND.

COBNHILI MAGAZINE.

It was from the Indian mines—from the mine chiefly of Jumelpur, in Bengal—that Borne was supplied with diamonds, of which the high price is referred to by Gibbon in a quotation from a long catalogue of Eastern commodities, subject about the time of Alexander Sever.us to the payment of duties. But long before Rome was were diamonds ; for the Mababaratta, the great epic poem of the Hindoos, written ItSOO years before Christ, speaks of them. The mine districts of India are chiefly three, where the hereditary turners divide the stones into : 1. Brahmas (pure water); 2. Chodras (honey colored) ; 3. "Vyseas (cream colored) ; 4. Sudras (grey white. The first district is that of Golconda, inaccurately described as a mine, more properly a city and fort, situate some distance from the mines, built for the protection of Hyderabad bv the Nizam., who kept his jewels and disagreeable relatives there. Of the city itself, destroyed in 1690 by Aureogzeb, nothing Temains but ruins, almost as vast as those of Nineveh and Babylon. Never was there any diamonds found there, bub thither were carried all discovered in the district. It was •visited by Tavernier, the travelling jeweller of Paris, in 1636, who brought from the neighborhood—compared by him, with its sandy soil, its boulders and brushwood, lo the •environs of Fontainebleau —many fine stones, disposed of ultimately to Louis XIV. There were at this time three-and-twenty mines at work in the kingdom of Golconda, employing ■60,000 miners of both sexes and all ages, and producing such stones as that one of 900 carats, presented in 1655 by Mirimgala to Aurengzeb. The second district is that comprised between the sacred river Godavari and the Mabaoadi, which falls into tbe Gulf of Bengal close to Puri, where is the most holy temple of Djagannath. Here, too, came Tavernier in 1659, and he he describes how, in January and February, when tbe water is low, the whole population takes to the river and works upwards towards the mountains of its rise. They can see the sand at the bottom and the pebbles, and there only they stay to search more closely where lie the thunder stones that tell them not far off is the flash of the diamond. And in other river mines, in March, when the fields call for no tillers of the soil, the people take to rafts, and scraping the sand out from between the rocks, wash it carefully in the pools. They say that this Mahanadi is the Adarnas river of the ancients, where, it is written, they find diamonds in quantities. The third district is Bur.delound, the richest and.surest of all, where is situate the renowned Pannah, the Panossa of Ptolemy. Let ua look in on them at work here, one shadeless morning, twenty minutes’ walk across the fields to a email flat surface covered with heaps of pebbles, between which cluster huge clumps of jasmine, whose thousand blossoms heavily scent the air. At the foot of a kuoll, gently sloping, he basking a few tattered soldiers ; on the other side is a large well, on the lip of which creaks a wheel turned by four bullocks. This was once • the most important diamond-field in the world, and now the only suggestion of animation and enterprise lies in the creaking of the wheel and the half-a-dozen coolies who trudge backwards and forwards, carrying on their heads baskets of rubbish. How different this from the feverish activity of Kimberley, the click and clatter of the thousand machines, the myriad buckets ! These mines are still let by Government or the Rajah of the district to the wretched class who work them, In the most primitive fashion, half-naked, for fear the governor should imagine them properous, and rise in his demands. They declare the English conquest has irritated the tutelary deities of the soil, who have deserted the mines, and ceased to plant them with precious stones ; it is the best excuse they can make for their idleness and ignorance. In the Bundelcund district, if the revenue falls below a certain fixed sum, the Maharajah beheads a chief and confiscates his goods. He is cheated all the same, but he gets an actual share of one kind or another, which, •without the making of an occasional example, would doubtless be denied him. Benares is the great market for Indian stones ; there, every April, is held a fair, where the merchants—none of them, as far as we can discover, older than twenty meet and chafier. This is all that is left of Golconda—a deserted fort, and all that is left of the three-and-twenty mines described by Tavernier. That there are diamonds still in India is very sure, but they will come to nothing till the Government grant long leases and the individual gives way to the company and machinery. Between the days of that great Mohammed Gho.-i who left lbs. weight of precious stones, the re-alts of indiscriminate plunder, and 1725, when the Brazil mines ■were discovered, there were no diamonds but Indian. In Brazil the miners of Villa do Principe, seeking their gold in the sand of the torrents, would often come upon crystals of a peculiar shape, which they used for counters for cards, keeping the best for the governor of the town. They had the marked advantage of never getting the worse for wear. These, one Bernardino Fonseca Lobo, a monk of Serra do Frio, who had been to the Indies, recognised to be diamonds, and had them sent to Lisbon, and thence to Amsterdam to be cut, whereby the Dutch Minister secured the monopoly of the trade. The discovery of diamonds at the Cape came about in this way. The scene is a Boer’s farmhouse, where dwells van Winkle, not in a Sleepy Hollow, but within white walls, stark and staring on a ridge. Rip van Winkle is six feet three, with a fat face and dusty light hair, and the joints and thighs of some great beast before tbe Flood. He lives on lumps of mutton, and he sleeps from one till four, and again from eight till three, he and his family, on a large ground floor of unburnt bricks, roofed with camelthorn and adorned with, labels of Coleman s mustard and cod-liver oil. If lie has any manners, they come to him from his French ancestry ■; far the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove to the Cape many of the Huguenots of 1685. whose lan-juage ionly died out in tbe time of the grandfathers of the present owners of the paejs and kopjes, round whioh to day the buckets creak and the Kafirs ebatter. Behind the dam for Rip van Winkle’s sheep and cows, lies the melancholy garden of C few pcor potatoes and onions, and taro or

three gum trees close by the kraal where squat the Hottentot cowboys ; and all away to the distant low red hills the unbroken barrenness of the karoo, hot and yellow,- with no shadow over it but the wing of the passing vulture, wheeling against the pale steel-blue of the lurid sky, with at intervals, visible for miles, an aloe or a dwarf acacia or a lump of cns-iia, and tbe low creeping ice plant's with their colored stars. Here, in this drowsy land, whose inhospitable shore is lined with dead sharks, whose trade was in those days all the flawed and damaged articles of the world, all the salvage of the fire and wreck of the other hemisphere, dosed Rip van Winkle, without capital, without energy, his only ambition to pay tbe ancestral debts, to keep tbe moving sand-hills from bulging in hiß staring walls. And far, far in the distance, below the hills, great lakes of shining water, with trees upon the strand, and breaks of lofty cane. For this old-new home of the diamond is the borne as well of Morgana the Fay. In such a farmhouse, with its large table and bureau bearing a Bible and two or three old Dutch books, and the clumsy rifle leaning in the corner, after tbe evening reading of a chapter in the Boer fashion, a trader named Nii-birk, who chanced to be present, told tbe vrouw Jacobs that the greait white shining stones they had just been Roaring of reminded him of the pebbles the children played with, picked up along the banks of the neighboring Orange river. As he 6poke there entered O’Reilly, an ostrich hunter. They tried one of the stones on the window glass, and scratched it all over, the scratches remaining there till this day. It was agreed if it turned out a diamond all were to share equally. On his way to Capetown O’Reilly showed the stone, arid was laughed at for his credulity ; it was even taken from him, and recovered with difficulty from the street where it bad been thrown; but * he laughs best who laughs last,’ for in Capetown the pebble from the banks of the Orange was pronounced a diamond, and was bought by Sir Philip Wodehouee for LSOO. Ten more such were easily found by the vrouw -Jacobs, and early in tbe next year, 1868, several were picked up along the banks of the Veal, among them the renowned ‘Star of Africa,’ by a Hottentot shepherd, who sold it to Niekirk the trader for L4OO, who disposed of it on the same day for L12,0Q0, Then the rush began in earnest, first to Pniel and the river diggings on the Vaal—Pniel, which stretched with its fet of tents, its hive of men and chequer of claims, down to the loud and busy river, and up again to the populous heights of Klipdrift, Here and there, but rarely upon the slope, a canteen of dirty canvas, or a plank built store with roof of corrugated iron ; upon the slope, all poked with holes, so that all looked like some rude and careless cemetery. Within three months of the first discovery there were fire thousand digging there.