THE WORLD'S ELDORADO

New Zealand Mail, 27 August 1902, Page 64 (Supplement)

THE WORLD'S ELDORADO

WONDERS OF SOUTH AFRICA’S GREAT GOLDFIELDS.

From times immemorial, the dreams of mankind and the hearts of the adventurous have been excited anil stirred by thoughts of the earth's great treasure houses. King Solomon’s Mines existed in pre-hist one days, as did the fabled wealth of Ind, and the famous of Golconda; while later, the farreaching Spaniards, in the period of their greatest pomp and power, realised to some extent the Golden Land of their visions in the conquest of Mexico and Peru. To come to quite modern days, one is reminded of the Gold Fever which swept over half the civilised world fifty years or so since, when the hidden stores of the precious yellow metal were unearthed in California and Australia : and it seems only the other day that all men’s mouths, and the newspapers also, were filled with news of the unprecedentedly rich discoveries of gold at Klondyke and Cape Nome. But the world’s great Eldorado was neither of these. It was in South Af- . rica; and it was, surely, one of the: strangest of the ironies of fate that one : corner of the earth, hitherto dubbed ' the Dark Continent, should bo destined to become the vastest and wealthiest of all known goldfields—ay. even richer than all combined. Yet such is the fact, as the following short paper will show. Such information as it contains is culled from the most authentic sources, and may. therefore, be accepted as unquestionable.

We have the authority of Theai, the historiographer of South Africa, for saying that gold was discovered at a comparatively early date in various places in the Transvaal. But the Boers were a pastoral people, subsisting on tillage and vast flocks and herds. Even tiie leaders of the people were afraid of having their country deluged by a vast army of gold-hunters, rushing in from all comers of the world: so the intelligence cf the existence of gold beyond the Yaal was suppressed as far as possible. and laws were even passed in the Vo'ksraad to prevent it ever being worked.

However, the news must have leaked \ out, for between sixteen and seventeen » years ago we find the first camp of gold-' diggers established in the Transvaal, j This place was called Ferreira's Camp ; it; was m the Witwatersraud—the White j Water Hills—and, where the camp stood Johannesburg was raised later. The few; hundred diggers, in slouched iiats and ; shirt sleeves, the outspanned waggons 1 and tents they lived in; the curious assemblage of tin huts, stores, canvas j houses, and a few* brick buildings, in fit- i teen years had given place to solid, palatial halls and houses, a hundred : thousand Outlauders,,and a score or two' of millionaires.

Even from the very beginning there was all the difference in the world between the gold mines in the Transvaal and those in California and Aunstraiia- In many districts in the latter places poor mail’s diggings were plentiful. There a man only required a few shillings, a pick and a spade, a cradle and water, and then by digging and sluicing the auriferous gravels and soils lie winnowed out his gold-dust, nuggets too, and many a poor fellow made a fortune.

It was never so as Johannesburg. There capital was needed, and often enough tremendous capital, for the gold was embedded in hard quartz rock, which had first to be blasted and then crushed into dust by powerful machines. Even when gold was found it remained locked up in the rock until thg capitalist stepped in to set it free. The engineer had to be called in to design the laying out of. works t shafts had to be sunk, hauling-gear erected, tunnels driven, and the ore stoped out. Underground excavations are carried out by rockdrilling, driven by compressed air; steam power is needed everywhere, and when the ore is obtained it lias to be taken to th@ battery to be crushed. I'rom the first the output of gold at the Randt was payable, hr.it for years there was evidently a lack of faith on the part of capitalists.rospect-

ing the future of the Witwatersraud mines. Many were afraid that the reef would fail or prove barren, and it is only within the past seven or eight years that the tremendous extent and value of the reef have been fully established. It has now been proved that tho gold reef extends for 29 miles, and competent geologists say it may extend for even fifty miles. This proof was a costly affair, as may be gleaned from the fact that one of tlie deepest bore-holes reached a depth of 3,200 feet. Afterwards it was only a matter of simple calculation to estimate that .when the deep levels of the existing mines were worked the gold won would reach the astounding value cf seven hundred millions of pounds; and it has been further calculated that when the whole of the Randt is fully worked by other mines yet to be- sunk the total yield may probably reach thirteen hundred millions of periods sterling.

£1,300.000,000! This is Eldorado, indeed! Compare the output of Californian and Australian gold with this immense, this incredible sum. It is five times the value of all the precious ore that ever was raised in California, four times the value of all hitherto raised in Australia, and more than double the yield f both. Nor does this stupendous amount of mineral wealth represent by any means the whole of the golden store cf South Africa. It represents only that block of miring properties known as the Randt, which are situated in and around Johannesburg, and which have been engineered, financed, and are now owned by capitalists and shareholders tif every civilised country on the face of the earth.

A glance at the map of South Africa will show that the great gold reef of tho White Water Hills is only one, though as yet the wealthiest, of many goldfields scattered through the vast country. Two of the oldest and richest gold districts, apart from the Randt, are the Lydenburg and Barberton Mines; and all oi er the Murchison Range in the north-east of the Transvaal, gold is found in a tract of country over 50 miles square. Besides those indicated there are at least a score of other gold fields in the Transvaal—lying north, east, south, west —and over the immense tract of country known as Rhodesia the rich yellow ore lias been unearthed in nearly a score of places..

But to return to the Randt mines. From a report issued shortly after the outbreak of the present w:i?. by Mr S. C. Norris, formerly Mining Com mis- . sioner in Rhodesia, we learn something ! of the tremendous outlay involved in i working the richest gold mines on earth. ; Of the 1,300,000,000 of pounds sterling . which Witwatersraud is estimated | to contain something like eighty or 'j ninety millions have teen extracted, ’ leaving over £1,200,000.000 to be won ; ■ and to win even one-thirteenth of tire j vast hoard buried in the rock many mil- i lions of pounds have had to be sunk, • the folks who found the capital being j mainly Britishers, Frenchmen, Ger- j mans, Hollanders, Americans, and the j inhabitants of Cape Colony, Natal and ! the two old Republics. When one con- j siders that the owners of the Randt 1 mines are spread over so many Eur- j opean and other nationalities, how ab- j surd it appears to talk of England baring undertaken the war in order to pos- J sess herself of the gold fields.

It is said by competent engineers— j some of whom are paid as much as : £12,000 per annum as retaining fees— j that to extract one cubic inch of Randt j gold no fewer than 500,000 cubic inches : of rock have to be pulverised into dust, 1 owing to the ore being scattered so fine- I ly through the quartz. To effect this ! crashing very powerful machinery is re- j quired, and in each of the great bat- l teries on the Randt nine hundred tons I og gold-bearing rock were ground into ' powder daily before the present war j commenced.

Day and night the whole year through the work of crushing the quartz was car- j ried on, and as each stamp in one of the larger batteries weighed half a ton, and there was sometimes two hundred stamps in a battery, the whole of them pounding away at once, the thundering, deafening uproar produced can be imagined. Near the ponderous batteries tho solid earth literally quivered under one’s feet, and even at a distance of •

six or seven miles the deep, thunderous boom of the machinery could be heard distinctly on a clear, day.

The battery houses are vast structures of corrugated iron, built on massive frames of timber; waggon loads of ore are tipped from tramways against big screens, and the larger masses of rock

i are forced through the jaws of mighty j mills to be crushed, shoots and feeders . admitting the ore to the mortar-boxes. I In these strong iron chambers there aro 1 great anvils, or dies, oil which the lialfi ton steam hammers, or stamps, were ! for ever at work pounding the rock !to dust: and in the four-and-twenty ! hours eacli stamp will crush about four : and a half tons.

A carefully regulated flow of water carries away the powdered ore, spreads it wide over surfaces of quicksilver amalgam, to which most of the gold clings, and at the end cf each month the stamps aiv stopped, the amalgam is then scraped off the plates, placed in retorts, where the gold is separated from the quick-silver. The crashed ore which is carried over the quicksilver plates is forced to yield up its gold dust bv cyanide treatment and other goldextracting processes, and, as it is at the end of each calendar month that the gold is separated and collected, a declaration of the output of gold is then made, such a system being made compulsory by Government regulations.

For two years and a halt now the vast bulk of the gold mining machinery of the Transvaal has been idle, and the booming of big guns and pom-poms has taken the place of the titanic stamps. For a time the Boers did carry on a few of the abandoned gold mines, and no doubt enriched their treasury* to tlie tune of a few hundred thousand sterling. With the scattering of the burgher forces a few of the mines have again been set to work; fcf.it it cannot be hoped that one-half of the mines will reopen or more than a modicum of the Outlanders will return to the Randt. "With peace Mill come not oniy the old prosperity of the country, hut a well-doing tenfold in excess of that prevailing three years ago. for when England becomes the dominant power in tho land most, if not all, of the former unjust impositions and restrictions will be swept away; the whole conditions of existence and industry will be improved ; the prices of food, machinery, etc., will be reduced, the dynamite monopoly will be crushed, and. under the stimulus of a free, broacT-minded, and fostering Government, at least a score of new gold fields will be opened out. To that new era of well-being all sensible sons of Empire look hopefully forward.