FRENZIED MEN DESPERATELY RACE TO DIAMOND FIELD.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18959, 4 January 1930, Page 11

FRENZIED MEN DESPERATELY RACE TO DIAMOND FIELD.

Riches Discovered In Central Brazil Lead To Amazing Rush

(Written tor tlie “ Star ” Ir Leader of a recent e

iy FRANCIS CiOW SMITH expedition to Brazil.)

Ragged and half-starved, bare-l'ooted but well armed, some five thousand lawless adventurers are hacking their way through the. great forest of central Brazil in a desperate race toward the newly-discovered diamond riches of the Araguaya River. Behind the brief despatche-s from Rio de Janeiro that have brought news of the stampede to this modern El Dorado, there lies a story of hardship, adventure and bloody feuds, more thrilling in many ways than the tales of Kimberley, the Klondike, or the Fortyniners. Indeed, this month’s army of frenzied fortune hunters, filtering through the dim aisles of the Matto Grosso jungles, is only the advance guard of what may become one of the most picturesque diamond rushes in history. This new rush for the- glittering gem that has left its trail of suffering and blood through all the diamond regions of the world, was caused indirectly by the revolt of 12.000 peons who worked the mines of the Rio das Garcas section. Fleeing for their lives from these enraged labourers, loyal workmen beat their way through the jungle to the Araguaya River, where one of the fugitives stumbled upon a diamond. A search revealed others. Short of supplies, the men soon were forced to return to civilisation. Efforts to_ keep their secrets were in vain. Word of their discovery was noised abroad and reports flew about that a thirty-carat diamond, purplish black and of great brilliance—the only stone of its kind in the world—had been taken from the river. Immediately the shiftless thousands in that, part of Brazil began to prepare for the long trek to the Araguaya. Only dreams of vast and sudden wealth could lure them on to dare the perils that await them where the blue Araquava dashes northward through rocky gorges and unchartered wilderness—a thousand miles from the settlements of Matto Grosso to the Amazon. But now. where only a few weeks ago was nothing but jungle fastness a teeming village has sprung into being almost overnight. Each day brings additional scores of diamond diggers and buyers, weary from their thousandmile trip to the new El Dorado; each morning finds this mushroom town larger than it was the night before; each night brings a larger throng to the dance hall gambling house.

Six-shooter Law. For this is the diamond boom towh of Lageado, where gambling, dancing, and drinking i.re the only recreations; where diamonds weighed out in improvised scales of clam shells are the universal legal tender; and where the six shooter is the only law. Southward and eastward it is three hundred miles to the nearest settlements. from which the merchants bring in their supplies by lumbering ox train. Northward and westward there is nothing but unmapped wilderness where warlike Indians poison their arrow-tips and treasure in their wigwams the dried heads of their enemies. The village huts of Lageado rise on each side .of a broad, grass-grown “street.” Their walls are made of roughly hewn saplings stuck upright in the ground and chinked with clay. The roofs are thatched with grass. The floors are dirt. The furniture is a hammock and a block of wood. A motley throng they are—these garimpeiros. the diamond diggers, who are cutting their way through the dense tropical growth that so quickly closes the jungle trails. Negroes, Indians, whites, half breeds, they travel in small groups. A tattered pair of trousers is their only bit of clothing, save a pair of home-made sandals, cut from a piece of cowhide and fastened about the ankle with leather thongs. Each of them carries a well oiled rifle—for they must live chiefly off the country. And thy only other supplies they are taking on their thousandmile dash to the diamond fields are some xarque, strips of sun dried beef, and guarana, a dried fruit, from which is made a stimulating drink that will sustain the traveller for days with little other food. The big diamond rush this month is nothing new to them. It is merely the greatly glorified edition of the annual trek many of them have been making fur a decade past. Each spring, with the beginning of the dry season and trie receding of the rivers, these same garimpeiros have been thronging into , the older diamond diggings along the Rio das Garcas. upper tributary of the Araguaya.

Diamond Buyers Arrive. Free lances all, are the garimpeiros—unyielding to authority and as ready to use their guns on humans as on animals. But regardless of how rich the stake rriay be—no matter how this diamond field may turn out—they are almost sure to depart from the fields at the end of the dry season nearly as impoverished as when they entered. The diamonds that the diggers toiled for months in the water to uncover will be brought back to civilisation next fall by the merchants and the diamond buyers, who already are trooping into the new Araguaya field behind the vanguard of the garimpeiros. By horse Or mule back the diamond buyers travel. Many of them accomplish part of the journey by flivver from the railhead, along rails that are mere ruts. Streams are crossed on bridges that are nothing more than two logs exit to fit the wheels. Turk, Armenian, Swiss. German, Portuguese, Dutch and Belgian—the buyers are a rough thick - skinned, cosmopolitan crew. They wear broad sombreros, checked shirts

and big boots. Rifles rest on their knees as they ride, and revolvers arc conspicuous in their hand-tooled leather belts. Over the right shoulder is slung a leather pouch, or capunga, which gives the diamond buver their name of capungueiros. It is this straggling army ot garimpeiros and capungeiros that has concentrated at Lageado along the shore of the Araguaya. * Boom Town. Lageado—the boom town of the jungle scene ol what may turn out to be Brazil’s greatest diamond rush—is the story of Cassununga all over again, though on a far grander and more amazing scale. Two years ago Cassununga was. the scene of another tropical diamond rush. I was there just as that rush was getting undei way, and the scenes that I saw there then are being duplicated in Lageado to-day. Cassununga was barely beginning to take shape when I rode into town on mule back. Scattered irregularly over a grass-grown clearing were a few hallfinished huts. Only one large stmc ture had been finished—the dance hall A few diamond buyers were gathered there, but the of the town was dr serted. Just another exaggerated boot.* story, I thought to myself, but that was before I had walked over to the bluff above the river. There, below me. the entire population of the new jungle metropolis was working feverish-ly-*—on the beaches and far out in the water —hunting diamonds. A rich strike had been made ancf every ata mond digger was out to get his share as quickly as he could. For in the diamond fields it is first come, first served. The river courses and the land for about four miles on each side are Government property. Nobody can stake an exclusive claim, but any garimpeiro can dig anywhere he chooses. There is, however, a tacit code of the diggings, universally respected, which prevents one man from ousting another from the hole in which he is woiking. But let its possessor leave it a moment, and the hole becomes the property of the first to reach it. 1 was particularly impressed, as 1 watched them, with their adherence to the code of the diggings—which is the more amazing because outside of wonting hours the garimperios are as wild, ruthless and quick-shooting a crew a*> can be found on any frontier. Some of them were scooping up shovels full of gravel, or cascalho from pits along part of the river bed from which the water had receded. But most of them were waist deep in water. Here and there the knots of diggere were much thicker than anywhere else —it was evident that these were the spots where recent lucky finds had been made, and the other diggers had gathered about as closely as their code permitted. Scooping up the gravel in shovels, the garimpeiros put it in shallow wooden bowls about three feet in diameter. Resting the bowls on tile water, they rotated them swiftly so that the worthless cascalho worked itself to the outer rim, whence delt fingers flipped it back into the river. Whatever diamonds there were remainder in the centre of the bowl—-irregular-shaped, cloudy-coloured, unin-teresting-looking little stones, sometimes with a greenish-blue coating that must be burned off before they are cut. A Find.

While J watched, an excited figure came scrambling up the bluff at my feet. He was naked to the waist;, his ragged trousers were dripping wet Under a floppy felt hat his unkempt hair fell forward over gleaming eyes. He had found a big diamond, of perhaps ten carats. It would pay all ot his last year's debts and leave him wealthy—unless, as was likely, he should gamble his new fortune away that night at the dance ball. At dark, the rest of the army of diggers came up from the river. Smoky fires sprang into life around the clearing—the men were cooking themselves meagre suppers of beans and rice, drying out their soaking trousers and donning shirts. Another hour and many of them had made their way to the dance hall. Its interior was illuminated with homemade lamps—dishes filled with oil from the castor bean and provided with crude cotton wicks that dangled over the side flaring feebly. Around the walls were scattered rough tables, at which girls were drinking with bearded diamond buyers. On two blocks of wood in a corner sat the orchestra, one musician playing a home-made guitar, the other an accordeon. Queerly matched couples were dancing the Maxine on the dirt floor in the centre 01 the room. The girls were dressed in colourful, chic costumes, but their partners, as often as not. were barefooted or shod in heavy boots. They wore their sombreros while they danced, and the revolvers, in their belts added a touch of incongruity to the affair. Above their heads was stretched a cloth to prevent snakes and lizards from falling out of the thatch into the middle of the festivity. In the back room a din of oaths and drunken laughter was rising. Here “ Silent Jim.” the sunburned, taciturn, hard-featured North American gold miner who-had floated down to South America looking for a thrill and had found it running a cabaret and gambling hall for the diamond diggers, was presiding over his roulette wheel. Slowly but irresistibly the day's hoard

of rough diamonds was drifting into his possession. Later they would find their way to the diamond buyers, who would stuff them into ostrich quills and taka them down to Rio at the end of the season to sell for anywhere from 10.000 dollars to 100,000 dollars. At one side of the dance hall was a small anteroom, fitted with stalls, to which the dancers could retire and drink in semi privacy. The diamond buyers alone availed themselves of this for nothing but beer is served in these stalls—a very expensive, luxury which the poor diggers could not afford. But there was no other social distinction. Thorough democracy prevailed. Murder-

While I sat at a table taking in the fantastic scene there came a shriek from the gambling room. The whirl of the roulette wheel ceased; a new uproar of oaths arose and a terrified figure raced across the dance floor, scattering couples right and left. Blood was flowing from a knife gash in his cheek. He was tugging desperately at a double-barrelled pistol in his belt. He reached the door a few steps ahead of his pursuer and the two of them passed out into the night. In a second there came a flash and roar of two shots. We found the pursued feudist dying beside an ox cart where he had sought shelter. Ilis assailant had disappeared. Tt was all only an incident—forgotten within an hour. Dancing and gambling went on quite unaffected.

Months later, far down the Araguaya, I met the winner of that night's duel at Cassununga. lie had become chief of police in a little settlement. His boasted record of six murders was known to the villagers, but they respected him the more for it as a competent guardian of the peace. Besides his killing had all been done in the diamond fields—where there is no law—and so they don’t count. But to get back to Cassununga. j Dawn found the garimpeiros back in the river bottoms —clustered in black groups like waterbugs along the shore and across the channel. A storm of new arrivals—sixty or more diggers who trudged in beside a eomativo or ox train, which was bringing supplies from Cuvaba—had invaded the grassy public square of the half-grown town. A number of new buyers had also cotrie in, together with a merchant who intended to set up some kind of a store.

Such was life at Cassununga two years ago. And such is life at Lageado to-day, though this new diamond town of the jungles is even more tumultuous, according to the stories that are filtering back. Certainly the day's job of diamond washing in the Araguaya L far more dangerous. At Lageado the river is tempestuous even in the drv season. The unwary digger may be pulled down into swirling potholes sucked under bv quicksand, or caught in a swift current and swept against the rocks of the rapids. The pockets where the diamonds are found are so deep beneath the river that the diggers must be divers. Skilled shimmers, they arc able to stay long under water. They plunge down to the bottom with a canvas sack, which they fill from a likely hole. But many of the diggers at Lageado, like many of them at Cassununga before them, will use modern diving equipment—helmet, suit and airlines. Perilous Work.

But no equipment can free them from the hardships and perils of the Lageado fields—the constant torment of mosquitoes, the danger of a gashed leg from treading on a stingray, the paralysing shock of an electric eel, which abounds in the rocky stretches of the river. The Araguaya is alive with piranha fish, too, which nibble morsels from the wading digger’s shins. The banks are infested with poisonous snakes whose bite is sndden death, and the diggers especiall}’ dread the sucuru, a twenty-foot constricting water-snake, powerful enough to crush a man like a*, eggshell. But—for all the .manifold perils of the new diggings—there are diamonds there! Diamonds, so the report has it, fine and numerous enough to compensate the insect-tortured adventurers who ae now building this nique mushroom town in the midst of an unmapped jungle. And the imagination of the garimpeiros is inflamed by memories of past finds of sparkling treasures in Brazil. They the glorious Estrella dc Sul, that 2,000.000-doltar gem found in Brazil seventy-five years ago by a Negro slave and now the chief glory of the Gaekwar of Baroda. They remember that the 250,000-dollar crown jewels treasured in Ireland came from Brazil. They think of the world’s finest blue-white diamond —the Tiffanyite, of thirty-three carats, another product of Brazilian fields and now preserved in the Metropolitan Mu-

seum of New York. They remember the splendid Regent Diamond, weighing nearly an ounce—it was picked -up by three outlaws in Misas Geraes. They know that Brazilian diamonds are the hardest and the fieriest-coloured in the world—and they have known for years that the Araguaya River would some day yield a hoard of gems in lavish quantity. For-—as the American geologist* James Orton, has pointed out—there is probably no river bed .in the world richer in mineral wealth. The Araguaya yields not only diamonds to the daring searcher, but also rubies, sapphires, topaz, opals, aquamarines and other semi-precious stones. Beautiful pearls are found in its fresh water clams; while the conspicuous flecks of gold in its gleaming sand are tangible evidence of the existence of the legendary gold mines in the neighbourhood. So it is no wonder that a nondescript throng of fortune hunters is flocking to its shores, now that the long-awaited diamond strike has l»een made in the neighbourhood of Lageado. But, to reach their goal, tropical forests must be traversed—forests where venomous snakes. treacherous Indians and poisonous hairy spiders vie with jungle fever and the river rapids to oppose their dash. Amid a tropical setting of celestial beauty, the menace of death shadows their cA-ery step. ( Anglo-American N.S. Copyright.)