III
With this economic setting for the whole South African picture and a visualization of the Cape-to-Cairo Route let us start on the long journey that eventually took me to the heart of equatorial Africa. The immediate objectives, so far as this chapter is concerned, are Kimberley, Johannesburg and Pretoria, names and towns that are synonymous with thrilling chapters in the development of Africa and more especially the Union.
CECIL RHODES — Photograph Copyright by W. & D. Downey
You depart from Capetown in the morning and for hours you remain in the friendly company of the mountains. Table Mountain has hovered over you during the whole stay at the capital and you regretfully watch this "Gray Father" fade away in the distance. In the evening you pass through the Hex River country where the canyon is reminiscent of Colorado. Soon there bursts upon you the famous Karoo country, so familiar to all readers of South African novels and more especially those of Olive Schreiner, Richard Dehan and Sir Percy Fitz Patrick. It is an almost treeless plain dotted here and there with Boer homesteads. Their isolation suggests battle with element and soil. The country immediately around Capetown is a paradise of fruit and flowers, but as you travel northward the whole character changes. There is less green and more brown. After the Karoo comes the equally famous veldt, studded with the kopjes that became a part of the world vocabulary with the Boer War. Behind these low, long hills,—they suggest flat, rocky hummocks—the South African burghers made many a desperate stand against the English.
When you see the kopjes you can readily understand why it took so long to conquer the Boers. The Dutch knew every inch of the land and every man was a crack shot from boyhood. In these hills a handful could hold a small army at bay. All through this region you encounter places that have become part of history. You pass the ruins of Kitchener's blockhouses,—they really ended the Boer War—and almost before you realize it, you cross the Modder River, where British military prestige got a bloody repulse. Instinctively there come to mind the struggles of Cronje, DeWet, Joubert, and the rest of those Boer leaders who made this region a small Valhalla.
Late in the afternoon of the second day you suddenly get a "feel" of industry. The veldt becomes populated and before long huge smokestacks loom against the sky. You are at Kimberly. The average man associates this place with a famous siege in the Boer War and the equally famous diamond mines. But it is much more for it is packed with romance and reality. Here came Cecil Rhodes in his early manhood and pulled off the biggest business deal of his life; here you find the first milepost that the American mining engineer set up in the mineral development of Africa: here is produced in greater quantities than in any other place in the world the glittering jewel that vanity and avarice set their heart upon.
Kimberley is one of the most unique of all the treasure cities. It is practically built on a diamond mine in the same way that Johannesburg rests upon a gold excavation. When the great diamond rush of the seventies overwhelmed the Vaal and Orange River regions, what is now the Kimberley section was a rocky plain with a few Boer farms. The influx of fortune-hunters dotted the area with tents and diggings. Today a thriving city covers it and the wealth produced—the diamond output is ninety per cent of the world supply—exceeds in value that of a big manufacturing community in the United States.
At Kimberley you touch the intimate life of Rhodes. He arrived in 1872 from Natal, where he had gone to retrieve his health on a farm. The moment he staked out a claim he began a remarkable career. In his early Kimberley days he did a characteristic thing. He left his claims each year to attend lectures at Oxford where he got his degree in 1881, after almost continuous commuting between England and Africa. Hence the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford created by his remarkable will. History contains no more striking contrast perhaps than the spectacle of this tall curly-haired boy with the Caesar-like face studying a Greek book while he managed a diamond-washing machine with his foot.
Rhodes developed the mines known as the DeBeers group. His great rival was Barney Barnato, who gave African finance the same erratic and picturesque tradition that the Pittsburgh millionaires brought to American finance. His real name was Barnett Isaacs. After kicking about the streets of the East End of London he became a music hall performer under the name by which he is known to business history. The diamond rush lured him to Kimberley, where he displayed the resource and ingenuity that led to his organization of the Central mine interests which grouped around the Kimberley Mine.
A bitter competition developed between the Rhodes and Barnato groups. Kimberley alternated between boom and bankruptcy. The genius of diamond mining lies in tempering output to demand. Rhodes realized that indiscriminate production would ruin the market, so he framed up the deal that made him the diamond dictator. He made Barnato an offer which was refused. With the aid of the Rothschilds in London Rhodes secretly bought out the French interests in the Barnato holdings for $6,000,000, which got his foot, so to speak, in the doorway of the opposition. But even this did not give him a working wedge. He was angling with other big stockholders and required some weeks time to consummate the deal. Meanwhile Barnato accumulated an immense stock of diamonds which he threatened to dump on the market and demoralize the price. The release of these stones before the completion of Rhodes' negotiations would have upset his whole scheme and neutralized his work and expense.
He arranged a meeting with Barnato who confronted him with the pile of diamonds that he was about to throw on the market. Rhodes, so the story goes, took him by the arm and said: "Barney, have you ever seen a bucketful of diamonds? I never have. I'll make a proposition to you. If these diamonds will fill a bucket, I'll take them all from you at your own price."
Without giving his rival time to answer, Rhodes swept the glittering fortune into a bucket which happened to be standing nearby. It also happened that the stones did not fill it. This incident shows the extent of the Rhodes resource, for a man at Kimberly told me that Rhodes knew beforehand exactly how many diamonds Barnato had and got the right sized bucket. Rhodes immediately strode from the room, got the time he wanted and consummated the consolidation which made the name DeBeers synonymous with the diamond output of the world. One trifling feature of this deal was the check for $26,000,000 which Rhodes gave for some of the Barnato interests acquired.
The deal with Barnato illustrated the practical operation of one of the rules which guided Rhodes' business life. He once said, "Never fight with a man if you can deal with him." He lived up to this maxim even with the savage Matabeles from whom he wrested Rhodesia.
Not long after the organization of the diamond trust Rhodes gave another evidence of his business acumen. He saw that the disorganized marketing of the output would lead to instability of price. He therefore formed the Diamond Syndicate in London, composed of a small group of middlemen who distribute the whole Kimberley output. In this way the available supply is measured solely by the demand.
Rhodes had a peculiar affection for Kimberley. One reason perhaps was that it represented the cornerstone of his fortune. He always referred to the mines as his "bread and cheese." He made and lost vast sums elsewhere and scattered his money about with a lavish hand. The diamond mines did not belie their name and gave him a constant meal-ticket.
In Kimberley he made some of the friendships that influenced his life. First and foremost among them was his association with Doctor, afterwards Sir, Starr Jameson, the hero of the famous Raid and a romantic character in African annals. Jameson came to Kimberley to practice medicine in 1878. No less intimate was Rhodes' life-long attachment for Alfred Beit, who arrived at the diamond fields from Hamburg in 1875 as an obscure buyer. He became a magnate whose operations extended to three continents. Beit was the balance wheel in the Rhodes financial machine.
The diamond mines at Kimberley are familiar to most readers. They differ from the mines in German South-West Africa and the Congo in that they are deep level excavations. The Kimberley mine, for example, goes down 3,000 feet. To see this almost grotesque gash in the earth is to get the impression of a very small Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It is an awesome and terrifying spectacle for it is shot through with green and brown and purple, is more than a thousand feet wide at the top, and converges to a visible point a thousand feet below. You feel that out of this color and depth has emerged something that itself incarnates lure and mystery. Even in its source the diamond is not without its element of elusiveness.
The diamonds at Kimberley are found in a blue earth, technically known as kimberlite and commonly called "blue ground." This is exposed to sun and rain for six months, after which it is shaken down, run over a grease table where the vaseline catches the real diamonds, and allows the other matter to escape. After a boiling process it is the "rough" diamond.
I spent a day in the Dutoitspan Mine where I saw thousands of Kaffirs digging away at the precious blue substance soon to be translated into the gleaming stone that would dangle on the bosom or shine from the finger of some woman ten thousand miles away. I got an evidence of American cinema enterprise on this occasion for I suddenly debouched on a wide level and under the flickering lights I saw a Yankee operator turning the crank of a motion picture camera. He was part of a movie outfit getting travel pictures. A hundred naked Zulus stared with open-eyed wonder at the performance. When the flashlight was touched off they ran for their lives.
This leads me to the conspicuous part that Americans have played at Kimberley. Rhodes had great confidence in the Americans, and employed them in various capacities that ranged from introducing California fruits into South Africa and Rhodesia to handling his most important mining interests. When someone asked him why he engaged so many he answered, "They are so thorough."
First among the Americans that Rhodes brought to Kimberley was Gardner F. Williams, a Michigander who became General Manager of the DeBeers Company in 1887 and upon the consolidation, assumed the same post with the united interests. He developed the mechanical side of diamond production and for many years held what was perhaps the most conspicuous technical and administrative post in the industry. He retired in favor of his son, Alpheus Williams, who is the present General Manager of all the diamond mines at Kimberley.
A little-known American had a vital part in the siege of Kimberley. Among the American engineers who rallied round Gardner Williams was George Labram. When the Boers invested the town they had the great advantage of superiority in weight of metal. Thanks to Britain's lack of preparedness, Kimberley only had a few seven pounders, while the Boers had "Long Toms" that hurled hundred pounders. At Rhodes' suggestion Labram manufactured a big gun capable of throwing a thirty-pound shell and it gave the besiegers a big and destructive surprise. This gun, which was called "Long Cecil," was built and booming in exactly twenty-eight days. Tragically enough, Labram was killed by a Boer shell while shaving in his room at the Grand Hotel exactly a week after the first discharge of his gun.
IV
The part that Americans had in the development of Kimberley is slight compared with their participation in the exploitation of the Rand gold mines. Not only were they the real pioneers in opening up this greatest of all gold fields but they loomed large in the drama of the Jameson Raid. One of their number, John Hays Hammond, the best-known of the group, was sentenced to death for his rôle in it. The entire technical fabric of the Rand was devised and established by men born, and who had the greater part of their experience, in the United States.
The capital of the Rand is Johannesburg. When you ride in a taxicab down its broad, well-paved streets or are whirled to the top floor of one of its skyscrapers, it is difficult to believe that thirty years ago this thriving and metropolitan community was a rocky waste. We are accustomed to swift civic transformations in America but Johannesburg surpasses any exhibit that we can offer in this line. Once called "a tin town with a gold cellar," it has the atmosphere of a continuous cabaret with a jazz band going all the time.
No thoroughly acclimated person would ever think of calling Johannesburg by its full and proper name. Just as San Francisco is contracted into "'Frisco," so is this animated joytown called "Joburg." I made the mistake of dignifying the place with its geographical title when I innocently remarked, "Johannesburg is a live place." My companion looked at me with pity—it was almost sorrow, and replied,
"We think that 'Joburg' (strong emphasis on 'Joburg') is one of the hottest places in the world."
The word Rand is Dutch for ridge or reef. Toward the middle of the eighties the first mine was discovered on what is the present site of Johannesburg. The original excavation was on the historic place known as Witwatersrand, which means White Water Reef. Kimberley history repeated itself for the gold rush to the Transvaal was as noisy and picturesque as the dash on the diamond fields. It exceeded the Klondike movement because for one thing it was more accessible and in the second place there were no really adverse climatic conditions. Thousands died in the snow and ice of the Yukon trail while only a few hundred succumbed to fever, exposure to rain, and inadequate food on the Rand. It resembled the gold rush to California in 1849 more than any other similar event.
The Rand gold fields, which in 1920 produced half of the world's gold, are embodied in a reef about fifty miles long and twenty miles wide. All the mines immediately in and about Johannesburg are practically exhausted. The large development today is in the eastern section. People do everything but eat gold in Johannesburg. Cooks, maids, waiters, bootblacks—indeed the whole population—are interested, or at some time have had an interest in a gold mine. Some historic shoestrings have become golden cables. J. B. Robinson, for example, one of the well-known magnates, and his associates converted an original interest of £12,000 into £18,000,000. This Rand history sounds like an Aladdin fairy tale.
What concerns us principally, however, is the American end of the whole show. Hardly were the first Rand mines uncovered than they felt the influence of the American technical touch. Among the first of our engineers to go out were three unusual men, Hennen Jennings, H. C. Perkins and Captain Thomas Mein. Together with Hamilton Smith, another noted American engineer who joined them later, they had all worked in the famous El Callao gold mine in Venezuela. Subsequently came John Hays Hammond, Charles Butters, Victor M. Clement, J. S. Curtis, T. H. Leggett, Pope Yeatman, Fred Hellman, George Webber, H. H. Webb, and Louis Seymour. These men were the big fellows. They marshalled hundreds of subordinate engineers, mechanics, electricians, mine managers and others until there were more than a thousand in the field.
This was the group contemporaneous and identified with the Jameson Raid. After the Boer War came what might be called the second generation of American engineers, which included Sidney Jennings, a brother of Hennen, W. L. Honnold, Samuel Thomson, Ruel C. Warriner, W. W. Mein, the son of Capt. Thomas Mein, and H. C. Behr.
Why this American invasion? The reason was simple. The American mining engineer of the eighties and the nineties stood in a class by himself. Through the gold development of California we were the only people who had produced gold mining engineers of large and varied practical experience. When Rhodes and Barnato (they were both among the early nine mine-owners in the Rand) cast about for capable men they naturally picked out Americans. Hammond, for example, was brought to South America in 1893 by Barnato and after six months with him went over to Rhodes, with whom he was associated both in the Rand and Rhodesia until 1900.
Not only did Americans create the whole technical machine but one of them—Hennen Jennings—really saved the field. The first mines were "outcrop," that is, the ore literally cropped out at the surface. This outcrop is oxidized, and being free, is easily amalgamated with mercury. Deeper down in the earth comes the unoxidized zone which continues indefinitely. The iron pyrites found here are not oxidized. They hold the gold so tenaciously that they are not amalgamable. They must therefore be abstracted by some other process than with mercury. At the time that the outcrop in the Rand become exhausted, what is today known as the "cyanide process" had never been used in that part of the world. The mine-owners became discouraged and a slump followed. Jennings had heard of the cyanide operation, insisted upon its introduction, and it not only retrieved the situation but has become an accepted adjunct of gold mining the world over. In the same way Hammond inaugurated deep-level mining when many of the owners thought the field was exhausted because the outcrop indications had disappeared.
These Americans in the Rand made the mines and they also made history as their part in the Jameson Raid showed. Perhaps a word about the Reform movement which ended in the Raid is permissible here. It grew out of the oppression of the Uitlander—the alien—by the Transvaal Government animated by Kruger, the President. Although these outsiders, principally English and Americans, outnumbered the Boers three to one, they were deprived of the rights of citizenship. The Reformers organized an armed campaign to capture Kruger and hold him as a hostage until they could obtain their rights. The guns and ammunition were smuggled in from Kimberley as "hardware" under the supervision of Gardner Williams. It was easy to bring the munitions as far as Kimberley. The Boers set up such a careful watch on the Transvaal border, however, that every subterfuge had to be employed to get them across.
Dr. Jameson, who at that time was Administrator of Southern Rhodesia, had a force of Rhodesian police on the Transvaal border ready to come to the assistance of the Committee if necessary. The understanding was that Jameson should not invade the Transvaal until he was needed. His impetuosity spoiled the scheme. Instead of waiting until the Committee was properly armed and had seized Kruger, he suddenly crossed the border with his forces. The Raid was a fizzle and the commander and all his men were captured by the Boers. This abortive attempt was the real prelude to the Boer War, which came four years later.
Most Americans who have read about this episode believe that John Hays Hammond was the only countryman of theirs in it. This was because he had a leading and spectacular part and was one of the four ringleaders sentenced to death. He afterwards escaped by the payment of a fine of $125,000. As a matter of fact, four other prominent American mining engineers were up to their necks in the reform movement and got long terms in prison. They were Capt. Thomas Mein, J. S. Curtis, Victor M. Clement and Charles Butters. They obtained their freedom by the payment of fines of $10,000 each. This whole enterprise netted Kruger something like $2,000,000 in cash.
The Jameson Raid did more than enrich old Kruger's coffers and bring the American engineers in the Rand to the fore. Indirectly it blocked a German scheme that might have played havoc in Africa the moment the inevitable Great War broke. If the Boer War had not developed in 1899 it is altogether likely that, judging from her whole campaign of world-wide interference, Germany would have arranged so that it should break out in 1914. In this unhappy event she could have struck a death blow at England in South Africa because in the years between the Boer War and 1914 she created close-knit colonial organizations in South-West and East Africa; built strategic railways; armed and drilled thousands of natives, and could have invaded the Cape Colony and the Transvaal.
In connection with the Jameson Raid is a story not without interest. Jameson and Rudyard Kipling happened to be together when the news of Roosevelt's coup in Panama was published. The author read it first and handed the paper to his friend with the question: "What do you think of it?"
Jameson glanced at the article and then replied somewhat sadly, "This makes the Raid look like thirty cents."
I cannot leave the Rand section of the Union of South Africa without a word in passing about Pretoria, the administrative capital, which is only an hour's journey from Johannesburg. Here you still see the old house where Kruger lived. It was the throne of a copper-riveted autocracy. No modern head of a country ever wielded such a despotic rule as this psalm-singing old Boer whose favorite hour for receiving visitors was at five o'clock in the morning, when he had his first cup of strong coffee, a beverage which he continued to consume throughout the day.
The most striking feature of the country around Pretoria is the Premier diamond mine, twenty-five miles east of the town and the world's greatest single treasure-trove. The mines at Kimberley together constitute the largest of all diamond fields but the Premier Mine is the biggest single mine anywhere. It produces as much as the four largest Kimberley mines combined, and contributes eighteen per cent of the yearly output allotted to the Diamond Syndicate.
It was discovered by Thomas M. Cullinan, who bought the site from a Boer farmer for $250,000. The land originally cost this farmer $2,500. The mine has already produced more than five hundred times what Cullinan paid for it and the surface has scarcely been scraped. You can see the natives working in its two huge holes which are not more than six hundred feet deep. It is still an open mine. In the Premier Mine was found the Cullinan diamond, the largest ever discovered and which made the Koh-i-noor and all other fabled gems look like small pebbles. It weighed 3,200 karats and was insured for $2,500,000 when it was sent to England to be presented to King Edward. The Koh-i-noor, by the way, which was found in India only weighs 186 karats.
THE PREMIER DIAMOND MINE — Photograph Copyright by South African Railways