Thirty miles northward across the veldt from Pretoria is the great hole in the ground known as the Premier Diamond Mine, the newest and potentially the richest of the South African diamond fields. Here, in January, 1905, the surface manager, a Scotchman named McHardy, while strolling through the pit during the noon hour, saw the sparkle of what he at first took to be a broken bottle. Prying it loose with his stick from the surrounding rubble, he found it to be a diamond as large as a good-sized orange. This remarkable stone, which is the largest diamond heretofore found, has since become known to the world as the Great Cullinan, being named after Sir Thomas Cullinan, one of the owners of the mine. It is a pure white stone, 4 by 2¼ by 2 inches, weighing 3,025 carats, or 1.37 pounds, and worth in the neighbourhood of a million dollars. As the surface cleavage shows that it is undoubtedly a fragment of a much larger crystal, one cannot but wonder what the original stone was like. The Great Cullinan was immediately purchased by the Transvaal Government—or, rather, the mine's share was purchased, for the government receives sixty per cent of the value of all diamonds found—and presented to King Edward. The question then arose of how so valuable a gem could be transported to England in safety, for no sooner had its discovery been announced than the criminals of the world began to lay their plans to get possession of it. After many discussions and innumerable suggestions and much newspaper comment, four men, armed to the teeth, left the Premier Mine, carrying with them a red-leather despatch box. Crossing the thirty miles of veldt to Pretoria under heavy escort, they were conveyed in a private car to Cape Town; in the liner by which they took passage to England a safe had been specially installed and the red-leather despatch box was placed in it, two of the men remaining on duty in front of it night and day. From Southampton a special train took them up to London and a strong guard of detectives and police surrounded them on their way to the bank at which the diamond was to be delivered. When the despatch box was opened in the presence of a group of curious officials it was found to contain nothing more valuable than a lump of coal! The stone itself—and as Sir Thomas Cullinan told me the story it is undoubtedly true—was wrapped in cotton wool and tissue paper, put in a pasteboard box, wrapped up in brown paper, and sent to England by parcels post, not even the post-office authorities being given an inkling that it was in the mails. I almost forgot to mention, by the way, that McHardy, the discoverer of the great stone, was given a bonus of ten thousand dollars, though it is a sad and peculiar commentary that within a year his wife died, the bank in which he put the money failed, and his house burned down.
The diamonds are found in beds of clay, of which there are two layers: a soft, yellow clay, lying on or near the surface, and a hard, blue clay, lying deeper. These clays, which are usually covered by a thin stratum of calcareous rock, are supposed to be the remains of mud pits due to volcanic action, such as the boiling springs of the Yellowstone. Imagine a great hollow, looking like a gigantic bowl, perhaps half a mile in diameter and one hundred feet deep, enclosed by a series of barbed-wire fences and filled by thousands of Kaffir workmen, looking, from a distance, like a gigantic swarm of ants—such was my first impression of the Premier Mine. The native labourers, who work in three shifts of eight hours each, after cleaving the “hard-blue” with their picks, load it onto trolley-cars, which are attached to a cable and hauled to the surface of the pit, where it is spread on mile-long fields and exposed for several months to rain, wind, and sun so as to effect decomposition. The softened lumps of earth, after being brought into still smaller fragments by the pickaxe, are then sent to the mills, where they are crushed, pulverised, washed, and finally sent to the “greaser” to get at the stones. Until very recently men had to be employed to sort the washed “concentrates” and pick out the diamonds. But they would miss some. And the men had to be guarded lest they steal the gems. And detectives had to be hired to watch the guards who watched the men. But one day a mine employee named Kirsten happened to notice that the diamonds, no matter how small or discoloured, always stuck to a greasy surface, just as iron filings stick to a magnet, while the dirt and other stones did not. That was the suggestion which led to the invention of the “Kirsten greaser,” a series of sloping boards, heavily coated with grease, which are gently agitated as the mud and slime containing the diamonds are slowly washed over them, and which never fail to collect the precious stones.
At Kimberley, which is the only other diamond-producing district of any importance in South Africa, the gem-bearing ground extends over an area of but thirty-three acres, so that open mining has long since given way to shafts, which have now been sunk to a depth of two thousand five hundred feet, galleries being driven through the producing ground at every forty-foot level, precisely as in a coal mine. Kimberley has a romantic and picturesque history. In 1869 you could not have found its name upon the map. In the following year a Boer hunter, pitching his tent on the banks of the Orange River, chanced to pick up a glittering stone from among the pebbles. The news of his find making its way overland to Cape Town, the submarine cables flashed it to every quarter of the globe, so that within a twelvemonth adventurers and fortune-seekers had flocked there in tens of thousands. By 1871 sixteen hundred claims, each thirty-one feet square, were being worked, each man digging out the earth on his own small plot, carrying it to one side, pulverising it by hand, and sifting it for diamonds. The dirt from one claim would fall into a neighbouring one, while some miners could not get their dirt out at all without crossing another's property, so that quarrels and lawsuits and shooting affrays soon began. About this time two quiet, uncommunicative, shabbily clad men appeared at Kimberley and began to buy up the various claims, until, before any one really appreciated what was happening, the whole diamond industry of South Africa was in their hands. Those men were Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Barnato, and the great amalgamation which their skill and shrewdness effected, now known as the DeBeers Consolidated Mining Company, was one of the greatest coups in the history of finance. It is this corporation which the women of the world have to blame for keeping up the price of diamonds, for the first thing it did was to close the greater part of the Kimberley mines, keeping just enough open to produce the amount of stones which experience has proved that Europe and America are able to take at a price high enough to leave a gratifying profit. Although, as a result of this policy, the price of diamonds has been well maintained, the population of Kimberley has been greatly reduced, the one great corporation, with its comparatively small staff of employees and its labour-saving machinery, having taken the place of the horde of independent adventurers of the early days.
It struck me that by far the most interesting sights, both at the Kimberley and the Premier mines, were the so-called compounds, in which the native labourers are confined, for the native who hires out to work in a diamond mine must submit, during the term of his contract, to as close confinement as a convict in a penitentiary; he knows that he is in danger of being shot by the guards if he attempts to escape; he is prepared to be searched daily with the same minuteness which customs inspectors display in the case of a known smuggler; and when his contract expires he has still to put up with a fortnight's solitary confinement, in which emetics and cathartics play an unpleasant part. The mine compounds are huge enclosures, unroofed but covered with a wire netting to prevent anything being thrown out over the walls. Around the interior of the wall are rows of corrugated-iron huts, in which the natives live and sleep when they are not at work, while the open space in the middle is used for cooking, for washing, and for native games. The compounds are surrounded by three lines of barbed-wire fence which are constantly patrolled by armed sentries and illuminated at night by powerful search-lights; every entrance is as jealously guarded as that of a German fortress; and visitors are never admitted unless they bear a pass signed by the administration and are accompanied by a responsible official of the mine. Although the government—which, as I have already remarked, takes sixty per cent of the mine's earnings—has made I. D. B. (illicit diamond-buying) a penal offence with a uniform punishment of twenty years at hard labour, and though the mining companies maintain espionage systems which rival those of many Continental governments, no employee, from director down to day labourer, ever being free from scrutiny, millions of dollars' worth of diamonds are smuggled out of the mines each year. To encourage honesty, ten per cent of the value of any stone which a workman may find is given to him if he brings it himself to the overseer, well over a quarter of a million dollars being paid out annually on stones thus found.
The compound of the Premier Mine contained, at the time of my visit, something over twelve thousand natives, representing nearly every tribe from Pondoland to the head-waters of the Congo. Here one sees Zulus, Fingos, Pondos, Basutos, Bechuanas, Matabele, Mashonas, Makalaka, and even Bushmen from the Kalahari country and Masai from German East Africa, all attracted by the high wages, which range from five to eight dollars a week. When the native's six-month contract has ended, he takes his wages in British sovereigns—and his earnings accumulate quickly because he can live on very little—goes home to his own tribe, perhaps six weeks' journey away, buys a wife and a yoke of oxen, and lives lazily ever after. Not all of the natives are of so thrifty a turn of mind, however, for the company store holds many attractions for them and they are heavy purchasers of camel's-hair blankets, French perfumes, and imported cutlery, refusing almost invariably to take anything but the best.
I have tried to paint for you a comprehensive, though necessarily an impressionistic, picture of this great new nation that has sprung up so quickly in the antipodes, and to give you at least a rough idea of what its people, its soil, its towns, its climate, its resources, and its problems are like. That South Africa will always be a country of great mineral wealth there is little doubt, for, when the supplies of gold and diamonds are exhausted, copper, iron, and coal should still furnish good returns. Likewise, it will always be a great ranching country, for nearly all of its vast veldt is ideal, both in climate and pasturage, for live-stock. It will probably never become a manufacturing country, for coal is of poor quality, there is neither water power nor inland waterways, and labour is neither good nor cheap. If, as I have already remarked, government irrigation can be introduced as successfully as it has been in our own Southwest, and if the malaria which makes the rich coast-lands almost uninhabitable can be exterminated as effectually as we have exterminated it on the Isthmus of Panama, I can see no reason why South Africa should not eventually become one of the great agricultural countries of the world. Though many South Africans look forward to a day when the natives will begin to retire to the country north of the Zambezi, and when a large European population will till their own farms, by their own labour, with the aid of government-assisted irrigation, I am personally of the opinion that South Africa will never become at all evenly populated, but that it will always bear a marked resemblance to our Southwest, with large areas devoted to the raising of sheep and cattle, with certain other areas irrigated for the raising of fruit, and with its population centred for the most part in towns scattered at long distances from one another, but connected by rapid railway communications.
Everything considered, South Africa is a country of big things—big pay, big prices, big opportunities, big obstacles, big resources, big rewards—and she needs young men to help her fight her battles and solve her problems. So, if I were a youngster, with the sheep-skin of a technical or agricultural school in my pocket, a few hundred dollars in my purse, and a longing for fortune and adventure in my heart, I think that I should walk into one of those steam-ship offices in Bowling Green and book a passage for that land of which some one has said, “Fortune knocks at a man's door once in most countries, but in South Africa she knocks twice.”