We soon found that most of the available land in the vicinity of Luderitzbucht had been taken up, and much of it had already changed hands two or three times. Companies and syndicates were being “floated” at a great rate, many of them by unscrupulous scoundrels of promoters, acting upon the “reports” of equally lying and unscrupulous “prospectors.”
Schurfscheinen (prospecting licences) were at that time transferable, and as they were daily becoming more difficult to procure, they often changed hands several times, and for quite large sums, before they were even used for their legitimate purpose of enabling the holder to locate and peg-off a claim. And often, when, as a result of an expensive expedition, ground was located and title secured, the diamonds shown to back up the “discoverer’s” or “promoter’s” highly coloured report would be the only ones ever seen by the gullible purchaser or shareholder.
The conditions under which diamonds were found made “salting” a very easy matter to carry out and a very difficult one to detect. The small and brightly polished little gems, usually running three or four to the carat—that is to say, about the size of hemp-seed—were generally found in the surface deposit of loose sandy shingle spread over much of the sand-belt near the coast, and differing from the sand of the country only in being slightly coarser. This loose deposit, in common with the sand, is in many places heaped up into small, wave-like ripples by the action of the prevailing wind, and wherever the diamonds exist these little ridges are exceptionally rich in them. The method of searching for them was simply by crawling along almost flat upon the ground, and turning over the shallow layer with a knife-point, though on some of the claims hand-washing in sea-water was being attempted. Most of the diamonds so far had come from a place known as “Kolman’s Kop,” a mile or two inland from the bay, and on the railway to Aus—indeed, the line ran right through this diamondiferous area—and it was here that Du Toit had picked up his stones. So plentiful were the little “crystals” that many a little bottleful of them had been brought into Luderitzbucht in the early days and given away as curiosities, without the slightest notion as to what they really were.
A few keen-eyed Kaffirs engaged in construction work on the railway, and who had worked in the Kimberley mines or on the Vaal River Diggings, first realised what they really were, and several of these “boys,” who afterwards came to Cape Town, and there attempted to sell the stones, were convicted and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment under the provisions of the “I.D.B.” Act of Cape Colony.
Few, if any, of those who read the report of their trials believed their story that they had picked up the stones in the sands of German South-West Africa, but the few who did believe and made investigation were amply repaid for their trouble, for the first-comers picked up diamonds by the handful.
A few days tramping the surrounding district soon convinced us that all the likely ground near Luderitzbucht had been taken up—and indeed much that was unlikely—and we decided to clear off to an outlying district where distance and want of water had thus far prevented “prospectors” from penetrating.
A general examination of the gravel, sand, and various deposits had shown to we old diggers the significant fact that, whatever the origin of the diamonds, there was some analogy between these fields and those of the Vaal River Diggings, for prominent everywhere were the familiar pebbles of striped agate, chalcedony, jasper, etc., we knew so well. Most of these pebbles were, however, very much smaller than those of the Vaal River; moreover the action of wind and water had “graded” the loose deposits to such an extent that whole acres appeared to have been worked by sieves of a uniform mesh.
Now, this “grading” was also a feature of the diamonds themselves, for they were of a remarkably uniform size, and in this respect differed entirely from those of any other known deposit; for at Kimberley, or on the Vaal River Diggings, one of the fascinations of the precarious profession of diamond-digging lies in the fact that big and little stones are found together, and the next spadeful of ground may bring the digger a stone the size of a pea, or one the size of a potato. Now, the general theory as to how the diamonds came to be in the Luderitzbucht sands was that they had come from the sea, either from a rich pipe beneath it, or from a huge deposit washed down the Vaal and Orange Rivers during the course of countless ages, and out to sea, whence the north-setting current had brought the diamonds ashore. And we—pundits all—believed that, as the sea had obviously done the work of “grading” the stones, there must exist vastly heavier deposits somewhere along the coast, where, it should follow, we should also find vastly bigger diamonds. And those were what we wanted, the bigger the better.
CHAPTER II
RUMOUR OF “HOTTENTOTS’ PARADISE”—UP THE COAST ON A SEALING CUTTER—WALFISH BAY.