The glamour of prospecting

by Fred C. Cornell

At that time rumour was rife that, somewhere in the terrible wilderness of sand-dunes stretching north-east of Luderitzbucht, there existed an oasis where not only water was plentiful, but where diamonds, big ones, abounded. This fabled oasis was usually called the “Hottentots’ Paradise,” and tradition maintained that to this remote and inaccessible spot the remnant of that poor degenerate race of natives that had escaped extermination at the hands of the Germans in the recent rebellion had retreated. It was also rumoured that these men were well armed, that they had cattle and food in abundance, and that, cut off by a wilderness of waterless country, the Germans had hesitated to attack them. There were other versions; in fact, no two agreed exactly, except that the oasis was situated somewhere between Luderitzbucht, Walfish Bay, the high plateau of the interior, and the sea, and that there the diamonds were as big as they were abundant.

Already one or two abortive expeditions had started with the intention of searching for this place, but none of them had got far; thirst had in each instance conquered them; and at least one had lost every animal it started with.

One day, when we were looking round as to the best direction in which to make our own attempt, I was asked by a prospector to join an expedition just being outfitted to search for this place, and he put such a plausible tale before me that I hastened to consult Du Toit. He shook his head when I told him the way this expedition proposed travelling. “No water,” he said; “they’ll be back within a week, if they get back at all! There are only two ways of searching for the place: from the coast, having a boat with plenty of water waiting you, or with camels. These fellows talk of mules—well, let ’em go. I’ve heard of something better.”

Then he told me he had met a man he had known on the River Diggings who had turned sealer, and had for some years past plied his dangerous trade along this wind-swept coast in a little ten-ton cutter, and that this man had told him that north of Sylvia Heights there existed a wonderful beach where the pebbles were identical with those of the Vaal River Diggings, but that they were very much larger. He said they lay graded by the tide for miles and miles along the beach—agates, chalcedonies, jaspers, and banded ironstones (the bandtom of the digger); and that, when he had come back from a holiday in Europe and found all Luderitzbucht diamond-mad, he had resolved to go to this beach, where he believed he would find them lying thick, but that he had been in some trouble with the police and could not get a Schurfschein. As we both had obtained these valuable documents, he was quite prepared to run us up to this spot in his little cutter, sharing expenses, and sharing in all claims we might be able to peg.

Now, this seemed a perfectly God-sent opportunity for locating the “big stones” we all felt certain existed, and we set about getting in stores for the trip at once. These consisted principally of hard biscuit, “bully beef,” tea, coffee, and sugar, and above all water. Of the latter we had two fairly large breakers, and a miscellaneous collection of other utensils, ranging from big oil-drums to canvas water-bottles—in all, an ample supply for fifteen or twenty days. We went on board that very evening. Besides our pal the skipper, there were two other hands, men who, had they chosen to wash themselves, would probably have proved to be white, but who were so coated with seal oil and the accumulated grime of many voyages that it was impossible to say what colour was underneath it all. They spoke a jargon that they fondly imagined was English, but I believe they were Scandinavians of sorts. The little half-decked cutter barely held us and our belongings, and would have been none too comfortable even for a short trip such as we hoped for and anticipated.

And, unfortunately, our voyage was both long and disagreeable, for we had scarcely got clear of Luderitz Bay one fine evening than it came on to blow great guns, and so heavy did the weather become that our skipper had to run clean out to sea. Up to then I had fondly imagined I knew something about the sea, and was proof against such a very amateur malady as sea-sickness; but alas! I had a lot to learn. Indeed, I soon found that, in spite of a good deal of knocking about the sea at various times, I really knew nothing of bad weather. There was no snuggling down in a cosy cabin or the soft cushions of a big saloon about this experience, no looking at big seas through the comforting protection of thick plate-glass portholes. Here the huge waves were towering, threatening, imminent; and nothing but the coolest of heads, and strongest and steadiest of hands at the helm, could have kept the little cockle-shell from shipping a big sea and foundering. Portions of big seas she shipped repeatedly, and little seas in the intervals; in fact, for hours she appeared to consider herself to be a sort of submarine of which I suppose I must have been the periscope—for I was continually endeavouring to stand erect in my attempt to dodge the waves. Within an hour or two of leaving the bay I was wet through, and continued so till I got on shore again; and during that period of three nights and two days I had ample reason to know that sea-sickness is not nearly as laughable as it looks! They gave me rum and water, and it made me worse; they coaxed me with hard ship’s biscuit and fat bully beef, and somehow it failed to entice me. Once, in a comparatively dry interval, they managed to light a stove and make some alleged coffee. It tasted so of seal oil that it merely effected the apparently impossible by making me feel worse than I did before.

The skipper assured me that it was all my fancy when I told him that the coffee-pot must have been used for trying down seal, and offered to prove it by making another brew in the legitimate utensil used for that purpose, that I might taste the difference. The only consolation I had during the whole memorable sixty hours was that Du Toit was apparently even worse than myself. He did not even attempt to dodge the water as we shipped it, but lay with closed eyes and hands mechanically clutching the oily stays, just where the first spasm caught him, and except for groans, nothing coherent passed his lips but profanity during the whole voyage. We had left Luderitzbucht at sunset on Tuesday evening, and the gale that sprang up that night blew itself out sufficiently by Thursday afternoon to enable them to put the cutter about towards shore again. I did not witness the operation, but I heard some cryptic remarks thereto, and knew by the way the crew fell over me they were hurrying about something. Then the motion changed, and a wave went over me broadside instead of lengthways. The sail flapped furiously, and then she heeled over so that I rolled off my seat. And then a quite new motion began, a bobbing, jerking, wrenching movement that started fresh trouble. However, by dark that night we were in sight of land, and I began to have some faint hope that, after all, we might survive.

I was aroused from a broken and uneasy slumber by a chorus of quacks, and cackles, and grunts, sounding as though the cutter had run clean into a farmyard, and at this phenomenon I had just sufficient curiosity in me to open my eyes and sit up. Dawn was breaking and we were close to land, in comparatively smooth water, to the leeward of a small island, from which arose the hubbub I had heard. It was not a farmyard, however, but an island covered partly with big seals, and partly with penguins and other sea-fowl in such incredible swarms that they jostled each other for elbow-room. This was one of the many guano and sealing islands lying off the coast of German South-West Africa, all of which are British possessions belonging to Cape Colony. On several of them diamonds are supposed to exist, but they are prohibited ground to prospectors. I believe this to have been Hollam’s Bird Island, but had no chance to inquire as my sitting position immediately brought on the old trouble, and I had other urgent matters to attend to.

However, our troubles were almost over, for less than two hours later the cutter was deftly manœuvred into a little indentation where the water was comparatively smooth, and we got out the tiny dory that had filled up most of the cutter’s foredeck room and landed. And never were men more pleased than Du Toit and I, and we there and then agreed that one trip in that cutter was enough. Once we had found the diamonds, we would send it back to Luderitzbucht to charter a decent-sized boat to go back in; but as for travelling back ourselves in her—not much!

According to the skipper the beach he knew of lay about three or four miles down the coast, but this was the only safe landing-place and anchorage, and here we must camp. So we got our water and provisions ashore, and by the aid of a big bucksail and some driftwood we made a shelter to live and sleep in. This driftwood lay in abundance all along the sandy, desolate shore, and served excellently for fuel, though it was too dry and rotten to be of much service for anything else. The landing even of our few stores and belongings took up the best part of the day, and we decided not to make our first trip to our diamond beach till the morning; but just before sunset Du Toit and I went a short distance inland to where the first high dunes began, and climbed a prominent one for a look-round. And east, north, and south there was nothing but sand; not a tree anywhere, only here and there a stunted bush struggling forlornly against adversity; nothing but bare waves, mounds, and ridges of desolate dunes as far as the eye could reach, and to the west the equally (but not more) desolate ocean. No sign of life anywhere except a few gulls over the sea, though on our way back a jackal followed but a few paces behind, full of curiosity at the strange beings the like of whom he had probably never seen before. We saw several of these jackals during our stay there, and they were all quite fearless. Their spoors and those of the stronte woolfe, or brown hyena, were numerous, and the only spoors of any kind to be seen along the desolate shore, where these creatures probably picked up a precarious living from the dead fish occasionally stranded there. A short distance up the coast we found a flat space where the sand was comparatively hard, and where, apparently, in the past a shallow lagoon had existed. Here there were a few straggling bushes, thick-leaved and resinous, and scanty clumps of a sort of strong, wiry rush seemed to point to moisture at a short distance below the surface. Here, too, we found huge heaps of the shells of a species of large limpet, shell middens showing that at one time a people existed in the locality, probably the strand looper, the beach-roaming forerunner of both Bushman and Hottentot. But except for the shells, no vestige of him remained, nor of the water that he at one time drank at, though probably a few feet dug in the sand might have laid that bare.