The glamour of prospecting

by Fred C. Cornell

Later I went round and looked at them; they were all base mineral licences. And as I saw no use for base minerals hundreds of miles from a railway, and as the ground showed no trace of anything else, I turned back towards Van Ryn’s Dorp. At the sand river and at a weird-looking spot known as “Dood Drenk” I found traces that the sand had been worked, but as half a day’s sieving found nothing, I gave up all hope of and all belief in diamonds existing in that locality.

There was no chance of getting back to Cape Town for a few days, and whilst waiting for the post cart I heard something that again sent my hopes sky-high, for a time!

I had bought a few stores on previous visits at a small local store-keeper’s named C. He was a Jew, and had all the curiosity and enterprise of his extraordinary race. And one evening he came to me in a most mysterious manner, and after a lot of circumlocution he told me that if I liked to join him in a trip he would show me a big diamond “as big as the top of his thumb,” and take me to the place where it had been found. And after a great deal of talk he showed me a scrawl from a customer of his in the district, which conveyed such intelligence. This man, he explained, was an old coloured man who had been granted a piece of land somewhere on the northern bank of the Olifants River, on Government ground there, and not far distant from gravels that I had seen and thought well of on my previous trip. C. had several messages to come out and see the stone, and all his efforts to get the old man to bring his precious treasure-trove in had failed, as the finder had heard of the I.D.B. Act, and feared the police would take both him and the stone. Well, it took time to make C. understand the provisions of that Act, but eventually he followed my advice and took out a licence himself, and the pair of us set out for the scene of the find, quite prepared to peg the whole country.

The weather had turned both wet and colder, and the discomforts of that three days’ trip in an open cart to Olifants Drift, Ebenezer, and thence in a boat to a lonely part of the north bank of the river, I shall never forget; but suffice to say that at length, cold, wet, tired, and generally disgusted, we stood in a native pondhoek before a frightened old nigger, who, being repeatedly assured that I was not a policeman, and only wanted to see the “diamond” and where it came from, at length dug up from the floor of his hut a tiny tobacco-bag from which, rolled in a whole volume of rags, he eventually produced a big, bright, but utterly worthless quartz crystal!

Disheartened and disillusioned, I turned back towards Van Ryn’s Dorp, but my luck was dead out, for scarcely had I passed Olifants Drift when the cart got badly smashed up and I was forced to bivouac for four days on the veldt.

It was a wild and lonely spot, and during the first two days of my enforced wait I saw no one, but on the third I woke to find the whole veldt alive with a magnificent flock of beautiful fleecy Angora goats. They were trekking north, and after 3,000-odd of them had passed with their “herds,” a very fine Cape cart hove in sight with their owner. He proved to be a certain Mr. Brand, a nephew of the late president of the O.R.F.S., who had for many years been farming in the Gibeon District of German South-West Africa. He had been to Cape Town to buy these Angoras, with which he intended stocking his farm experimentally, and was trekking with them over the 800-odd miles of wild country between Table Bay and his lonely home.

He had plenty of time, and stayed a whole day with me, and when he heard what I had been after he told me a tale that almost sent me back to the wilds of German territory again. It was the tale of the first discovery of diamonds in German South-West, years before they were found in Luderitzbucht, a tale of a German soldier on patrol, separated from his comrades and lost in a blinding sand-storm. He had struggled on for days, lost to all sense of direction, and when at his last gasp had been found by wandering Bushmen, and taken to an oasis in the desert, where not only was there an abundance of water, but diamonds by the thousand. Here he was kept captive, but eventually escaped and got back to Swakopmund, where he had been struck off the rolls as dead. His one idea was to organise an expedition to go to this spot for the diamonds, but no one believed him; his tale was laughed at, and it was thought that his sufferings in the desert had driven him mad.

One fine day he was missing again, and it was found he had taken mules and a considerable amount of water, and no more was heard of him, until some months later his body was found in the sands near Swakopmund, bloated and swollen with the poison of a Bushman’s arrow, that had pierced him through and through. His rags of clothing had been rifled, but in an old pocket-book near was found a rough diary he had kept of his route, and four large rough diamonds.

This was the tale that Brand told me, and this had been the origin of the belief of the existence of the oasis usually known as “Hottentots’ (or Bushmen’s) Paradise” to which I have previously alluded, and the search for which from Luderitzbucht had already cost several lives.

Well, Mr. Brand assured me that he was one of the four men who had seen both the diamonds and the pocket-book with the original map. And, seeing I was keenly interested, he said, “Why not go after it yourself? I will help find the money. But you must take camels and work from the coast. And you must land near Hollam’s Bird Island, at Strandlooper’s Water, and go straight east.” And although I had not told Brand so, this was close to the spot at which we had searched the beach, and from the dunes of which Du Toit has seen an oasis in the heart of the dunes eastward. So that, although I abandoned the Van Ryn’s Dorp district as a bad job, I had much food for thought on my way back to Cape Town.