The adventurous bandeirantes of São Paulo first penetrated this region looking for gold. A considerable amount of it was found in the muddy stream at the foot of the present town, and early in the seventeenth century the adventurers founded the village of Tijuca, which took its name from a nearby swamp. In olden times gold dust and tiny nuggets were used as money throughout the region, and there were scales in every shop. Gold seems to be found almost anywhere in the region, and placer-mining is the natural occupation of all its inhabitants. When electric-light poles were put up by a syndicate at Boa Vista, in order to give Diamantina as light by night what the company uses as power during the day, the children carried off the earth dug up from the holes to wash out the gold. After a heavy rain tiny particles of gold are picked up in the gutters of Diamantina and along the edge of the little stream below it. So here at last is a place where you can really pick up gold in the streets, yet the people are poorer and more ragged than those who live by planting beans.

It was while searching for gold that the miners of Tijuca came across many bright, half-transparent pebbles that were plainly of no use to them, but the largest of which they gave to their children or used as counters in their own card games. There were a bushel or more of them in such use in the village and its vicinity when a new priest arrived from Portugal. In his first game of cards the pious padre noticed the peculiar poker chips that everyone produced by the handful. He let the information leak out that he thought them very pretty, and would be pleased to have them as keepsakes. They were quite worthless, of course, to his new parishioners, and if his innocent sacerdotal eye was caught by their transparent brightness, they saw no reason why they should not humor his whim, and at the same time gain in favor with the Church, by giving him such of the worthless little baubles as he did not win at cards. Thus he gathered together half a bushel or more of the pebbles, and suddenly disappeared in the general direction of Amsterdam, dropping a hint in Rio on the way.

Word soon reached the Portuguese crown of this new form of riches in its overseas possessions. It turned out that the range of hills from well south of the present town of Diamantina to far up in Bahia, a tract of more than four hundred square leagues, was diamond-bearing land. Indeed, if one may believe local conviction, the finest diamonds in existence come from Minas Geraes, and the world’s most famous black diamonds from Bahia State a bit farther north.

Diamonds were first discovered in India and for centuries came only from there. When they were found in Brazil, thousands of the stones were sold as Indian diamonds not only because buyers were prejudiced, but because the Portuguese government had forbidden private mining on penalty of death, and the contrabandists were forced to reach their market by way of India. The village of Tijuca became a flourishing center, far as it was from the outside world, and for all the stern government régime set over the region. In 1734 Portugal sent out an “Intendente Geral dos Diamantes,” with absolute power to enforce the government monopoly. His palace still exists in a garden near the top of the town, with the remains of an artificial lake on which he kept a sailboat to show the people of what came gradually to be known as Diamantina how he had crossed the sea. The crown forbade individual mining and gave the job to contractors, who worked six hundred slaves and paid 220–240$ yearly per slave for the privilege, yet who made fortunes even though all large diamonds and twenty per cent. of all finds went to the crown. Population multiplied and Diamantina became a center of riches and luxury. Contrary to the case in the rest of Brazil, many broken noblemen and men of education came here to mend their fortunes, and the colony, and eventually all the province of Minas Geraes, became a focus of “civilization,” as that word was understood in those days,—much powdered hair, knee-breeches, beauty patches, minuets—and swarms of miserable slaves. It may be that the courtesy of the poor Africanized inhabitants of to-day is but a hold-over from those times of elaborate etiquette.

Amazing tales are still told in Diamantina of its golden days. It was evidently the custom of the government viceroys to imprison the contractors as soon as they got rich and “roll” them penniless. One official is reputed to have made every guest a present of a cluster of diamonds. The Grupo Escolar, or school building, across the street from my hotel was once the residence of a great diamond buyer, and when the building was made into a school some years ago a score or more of skeletons were found tumbled together in the bottom of a secret shaft. This revived the legend that the buyer had a chair set on a trapdoor, and when a man came in with a large “parcel” of contraband diamonds he was asked to sit down and make himself at home while the buyer looked over the stones—and brought up at the bottom of the shaft.

In 1771 the famous Pombal sent out the “green book,” with fifty-four despotic articles that nearly depopulated the district, but in 1800 the régime softened, and finally, in 1832, the government monopoly was abolished. Since then mining has been more or less intermittent. Diamonds reached their highest price during the war with Paraguay, at the end of which, in 1867, the stones were found in South Africa, a blow from which the industry in Brazil has never recovered. For while it is claimed in Diamantina that Brazilian diamonds average much higher than those from the Cape, the African mines now produce at least eighty per cent. of the world’s supply and with more modern methods and widespread propaganda completely control the market. Abolition was the final straw, and in five years exportations of diamonds from Diamantina dropped from 2,500 to 300 annually.

Unlike those of South Africa, the diamonds of Brazil are found on or near the surface. In a few places quartz is broken open in the search, but in general they are taken loose in the gravel of the alluvial deposits by the simpler process of placer mining. The fact that enormous tracts of territory were worked over by the Portuguese does not mean that they took out fabulous amounts, according to modern local authorities, because they had to feed their slaves anyway and it was to their advantage to keep them working, even if the finds were few. To-day, though there are some syndicates and large companies, most of them are completely paralyzed and such work as is done is mainly by individual natives. The company troubles seem to be due to lack of a good mining law—natives may wash for diamonds anywhere, even on company claims—the insecurity of titles, the prohibitive cost of transportation for machinery, high tariffs, low rate of exchange, the constant war of South Africans against South American diamonds, and finally the “salting” of mines by fake promoters, coupled with carelessness of foreign stockholders in sending out experts to examine the ground before accepting even an honest promoter’s word for it. Thus fortunes have been lost in the Brazilian diamond fields, notwithstanding the fact that diamonds continue to be steadily picked up in them.

The largest diamond ever found in Brazil was the “Star of the South,” found at Agua Suja (Dirty Water), on the line to Catalão. This weighed about the same as the famous Kohinoor diamond,—300 carats. The stones are usually found in the beds of rivers, larger near the source, and smaller farther down, for they wear off in traveling, and in sand, earth, and common gravel, usually with gold. Rough diamonds generally have no brilliancy, looking merely like white, half-transparent pebbles, though any child of Diamantina is said to be able to recognize one at a glance. There is really nothing more prosaic than diamond gathering, and the resemblance is slight between those who hunt for and those who wear them. None of the improved methods of South Africa have been introduced into Brazil, not even the hand screen or the “grease board,” and the negroes still use the batea, or wooden bowl in the shape of a hand basin, in washing for both diamonds and gold. When he has chosen his spot beside some stream the negro sets up a baca, a kind of topless soapbox with one end knocked out, about six inches above the surface of the water and fills it with gravel. Then with the batea he scoops up water and throws it with a peculiar flip on the gravel, washing it from side to side until the loose stuff runs off and leaves only the pebbles. These are then spread out and gone over carefully by hand, the diamonds being readily detected by the experienced eye, particularly since, unlike the other stones, they cannot be wet and for that reason stand out brilliantly from the rest. In fact, in Spanish and Portuguese they are as often called brillantes as diamantes. With the war and the sudden drop in the diamond market that came with it the people of Diamantina largely left off hunting for diamonds and began the more paying occupations of planting corn and gathering firewood.

On the Sunday afternoon following Christmas, the rain having at last ceased, I went out for a walk. An hour’s climb, in which I did not suffer from heat, brought me to a cross on the culminating point of the great mass of gray-black rock of ragged formation across the valley and small stream in which many a diamond has been picked up and much gold washed. Here is a full view of the town, stacked up on the green and fertile side of the long valley and spilling like coagulated grease down into it, scattered groups of eucalyptus trees and its general greenness in great contrast to the rockiness of all the rest of the vast and jagged encircling landscape. The gothic church of Coração de Jesus and the tree-girdled seminary stand somewhat above the rest of the orderless heap, and one realizes that the railroad does indeed come in at the top of the town, for its station is so high that here it cannot be seen above the edge of the plateau on which it sits. Diamantina is a great trading post of the interior, and down in the center of town there is a species of Arab khan, a roof on posts where shaggy sun-, rain-, and road-marked muleteers with long, ugly facas in their belts pile their saddle-blankets and goods and cook over campfires. The old, old highway unravels down across the broken rocky hills, descends into the valley, stops a while at the khan, and having gathered its forces together once more into a compact trail, marches across and out of the valley again and away over the bleak horizon.

It was in the middle of this public trail that I came upon two negroes in quest of gold washed down by the recent rains. While one dug up wooden bowls of earth and gravel, the other stood knee-deep in a muddy, dammed-up pool and, filling his batea with the earth brought by the other and letting water into it, whirled it about until the heavy matter went to the bottom. Then he scraped off by hand the top layer, continuing the process until within ten minutes he had left about a quart of heavy black earth. This he dumped with more of the same in a white sand-nest he had made on the bank of the little stream crossing the trail. Like most of his fellow-townsmen he was talkative and ready to explain his affairs to a stranger. He had washed for gold after a rain ever since he was a boy, getting from two to four milreis worth every time, and where there is gold there are sure to be diamonds, especially the “chapeu de palha” (“straw hat”), which he explained to be a very flat diamond making much show with little weight. Though both he and his companion were shoeless and had been from infancy, ragged, illiterate and half toothless, they were far from ignorant on some points, especially of words used in the diamond industry, which they spoke with a curious negro mispronunciation mixed with slang.