Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer

by W. C. Scully

The Hottentot easily distanced them all, but unfortunately for him a man mounted on a small pony appeared on his right front. This man, seeing that a chase was in progress, headed the fugitive off. The latter was brought back, tried on the spot, and sentenced to receive fifty lashes. He was triced up to the wheel of a wagon; an elderly man he had been in the Royal Navy appeared with a cat o' nine tails. At every stroke the culprit called out, in derision, "Hoo-lay." Although terribly punished he never uttered a cry. I remember being struck by the curious circumstance that the ex-seaman should have taken the trouble to bring his "cat" with him to a mining camp. He must have had an affection for the horrible thing.

I will now relate how I very nearly became the discoverer of the world-famed Kimberley Mine. Being somewhat slightly built, I was not of much use at heavy work in the claim, so it was arranged that our Hottentot boy, David, should take my place, I taking his in the matter of herding the twelve oxen. This arrangement suited me exactly. Small game abounded, and I had the use of a gun. My favorite pasturage area was the big shallow basin to the westward, within the perimeter of which was a low, oblong rise covered with long grass, and at the eastern end of which stood a grove of exceptionally large camel thorn trees. This rise afterwards came to be known as "Colesberg Kopje"; eventually it was named "Kimberley," after Lord Kimberley, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time of the annexation of the diamond-fields. On it were usually to be found hares, Namaqua partridges, korhaan, and an occasional steenbok. Ant-bears and jackals had been at work at various places. One burrow was exceptionally deep, and the gravel thrown up from it looked exactly like that of the claim in which I had been working. I determined to do some prospecting on my own account at this spot.

Unfortunately, however, I mentioned my intention at the camp. One of my peculiarities as a youngster was a morbid sensitiveness in respect of anything like chaff. This was so marked that the least attempt at teasing was enough to send me away in a state of misery. My mates knew this, and accordingly often made me the butt of their cheap witticisms. When I spoke of the burrow and the resemblance of the gravel at its mouth to the diamondiferous soil in which we were working, this was made a pretext for derision.

Day by day I was bantered about my supposed diamond-mine; mockingly I would be asked how many carats my last find weighed, and so on. Consequently, I was afraid again to mention the subject. Had it been possible secretly to obtain the necessary appliances for prospecting, and to get them away without the knowledge of my mates, I would have done so. I often thought of asking some of my friends in the other camps to lend me tools, but the dread of my enterprise becoming known and being made the subject of more chaff deterred me, so I kept putting the thing off.

However, I never abandoned the intention of one day carrying out the "prospect." But I delayed too long; the clue dangled by Fortune within my reach was grasped by other hands.

One day when I drove my oxen to their usual pasturage I noticed that the camel thorn grove had been invaded. A tent had been pitched there, and the smoke of a fire arose from the camp. This annoyed me exceedingly; not because it in any way interfered with my intention of prospecting I could still have done that freely, and the tent was nowhere near my burrow but for the, to me, more important reason that the advent of a camp right in the middle of my preserve was bound to spoil my shooting. The camp turned out to be that of Mr. Ortlepp, of Colesberg, and his party. Mr. Ortlepp I afterwards got to know, but at that time we had not met. So for the future I avoided the area in which I had been accustomed to spend most of my days, and sought new and more lonely pastures.

But game had now become so scarce that I usually left my gun at home. Early one afternoon, when I was herding my cattle on that ridge which runs south-east from Kimberley in the direction of Du Toit's Pan, I noticed a stream of men flowing from De Beers towards the north-west, and at once correctly inferred what had happened. Diamonds had been discovered by the Ortlepp party, and a "rush" was in progress. Leaving the cattle to fend for themselves, I started at a run across the veld towards the objective of the rushers. My burrow! on that my thoughts were centered; I longed to reach the spot before any one else had pegged it out. Three or four tunes I paused to take breath, and each tune I managed to pause in the vicinity of some patch of scrub, so that I could therefrom cut pegs wherewith to mark out my "claim." When I reached the kopje which, by the way, never was a kopje at all men were swarming over it like ants over a heap of sugar. But I noticed with delight that my burrow and the area immediately surrounding it were still unappropriated. Accordingly I got in my pess, enclosing a square with sides measuring approximately thirty one feet six inches (or thirty Dutch feet), the burrow being exactly in the middle. Then I fell to the ground, panting from exhaustion.

I remained on my claim until darkness fell. One by one I watched the prospectors depart; I was not going to risk being dispossessed of my burrow, so stuck to my post as long as a human being was in sight. I had managed to get a message through to Brown, some time before sunset, asking him to send David out to look for the oxen. When I reached the camp I was roundly pitched into for my foolishness in abandoning the cattle and running after "wild cat." However, my blood was now up, so I told Brown that for the present I would do no more cattle herding, as I meant to return next morning to my claim. Brown forbade my doing this, and ordered me to resume charge of the cattle, but I defied him.

The stars were still shining; there was, in fact, no hint of dawn in the sky when I reached my claim next morning. I was first in the field, having reached my destination some time even before the fire was lit in the Ortlepp camp. I brought with me a pick, a small circular sieve, a piece of plank about eighteen inches square for use as a sorting-table, and a small iron "scraper" an instrument used in the sorting of sifted gravel. Day soon began to break, so I filled my sieve and separated the sand from the gravel, placing the latter in a heap on the plank.

There was not enough light for sorting; I sat on a tussock and watched the east grow white.