Up the Mazaruni for Diamonds

by William La Varre

JIGGERS SEPARATING DIAMONDS FROM GRAVEL

Some of the jiggers are so expert that, impossible as it seems, they can jig a baby—to use their own expression—so that the diamonds, heavy as they are, will actually come to the top. They then pick off the biggest ones and then go on jigging as usual. But they do not get away with many. A close watch is kept on the jiggers and if they are caught stealing they are fined a month’s pay or more. We had some trouble but not much. These men are bound out to us by the British Government and must work. If they run away they are outcasts and cannot get more work to do. On the other hand we must feed them according to the law and work them only so many hours.

One day we were watching the results of a jigging from the “Long Tom” and suddenly there sparkled before us a large, brilliant stone.

It weighed more than seven carats!

This was the largest stone we found. But all together we cleaned up, in only a few months of actual mining, more than $20,000 worth of diamonds!

Rough diamonds are mostly of odd shapes. Seldom do you find them in the almost perfect form that we find quartz crystals. Once in a while I have picked out a small diamond that looked as though it had come directly from a skilled lapidary, so perfect in form it seemed to be.

The largest diamond known to have been found in these fields weighed fourteen carats. A pork knocker named “London” found it. He was a giant of a black man, noted for his lawlessness, and greatly feared. He was working for another man at the time and, strange to say, he turned it over. The reason was that he knew he could not sell so large a gem without being caught.

There is also much gold in that region, but we did not go after it. Having come for diamonds, and finding them in paying quantities, we stuck to it.

Day after day Lewis took his eight or ten grains of quinine. Day after day I seemed to get along without it and I feared to take too much. The mosquitoes were there in plenty, the sort whose sting gives one the jungle fever, so deadly to white men, just as, at home, they cause malarial fevers.