Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/480

462 from the sands in the valleys by wearing slippers of straw which catch the precious stones and hold them, and then, on being burned, give them up. Diamonds in considerable quantities have been mined in Borneo, which has furnished one of the largest gems in the world, valued by the Governor of Batavia, who made the offer to the owner to be refused, at the worth of two brigs of war fully equipped and ammunitioned, plus one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Some specimens have been found in Australia, which might have attracted more attention but for the discovery of the South-African fields, and small numbers or small crystals in nearly every other country.

The diamond-fields of South Africa are richer and more extensive than any others—so far as we know of present and have accounts of past richness—although they were only discovered less than twenty years ago. They are situated in Griqualand West, north of the Orange River, at an elevation of four thousand feet above the sea, six hundred and ten miles from Cape Town, and four hundred and eighty miles from Port Elizabeth. They might have been found long before they were, for the place was marked on a French mission-map of 1750 with the phrase Ici sont des diamants ("Here there are diamonds"), but that had long been lost sight of or disregarded. The rivers of the region had been resorted to by the natives and their ancestors for perhaps generations, for crystals with which to bore their weighting-stones, but no account seems to have been taken of that fact. Van Niekerk's children at Barkly, on the Vaal, and De Beer's at Dutoitspan, were in the habit of playing with the diamonds along with the other pretty pebbles which they found in the gravel, and no one thought the diamonds were anything more than pretty stones till one evening in March, 1867, when a trader, John O'Reilly, "out-spanned" at Mr.Niekerk's farm. "O'Reilly saw a beautiful lot of Orange River stones on the table, and examined them. 'I told Niekerk,' he says, 'they were very pretty. He showed me another lot, out of which I at once picked the first diamond. I asked him for it, and he told me I could have it, as it belonged to a Bushman boy of Daniel Jacob's. I took it at once to Hope Town, and made Mr.Chalmers, civil commissioner, aware of the discovery. I then took it on to Colesberg, and gave it to the acting civil commissioner there, for transmission to Cape Town to the high commissioner.' "Another account says that O'Reilly and Niekerk tried the stone on the window, and scratched the glass with scratches that are still there; and that on his way, O'Reilly was laughed at for believing that he had a diamond, and the stone was taken from him and thrown into the street, whence he had some difficulty in recovering it. This stone was sold to Sir Philip Wodehouse, for £500. Several other diamonds were obtained during the year, among them the famous "Star of South Africa," which was bought of a native for £400, and sold in Hope Town for more than £10,000; and now, cut, reduced from 83 carats in the rough to 46