_Some Famous Stones_
History and fiction throughout the ages find mystery, glamour and romance
in the stories of great jewels. _The Count of Monte Cristo_, one of the
most successful of all romances, has its hero achieve his goal by finding
a hidden treasure of great jewels. _The Queen’s Necklace_, another of
Dumas’ masterpieces, centers its intrigue around a necklace fraudulently
secured, upon which hangs the evidence of Marie Antoinette’s fidelity. Or
one thinks of a marauding foreigner, plucking the great emerald from the
eye socket of an Orient god—then followed, as in Dunsany’s grisly play
_A Night at an Inn_, by the great stone god itself, come to crush the
desecrator and regain its vision.
_The Black Prince’s Ruby_
The historical stories tell fascinating tales of changes of ownership,
as the gems endure across the dying centuries. In the state crown of
Britain, guarded in the Tower of London, is a stone called the Black
Prince’s ruby. It belonged, when first we hear of it, in 1367, to the
King of Granada. Don Pedro, King of Castille, slew him and took the gem.
But Edward III of England, the monarch who established the Order of the
Garter, had sent Don Pedro some 5,000 men; in thanks for these services,
the triumphant Spaniard sent the ruby to Edward’s son, the Black Prince.
The ruby was pierced at the top, as though it had, back in its unknown
past, been part of a fabulous necklace of an Orient potentate; today, the
hole is filled with a small ruby set in gold. The Black Prince, dying
before his father, left the stone to his son, who became King Richard
II in 1377 and was deposed by Henry IV in 1399 and probably murdered in
the very Tower where the ruby now rests. Henry V, to whom it came in his
turn, wore the stone at the Battle of Agincourt, where against great odds
he defeated the French. After that, it was deemed safer to leave the
gem in London; there it became part of the crown jewels. But the crown
jewels were scattered by the Puritans in 1642, after Cromwell became Lord
Protector. With the Restoration, the Black Prince’s ruby was returned to
the crown and has remained unharmed since—save that modern methods of
examination have revealed that it is not a ruby at all, only a “balas
ruby,” that is, a spinel.
_Other Precious Stones_
The Stuart sapphire, a great oval an inch and a half by an inch with
a hole near the top, can be removed from the royal crown and used as
a pendant. This sapphire, after James II was deposed by the Bloodless
Revolution of 1688, was carried away from England by the Young Pretender,
who—when he grew older and more sage—bequeathed the sapphire, along with
other Stuart relics, to George III of England. Since then, it has rested
quietly in the crown.
Other precious stones have had their historic moments or movements.
Catherine the Great of Russia sent thousands of workers into the Ural
mines to hunt for amethysts. Some of Napoleon’s gifts to the Empress
Josephine were of emeralds and pearls. The American Museum of Natural
History holds among its treasures a great star sapphire weighing 563
carats.
_The Crystal Palace_
Almost impatiently, however, when great gems are discussed, everyone
turns from the other precious stones to talk of diamonds. At the Crystal
Palace Exhibition in London, the pride of Prince Albert in 1851, stones
of all sorts were on view. The collection of gems from India, the great
subcontinent that was soon to change the Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland into an Empire, was stupendous. Queen Victoria noted in her
diary: “The girdle of nineteen emeralds is beautiful, all set round with
diamonds and fringed with pearls. The rubies are even more wonderful
and one is the biggest in the world ... I shall certainly make them
Crown Jewels.” Among the pieces exhibited by the lapidaries of Calcutta
were strange creations never seen in the western world before: gowries
(“blackamoors’ teeth”), golden gothas, ferozahs, a gallobund set with
diamonds, and other wonders that have since fallen out of the dictionary.
There were also educational exhibits, new and world-shaking inventions
like Nasmyth’s steam-propelled engine, the Folkestone express locomotive,
and McCormack’s reaping machine from America. But the gaping crowd passed
by all these prizes to gather and stare before the diamonds.
_The Diamonds_
There were diamonds for which there should have been automation to count
the value. The great collection of Henry Thomas Hope and his son was
displayed, all the glory of their Hope chest, including the mysterious
blue stone that came to be called the Hope diamond. There on white velvet
lay the great Black Diamond of Bahia, weighing 350 carats, so hard that
no one had been able to shape it with facets. And there, not far from a
replica of the ship that had just brought it from India, was shown for
the first time in England what the catalogue called “the great diamond of
Runjeet Singh called the Mountain of Light or the Koh-in-noor.” This is
what the millions came to see. (They were disappointed by the sight, for
the diamond had been poorly cut and did not reveal all its brilliance.)
The Kohinoor lay on a velvet cushion in an iron bird cage on an iron
pedestal. When the doors of the Crystal Palace closed each night, wheels
began to turn, and the bird cage descended into the pedestal. Safe from
all the itching fingers of international thiefdom, the Kohinoor rested in
its cage.
_The Kohinoor_
Mountain of light! The Kohinoor. First worn in the crown, perhaps, of a
great ruler in India five thousand years ago. The Koh-i-nur, or Mountain
of Light, was next heard of as a great companion to the Darya-i-Nor, the
Sea of Light, in the scabbard of Afrasiab around 3,000 B.C. Such are the
fabulous stones of ancient times, which Tennyson called
—Jewels five words long,
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle forever.
We are told that the great diamond weighed 700 carats; but, when its
modern career began, it had been severed and weighed only 186 carats.
In 1304 A.D. the stone was in the family of the Rajah of Malwa in India
from whence most of the early diamonds had come. In the early sixteenth
century, it was seized as a trophy of war by Beber, first of the Mogul
emperors. This long and mighty line, including Shah Jehan who built
the Taj Mahal for the jewel of his harem, preserved the great diamond.
Jehan set it as one of the eyes of his Peacock Throne. Through the long
years of the Mogul Empire, the legend grew that he who owns this diamond
rules the world. But all dynasties fall and in 1739 Mohammed Shah, Mogul
of Delhi, was conquered by Nadir Shah of Persia. Although the defeated
Mogul managed to keep possession of his diamond he could not keep control
of his harem. In a group of women there is bound to be one who curries
favor with the champion, and one of Mohammed Shah’s harem whispered to
the Persian king that the diamond lay hidden in her master’s turban. The
etiquette of the day gave the shrewd monarch his opening. The treaty of
peace having been signed, the Persian invited the Mogul to dinner and
there, admiring his guest’s turban, suggested that they exchange. It was
impossible to refuse. In his room, unwinding the silken yards, Nadir Shah
saw the great diamond. It lay on the floor, an enormous cone-shaped gem,
and he exclaimed “Mountain of Light!”—Koh-i-nur!—thus giving the stone
its name.
The legendary power of the stone declined, for it changed hands more
times than history records. Nadir Shah was murdered by one of his
bodyguards, whose most ingenious tortures could not wring the whereabouts
of the diamond from the dead king’s son. It passed on through two
generations, until Shah Suja was forced to flee for asylum to the court
of Runjit Sing, the Lion of the Punjab, at Lahore (now part of Pakistan).
The price of Suja’s safety was the delivery of the Kohinoor to Runjit
Sing. And here it was in 1849, when the East India Company and the
British took control. As partial indemnity for the damages of the Sikh
wars, the Company took the stone, presenting it to Queen Victoria the
next year at the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Founding of
the East India Company by Queen Elizabeth I.
After its exhibition at the Crystal Palace, Queen Victoria decided to
have the Kohinoor recut to improve its sparkle. She decided on brilliant
faceting. A four-horse-power steam engine was set up in the workshop of
the crown jewelers to turn the cutting wheel. Prince Albert set the stone
on the mill, and the Duke of Wellington started the wheel. Thirty-eight
days later, Queen Victoria was given the new-cut diamond, now weighing
only 108 carats but superbly sparkling.
As the Queen’s power grew—in 1876 she became the first ruler of the
British Empire, on whose flag the sun never set—the legend of the diamond
changed: only queens could wear the gem and prosper. From Victoria it
went to her daughter-in-law, Queen Alexandria, and it is now part of the
treasure of the royal ladies of the British throne.
_Tavernier_
Jean Baptiste Tavernier was the first of the great travelers who went
to the Orient in search of precious stones. On his voyages he saw and
described many stones that have since been lost to history. They may have
been recut, by illegitimate owners, into smaller stones, or they may be
resting in some hidden treasure store.
_The Florentine_
Among these lost stones is the Florentine, a clear yellow diamond of 137
carats, which Tavernier saw among the treasures of the Duke of Tuscany in
1657. Legends say that Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was wearing
the stone in 1476, when he fell in battle. Picked up by a peasant as
an attractive pebble, the stone was sold for a florin; after various
adventures it fell into the hands of the Medici. Later, when the Grand
Duke of Tuscany married Maria Theresa of Austria, the Florentine became
part of the Austrian crown jewels. It went into exile, after World War I,
with the imperial family, and half a hundred rumors since have set it in
as many hands.
_The Great Mogul_
Tavernier was probably the only European who ever saw the Great Mogul.
It was shown him by Aurangzeb, sixth Mogul Emperor of Hindustani, who
had usurped the throne in 1658 and imprisoned his father, the great
Shah Jehan. Tavernier said it weighed 280 carats and resembled half an
egg sliced through the middle. He was told it had weighed 787 carats in
the rough, but had been so badly cut that the jeweler, instead of being
paid, had forfeited all his fortune. (Such were the risks conscientious
jewelers ran!) When the Persians sacked Delhi in 1739, the Great Mogul
may have been among their loot. It probably still adorns a beauty in
Iran—unless it turned up in the western world as the Orloff Diamond.
_The Orloff_
Similar in shape to the Great Mogul but weighing (one can hardly say
“only”) 199 carats, the Orloff was among the more than 2,500 diamonds
owned by Catherine the Great, ruler of all the Russias. One story says
the gem was stolen by a French grenadier from the eye socket of a Hindu
idol and hidden in a self-inflicted leg wound. Such accounts recur in
tales of many jewels. Another story says that it is one of the stones
resulting from the cleavage of the great rough diamond that also produced
the Kohinoor.
At any rate, it was purchased in Holland in 1774 by the Russian
Count Gregory Orloff for 400,000 rubles ($450,000). The Count had
been a favorite of Catherine’s; she had made him a prince and the
commander-in-chief of her armies. The Court did not mind—or could not
help—the number of Catherine’s lovers; but she seemed on the verge of
actually marrying the Count. Her entourage therefore set their wits to
work, and Orloff fell from favor. For Catherine’s name day, when others
at Court presented the customary bouquets, Orloff gave her the diamond.
His family’s fortune had been pledged for it, but it failed to re-open
Catherine’s arms to him. She never wore the diamond but had it mounted in
her sceptre, right under the double eagle. Under that symbol of imperial
power, it presumably rests in the Kremlin today. A more prosaic version
of the Count’s enterprise states that he assured himself of heart balm by
selling the diamond to Catherine for £90,000 plus a £4,000 life annuity.
_The Shah of Persia_
Another diamond reported by Tavernier and now reposing in the Kremlin
is an 88-carat bar-shaped stone of finest quality. It has a tiny furrow
cut in it, presumably to secure the cord by which Tavernier, in 1665,
saw it suspended in front of the Mogul throne. It also has engraved on
it three names and dates. The first name is that of an Indian prince,
Bourhan-Nizam Shah II; the date, the year 1000 in the Mohammedan count,
the western 1591. The second engraving, in the western year 1651, sets
this gem as another among the treasures of the great Mogul Shah Jehan.
The third date is western 1824; the owner, the Shah of Persia.
The Persians possessed the jewel until 1889, when a Teheran mob slew the
Russian ambassador, the thirty-four-year-old playwright Griboyedov. As a
sign of their regret, the Persian royal house sent the Shah Diamond to
Russia, where it has remained.
_The Great Table_
Another stone that Tavernier was the only European to look upon is the
Great Table Diamond, sometimes called the White Tavernier. This 242-carat
stone is described by the French traveler: “When at Golconda in 1642, I
was shown this stone, and it is the largest diamond I have ever seen in
India in the hands of merchants. The owner allowed me to make a model of
it in lead, which I sent to Surat to two of my friends, telling them of
its beauty and the price, namely, 500,000 rupees. I received an order
from them, that if it was clean and of fine water, I should offer 400,000
rupees; but it was impossible to purchase it at that price.” The asking
price was about $280,000, for want of which the Great Table has totally
disappeared.
The table cut—which was virtually discontinued after 1520, when the rose
cut grew popular—sliced the gem into a flat slab, sometimes so thin that
the diamond was used as a “portrait stone,” set over a miniature painting.
_The Blue Tavernier_
One diamond that Tavernier brought back from his travels was a blue
diamond, roughly heart-shaped, of 112 carats. He sold it in 1668 to Louis
XIV of France. It was recut as a slightly pointed drop, being reduced in
the process to 68 carats. Louis XV set the diamond in his Order of the
Golden Fleece. It was also worn by Louis XVI but was among the treasures
of the royal house that disappeared at the beginning of the French
Revolution in the great crown jewel robbery. Of these, only the Regent
and the Sancy were recovered.
The fate of the Blue Tavernier is in doubt. One story runs that the
insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece were smuggled to England,
where later this diamond was recut. A one-carat blue diamond, last heard
of in London, is supposed to have come from the tip. A second stone is a
blue drop diamond that came into the possession of the Duke of Brunswick.
The third and largest cut is the Hope Diamond.
_The Hope_
Without any guarantee of this past history, Henry Thomas Hope in 1836
bought a superb blue diamond of 44 carats. Blue diamonds are exceedingly
rare; the nearest in weight to the Hope Diamond are the Brunswick
diamond, mentioned just above, of almost 14 carats, and a 35-carat stone,
the Wittlesbach, exhibited in London in 1930.
The Hope Diamond was willed by Lady Hope, in 1887, to her daughter’s son
on condition that he adopt the family name. He became Lord Francis Pelham
Clinton Hope. In 1894 he married the American actress May Yohe who wore
the diamond when she sang in the music halls. It is said to have been
part of the “stage jewelry” listed among her belongings when her trunks
were held for a lodging debt, but it was returned to the Hope family.
In 1908 the gem was bought for $400,000 by Abdul Hamid, Sultan of Turkey.
With the breath of revolution on his neck, the Sultan three years later
sent it to Paris to be sold. It became part of the famed collection of
Mrs. Edward B. McLean, whose gems dazzled Washington, D. C., for almost
forty years. After her death, it was bought in 1949 by Harry Winston,
noted diamond merchant of New York.
_The Jehan Akbar Shah_
This diamond deserves distinction as the second great eye of the Peacock
Throne of the Mogul Emperors. It was engraved with the names of Shah
Akbar and his grandson, Shah Jehan. It weighed 116 carats. After Shah
Jehan was deposed by his son in 1666, the stone disappeared. Precisely
two hundred years later it was shown in Constantinople as the Shepherd
stone. Recognized by the inscriptions, the diamond was bought by an
English merchant. In London, it was recut to 71 carats, losing the
inscriptions and sold to the Gaekwar of Baroda.
_The Cullinan_
The largest diamond ever discovered was found in 1905 in the Premier Mine
in South Africa, which had been opened by Sir Thomas Cullinan. The rough
stone, weighing 3,106 carats, about one and a third pounds, was bought by
the Transvaal Government and presented to King Edward VII of England, in
1907, on his sixty-sixth birthday.
The Cullinan was sent to Amsterdam to be cut. There, after months of
study, the expert set the cleaving blade on the diamond and tapped it
with a heavy rod. The blade broke. On the second try, the expert fainted.
He recovered to find the great diamond split precisely as planned.
Out of the great Cullinan came nine major gems and ninety-six smaller
brilliants. The greatest of the cuttings, called the Great Star of
Africa, weighs 530 carats, and is the largest cut diamond in the world.
It adorns the sceptre of the British Empire. The other large stones are
also part of the British Crown jewels.
_The Excelsior_
Mention should be made of the Excelsior, a diamond of 995 carats,
found in the Orange Free State in 1893 and, until the discovery of
the Cullinan, the largest diamond known. The Excelsior was noticed by
accident, seen by a native in a shovelful of gravel he was pitching onto
a truck.
The stone was cut in 1903 by the same firm, Asscher of Amsterdam, that
later cut the Cullinan; but the cutting is unique in that all the
resulting stones—twenty-one gems—are either pear-shaped or marquise.
_The Regent_
The Regent Diamond, like the Blue Tavernier, was stolen from the French
royal treasures at the brink of the Revolution, but unlike the others
this gem was recovered and restored to its place in France. A superb
stone, the diamond weighed 410 carats in 1701, when it was picked up
by a slave in the Partial Mines of India. The slave, following storied
precedent, gashed his leg and hid the stone in the bandage. He limped
his way to the seacoast. There he offered to share the proceeds of the
sale of the stone with a sea captain; but unfortunately the slave did not
survive the rigors of the ocean voyage, and the ship’s arrival in Bombay
found the captain in sole possession of the stone.
From an Indian merchant it was bought by Thomas Pitt, then Governor
of Madras, and sent to England to be cut. Political enemies bruited
abroad that he had obtained the stone by questionable means; though
they never got to the core of the matter, he became known as Diamond
Pitt. He sold the diamond in 1717 to the Duke of Orleans, then Regent of
France, for about $500,000, which kept the family in affluence through
several generations. But at any moment in the political careers of the
great English statesman, William Pitt the Elder and William Pitt the
Younger—major figures in the struggles with the American colonies and the
American Revolution—there might be dragged out, as a political target,
that family skeleton about the coming of the Pitt Diamond to England.
The Pitt Diamond, now renamed the Regent, was cut into a cushion-shaped
brilliant of 140 carats, a superbly sparkling specimen of a great gem
deftly handled. Marie Antoinette used it to adorn a large black velvet
hat she favored, borrowing it from the crown of Louis XV. But it remained
with the royal jewels until they were all stolen in 1792.
Found in a Paris garret, the diamond came to Napoleon, who pawned it to
secure funds for his triumphant campaigns. After using the stone in this
fashion several times, he had it set into the hilt of his ceremonial
coronation sword.
When Napoleon went into exile, the stone accompanied his second wife,
Marie Louise, to the Chateau of Blois. Her father, the Emperor of
Austria, returned it to Louis XVIII. The diamond shuttled between the
Napoleons and the Louis until France became a republic. When the French
crown jewels were auctioned in 1886, the Regent Diamond was withheld from
the sale.
By lying quietly behind a stone panel of a chateau in Chambord, the
Regent escaped capture by the Germans in the Second World War. It is now
on display in the Louvre where, like the Kohinoor cage at the Crystal
Palace, its case sinks nightly into a burglar-proof vault.
_The Sancy_
The Sancy and the Regent are the only jewels of the French royal treasure
that were recovered after the robbery of 1792. Legend has confused the
early story of the Sancy stone with that of the Florentine Diamond,
but it has had enough vicissitudes to make an historic tale. A superb
and fiery stone of 54 carats, one of the first ever cut in symmetrical
facets, the diamond was bought in Constantinople, about 1570, by the
French Ambassador to Turkey, the Seigneur de Sancy. Back at the court
of his king, vicious and vain Henry III, Sancy was constrained to lend
the diamond to his monarch, who set it in the cap he wore to cover his
baldness.
The shrewd successor to the throne, Henry IV, made Sancy the Minister of
Finance, and the again borrowed diamond was used as security to raise
troops. The stone was sent to the moneylenders in Metz; but the messenger
was waylaid and slain. The diamond vanished. Sure of the man’s loyalty,
Sancy recovered the body and had an autopsy performed; and from the
stomach of the faithful servant the diamond was recovered.
Wary of further loans, Sancy sold the diamond to Queen Elizabeth I of
England. It stayed with the royal house until Charles I was beheaded. The
Earl of Worcester, to whom Charles’ widow had entrusted it, returned it
when the monarchy was restored. In the second Revolution in 1688, James
II took it to France. There, after a time, it passed from the royal exile
to his diamond-hungry host, Louis XIV. Again the gem stayed with a royal
house until the turbulence of revolution; the Sancy, along with the other
royal treasures, was stolen in the tumultuous days of 1792.
For almost forty years the Sancy’s story is hidden. In 1828 it turned
up in hands that sold it to Prince Demidoff of Russia, husband of the
Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon Bonaparte. Many of this Princess’
jewels were designed by Louis François Cartier, whose creations she made
popular at the court of the Empress Eugénie, thus giving impetus to the
young House of Cartier.
But at this point the story of the Sancy Diamond takes a double path.
Sold to the Maharajah of Patiala and set in platinum, it remains part of
the treasure of the land from which it first came. So goes the story. But
either the Sancy diamond or a mysterious twin is worn by the former Nancy
Langhorne of Virginia, now Lady Astor.
What further wars such gems may survive, and what owners they may be
cherished by, in the coming centuries, future historians may tell.
_Out of the Earth_
From the dull earth comes the bright sparkle of the diamond. Early
prospectors, as gold-hunters panned the streams, sifted the surface
gravel. When likely spots were located, men and machines began to dig. At
Kimberly, the mine shaft is more than 3500 feet deep. One diamond may be
secured for each 21 million parts of ore; but gem diamonds in the larger
sizes are so much more rare than industrials or gems in the smaller sizes
that more than 250 tons must be mined to yield a stone that can be cut
and polished into a one-carat gem.
A purchaser, at the end of this arduous searching, must see to the four
C’s of diamond value. First the weight in carats. Although more labor
goes into the preparing of five one-carat gems than of one five-carat
gem, the single large stone is worth more than the sum of the five.
Comparatively few rough diamonds can be effectively cut into large-carat
stones.
Second, the clarity. A flawless gem, by official standard, is one in
which no imperfection is visible to the trained eye under tenth-power
magnification. Such a stone can be shaped to fullest brilliance.
Third, the color. Rarest is the pure colorless diamond, together with the
flawless blue. Slightly yellowish tints are in disfavor, but red again
is extremely rare and highly valued. Of all, the colorless, or white,
diamond, is most likely to be richly responsive to light.
Fourth, the cut. Not merely how well does the particular cut—brilliant,
marquise, rose, and the rest—become the diamond; but, whatever the
cutting, how well was it made? That is the pertinent question. And
perhaps there should be added to this the matter of the setting—the
degree to which the finished jewel sets off, displays and enhances the
precious stone.
When these qualities are properly present, when a choice gem in a fine
jewel adorns a fair lady, then one may truly say, in every sense, that
all beholders are privileged to look upon beauty in jewels.
Transcriber’s Note: On page 221, the line “revolution, there is no need
to wear more elaborate jewels” was erroneously printed as the first line
of the page. It has been moved to the correct place. A few other typos
have been corrected without further note.