I can hardly hope to give any idea of our first impression of Kimberley.
The town consists entirely of stores and dwelling-houses, covered
sometimes with coarse canvas, but more generally with corrugated iron.
One cannot help being very much astonished when one considers that every
scrap of wood, canvas, and iron has been imported from England or
America, and brought six hundred miles in an ox-wagon through a country
little removed from a desert.
The "Queen's Hotel" was the resort of most of the better class of
diggers and diamond merchants in the camp. A noisy crowd of
fine-looking men usually filled the long, low dining-room at meal-times,
a large number bearing the unmistakable stamp of the Jewish race, nearly
all of them being representatives of the diamond trade in London and on
the Continent. On the evening of our arrival several acquaintances we
had made on board the steamer coming out to the Cape called on us, and
they seemed like the faces of old friends; through them we were made
acquainted with the Kimberleyites.
For the first few days we could do nothing but wonder at the
extraordinary energy and resource that men's brains can display when
incited thereto by the hope of wealth. The town is unlike any other
place in the world, and looked at first sight as though it had been
built in a night, being more like a huge encampment than a town. It is
usually spoken of by the residents as "the camp," and they use the
expression of going "up camp" or "down camp" just as we would say "up
town" or "down town." The day after our arrival we paid a visit to the
mine, and were rewarded by a sight of the very biggest hole in the
world, covering between twenty-five and thirty acres, shaped like a huge
bowl, and over four hundred feet deep.
The first diamond in South Africa was found in 1867 by one of the
children of a Dutch farmer named Jacobs, who had it in his possession
for months, in perfect ignorance of its value, before the accidental
calling of a traveller, Mr Van Nierkirk. Mr Van Nierkirk sent it at
once to an eminent geologist, Dr Atherstone, of Grahamstown, who
discovered the fact that indeed it was a diamond.
Natives and Europeans began to search, and the result was that several
other diamonds were very soon found, and the hopes of the Cape Colony,
which at that time was in a bankrupt condition, began to revive.
The first diamonds were found in the boulders and under the Vaal River,
so that it was not until 1872 that the diggings at Dutoitspar and
Kimberley attracted any attention. But they very soon eclipsed the old
diggings, and the present town sprang up around the claim. For some
time the claims were kept distinct from one another, but as they dug
lower and lower, it was found impossible to retain the roads separating
the claims, so the whole was thrown into one large mine.
The diamondiferous soil is quarried out below by Kafirs and deposited in
great iron buckets which run on standing wire ropes, and are hauled up
by steam to the receiving boxes on the brink of the mine. Everywhere is
activity and bustle, and a loud hum comes up out of that vast hole from
three or four thousand human beings engaged at work below.
The men themselves look like so many flies as they dig away at the blue
soil, and the thousands of wire ropes extending from every claim to the
depositing boxes round the edge have the appearance of a huge spider's
web, while the buckets perpetually descending empty and ascending full
might well represent the giant spiders.
The mine having recently been worked by companies owning large blocks of
ground, there could still be traced the individual claims of the
original diggers, some carried down to a great depth and others left
standing like square turrets with the ground all dug away round them.
The effect is weird in the extreme, and it does not require any very
great stretch of fancy to imagine these isolated claims to be the
battlemented castles of the gnomes who inhabit the underground regions.
As we were gazing down the mine, the whistles from the engine-houses
began simultaneously to shriek out the signal that it was time for men
to cease working and come up from the mine for dinner.
The buckets ascended for the last time and stood still; the tiny ants at
work below threw down their picks and shovels and began to toil up the
sides of the hole. Gradually they grew larger and larger till the ants
became moles, till the moles looked like rabbits, then larger till the
rabbits became boys, and finally emerged full-grown men.
They were principally Kafirs, with very little clothing beyond a cloth
round their loins; some sported old red military jackets, and the
appearance of their bare black legs beneath was comical in the extreme.
Every thirteen or fourteen Kafirs at work in the mine have a white
overseer, to prevent as much as possible that wholesale robbery which
goes on amongst them.
One would think they would find it rather hard to steal, and still more
difficult to conceal a diamond on their naked persons under the eye of
the overseer; but, despite all precautions, they do steal a vast number
of stones, picking them up and carrying them away in their mouths or
between their toes.
The largest diamonds are usually unearthed in the mines before the stuff
is washed, and an overseer must keep his eyes well open, for he cannot
be sure of the honesty of any one of his "boys."