DIAMONDS.
UNTIL within little more than ten years ago, an " Ethiop " on his native soil desirous of wearing a fair jewel in his ear would have had to import the bauble ; and at a much later date, the colonists of Queensland and New South Wales believed that Nature, in the storing of her treasure-houses out their way, had drawn the line at Gold. In all the riches of the earth had Eng- lish territory a share, except in those much-prized things which have inspired fancies and fables from the beginning of all records of fancy and of fable. The diamond had hitherto yielded up its peerless preciousness in Indian mines and in Brazilian gravel-beds —where in early times the men who, in washing gold found the sparkling stones, threw them away, or used them as card-markers —in the Ural mountains (where the earth was also bountiful of emerald), and in Borneo. Of these treasure-hoards, India's were the most ancient and rich, and the most industriously rifled. When, in 1727, Bernardino Fonseca Lobo, who had seen rough diamonds in India, took a number of the pretty card-markers from Minas-Geriies to Portugal for sale, the European mer- chants, frightened lest the discovery should cause a fall in the price of the gems in their possession, declared that "Brazilian diamonds" were only the refuse of the Indian stones, forwarded to Goa, and thence to Brazil. No inanimate article of commerce in the world has inspired more cruelty and tyranny or occasioned more misery than the diamond, and if among the animate the horse rivals it as a suggester of subtle swindling, it barely does 60. The very fairies cannot help cheating in precious stones,— how, then, should mere mortal merchants ? So the dealers, having the ear of the diamond-buying world, pooh-poohed and discredited Brazil ; whereupon the Portuguese cut their human fellow-diamonds deeply, by sending the Brazilian stones to Goa and thence to Bengal, where they were offered for sale as Indian gems and fetched Indian prices. This was a very neat transaction, pending the establishment of the " Diatuantina " as a remunera- tive fact demonstrated by slave-labour.
Some remarkable stories are connected with the discovery of diamonds in Brazil, so much regretted by the Marquis de Porn- bal, who vainly endeavoured to arrest the evil by forbidding search in the province of Bahia (Brazilian diamonds were known at first as " Bahias ") on the plea that agriculture would suffer from the diversion of industry. We find these stories in Mr. Streeter's valuable work on "Precious Stones," in which every branch of his fascinating subject is made interesting. The discovery of diamonds in Bahia was in this wise :—" A cunning slave from Minas-Geriies, keeping his master's flocks in Balda, ob- served a similarity between the soil of his native place and that of Bahia. He sought therefore in the sand, and soon found 700 carats of diamonds. Fleeing from his piaster, he carried these with
him, and offered them for sale in a distant city. Such wealth in the hands of a slave caused him to be ar- rested, but he would not betray himself. The master, to whom he was given up, tried to get at his secret by cun- ning, but without avail, until he thought of restoring him to his former occupation in Bahia, and watching him." A year after- wards, 25,000 people were digging diamonds in the fields there (80 miles long by 40 broad), and at the rate of 1,450 carats a day. Dreadful misery ensued on the discovery of the "Diamond 'Rivers." The Government wanted to secure the monopoly of the new-found wealth to the Crown, and so the dwellers on the rivers' banks were driven from their homes to distant wilds and despoiled of all they possessed. " Nature seeped to take part against them ; a dreadful drought, succeeded by a violent earth- quake, increased their distress. Many of them perished, but those who lived to return, on May 18, 1805, were benevolently reinstated in their rightful possessions. Strange to say, on their return, the earth seemed strewn with diamonds. After a shower, the children used to find gold in the streets, and in the brooks which traversed them. Often the little ones would bring in three or four carats of diamonds. A negro found a diamond at the root of a vegetable in his garden, and poultry, in picking up their food, took up diamonds constantly." .7Esop thus improved upon, in the fullness of time we find Sindbad parodied. In 1868 the child of a Dutch farmer named Jacobs, settled at the Cape, amused himself by collecting pretty pebbles on the banks of the neighbouring river, and picked up a specimen which attracted his mother's attention, so that she showed it to one Schalck van Niekerk, who was curious in such matters. He was puzzled about its nature, and offered to buy it, but Mrs. Jacobs laughed at his offer, and gave him the pebble, which afterwards passed carelessly through two intervening pairs of bands before it reached—in a gummed envelope and un- registered—Dr. Atherstone, of Graham's Town, an excellent mineralogist. This gentleman, having examined its physical character and tested its degree of hardness and density, and its behaviour when subjected to optical tests by means of polarised light, pronounced it to be a diamond. This is the stone which was examined by savants of all nations during the Paris Exhibition in 1867, and purchased at the close of it by Sir Philip Wode- house for £500. In 1870, Mr. Streeter's Diamond Expedition party were exploring the Transvaal far and wide, and ascertaining facts which complete our knowledge of the new wonder of the world. Amid dry geological details, charming touches of anecdote and adventure crop up, like the gems them- selves, from the gravel and the quartz ; and great solitary jewels, like the " Stewart " and the " Dudley," emerge and take their places in history, with the Saucy, the Pitt, the Great Mogul, the Hope Brilliant, and many another bright bauble, blood-and-tear- stained. The Transvaal, our new territory, is Sindbad's Valley in prose fact, and the origin of the most celebrated group of dry diggings—that called Du Toit's Pan, which does not sound poeti- cal—is as simple and fantastic as a fancy of Hans Christian Andersen's. " A Dutch hoer, named Tan Wyk, who occupied a farmhouse in this locality (twenty miles S.E. of Pniel), was sur- prised to find diamonds embedded in the walls of his house, which had been built of mud from a neighbouring pond. This led to ex- amination of the soil, which was soon found to contain diamonds. On continuing to dig lower and lower, diamonds were still brought to light, nor did they cease when the bed of rock was at length reached."
It was but natural that the discovery of diamonds at the Cape should excite only moderate enthusiasm ,in Brazil, but the Portu- guese trick was long past, and the merchants would have been wiser had they been less angry, and especially less incredulous ; had they remembered, to avoid them, the incidents of a century before. They refused to receive the warnings sent in perfect good-faith, and in stolid unbelief beheld the attention of the trade diverted to the Cape stones, which were brought to market by all kinds of holders, and so fascinated the Amsterdam lapidaries that for a long time they would cut none other. The Brazilian market went down, and down, and has never recovered itself. "The Cape yield of large stones," says Mr. Streeter, "enhanced the difficulties of influencing the Amsterdam lapidaries. They, finding a super- abundance, refused to cut small ones, and these Brazil furnished in every parcel with which the merchants supplied the market. The merchants of Brazil had therefore to exclude all small stones, and contrive to compose their parcels so as to enter into competi- tion with Cape gems. They have not succeeded yet, not because in beauty and quality the Brazilian diamonds had deteriorated, but because of the exorbitant prices at which they bad been offered for sale. The future appears decidedly unpropitious for the im- portation of Brazilian diamonds, so long as the prices of diamonds generally remain at their present level. A very considerable rise would alone produce a resumption of the mines in the diamond districts of Brazil, where none the less untold treasures are still hidden." So is the eclipse of the great Cuddapah, Kandiah, and Ellore groups avenged.
The discipline of the Brazilian diamond-fields is well contrived and maintained, but it must be comical to behold the tableau of "honesty rewarded," when a lucky negro finds a stone of 17i carats, and is crowned with a wreath of flowers, and led in pro- cession to the manager. It is pleasant to know that the triumph has substantial elements also ; that the virtuous digger receives his freedom, a new suit of clothes, and permission to work for wages. The only important Australian diamond-fields are in New South Wales—discovered within three years— the gems existing in Victoria and South Australia be- ing not remarkable for quality or quantity ; but Mr. Streeter is convinced that great things are in the future for Australia, 'when the colonial continent shall be scientifically ransacked for these mysterious and beautiful formations of the immeasurable past. lie believes that in the Australian Alps the matrix will be discovered whence the crystals of pure carbon already found have been washed, and that, as the geological formation of the whole of the New England district in New South Wales resembles closely that of the district of the Baggage Mines in Brazils, it will sooner or later be found to yield diamonds in paying quantities. Of Queensland he prophesies that another diamond-field will be found, either on the Palmer River or its affluents, where some very remarkable and rich gold-mines have lately been recovered ; or on the Gilbert River and its affluents, and in the country extending to the Gulf of Carpentaria,— that pitiless country, which has witnessed so much heroic effort and terrible suffering.
The Indian princes and nobles are greedy of diamonds beyond an people, and there is but one country in the world in which any product of nature is held more precious than this wonderful com- bustible gem, whose nature, indeed, we know, but whose genesis is still a moot question for science. That country is Burmah, the land of the White Elephant, where the finest rubies sheltered in the earth's breast are found, and are rated far above diamonds. As the King of Siam prizes his cats, so the King of Burmah prizes the rubies of his country, jealously prohibiting the export of them, so that the beautiful aluminous stones—which do but glow with a clearer and richer colour when they are exposed to fire in which the diamond would be consumed and disappear—can only be procured by stealth or favour of private individuals. No Euro- pean has ever been permitted to see the King's wonderful ruby, "the size of a pigeon's egg, and of extraordinary quality ;" and the sale of the two magnificent rubies which were -brought' to England in 1875—the finest ever known in Europe caused such excitement, that a military guard had to escort the persons conveying the package to the ship. Five days' journey south-east of Ave lies the home of the blood-red gems, the jealous earth in which the people believe that they ripen, becoming from their original colourlessness, yellow, green, blue, and last of all, the matchless ruby-red. Next to these rank the rubies which are found in the Tartar wilds of Badakshan, and which the people there believe are always found in pairs. "When one of the seekers has discovered one, he will frequently hide it until its mate is found." Mr. Streeter knows of only one specimen of a red diamond, which is like a gem on fire, and it passed from his hands into the possession of a great connoisseur
last year. The red diamond," wrote Sir Thomas Nicole, in 1651, "is prized according to the glorious beauty of its perfec- tion. It feeds your eyes with much pleasure of beholding, and hence are discovered to us the excellency of super-celestial things."
There is something fascinating to the imagination in the experiments which have been tried on diamonds in order to wrest the secret of their nature and their formation from them. One cannot read without a feeling of suspense how the Accademia del Cimento. in the year 1694, induced by Cosmo III., fixed a diamond in the focus of a great burning-glass, and watched it, dismayed, as it cracked, coruscated, and disappeared ; and how the experiment was frequently repeated, until Lavoisier (he whom Fouquier Tinvillo declared to be unnecessary to the Republic) proved that diamonds burn just the same as common coal, if oxygen be not shut out, because they are pure carbon and combine with oxygen. How silent and how still one would have stood to watch Guyton de Morveau at his work, when he con- sumed a diamond in oxygen by means of the burning-glass :— " First, he saw on that corner of the diamond which was in the exact focus of the lens a black point ; then the diamond became black and carbonised. A moment after, Le saw clearly a bright spark, twinkling on the dark ground ; and when the light was interrupted, the diamond was red-hot and transparent. A cloud, and the diamond was more beautifully white than at first ; but as the sun again shone forth in its full strength, the surface assumed a metallic lustre. Up to this point, the diamond had sensibly decreased in bulk, not being more than a fourth of its original size ; of elongated form, without definite angles ; intensely white, and beautifully transparent. The experiment was suspended for a day or two, when, on its resumption, the same phenomena recurred, but iii a more marked degree ; subsequently, the diamond entirely disappeared,"—like Macbeth'a witches, making itself.—air
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