THE SOUTH-AFRICAN DIAMOND-MINES. 463 



carats, and in the jewel-case of the Countess of Dudley, is valued at 

 £25,000. Upon the news that such a gem as this had been found, 

 which was spread in 1869, a " rush " of diggers took place to the 

 Orange River. It was on the Vaal, however, that they found the dia- 

 monds, and they scattered their camps for a hundred miles or so along 

 its course, where the washings still yield more or less satisfactory re- 

 turns. The importance of this district was destined to he speedily 

 eclipsed by the discovery, in 1871, of the famous Kimberley mine — 

 first known as the " Colesberg Kopje," or Colesberg Hill, because it 

 was discovered by three men from Colesberg, afterward by the sug- 

 gestive name of " De Beer's New Rush," and finally by its present 

 title — and its companion mines De Beer's, Bultfontein, and Dutoitspan. 

 These mines are situated some twenty miles south of the river-mines, 

 in a sandy, treeless country, that contrasts most unfavorably with the 

 green and shady valley of the Vaal, and are so placed with refer- 

 ence to one another that a circle three and a half miles in diameter 

 will inclose them all. 



The Kimberley mine was opened to the public on the 21st of July, 

 1871, the allotments being made in claims thirty-one feet square. Any 

 one could take one or two claims, but no more, for himself, on the pay- 

 ment of thirty shillings a month. If the claim remained unworked for 

 a month, it could be allotted to another applicant on the same terms. 

 A strip of seven and a half feet on one side of each claim w r as re- 

 served for roadways, of which some fourteen or fifteen, each fifteen 

 feet wide, were provided. But as the claims were worked, forming 

 pits of greater and greater depth, the roadways soon became unsafe 

 and began to cave in, and they eventually had to be abandoned. But 

 the scene while they were in operation is described by Mr. Theodore 

 Reunert, in the " Hand-Book " of the colony, which was published in 

 connection with the recent Indian and Colonial Exhibition, as having 

 been most picturesque : " Hundreds of carts and wheelbarrows career- 

 ing along the roads, bearing their precious freight of excavated ground 

 clear of the mine to be sorted ; down below, at all distances from the 

 surface, a succession of rectangular ledges, representing the various 

 working -levels of different claims, where thousands of diggers and 

 native laborers, crowded together on the narrow working-spaces, were 

 busy picking and shoveling the ground and filling it into the original 

 tubs and buckets of all sorts and sizes employed for conveying it to 

 the surface ; some of these were hauled up by ropes and tackle, others 

 carried by hand up inclined planks and staircases cut in the perpen- 

 dicular walls ; each man worked on his own device, without regard to 

 his neighbor, the only general rule being that the roadways must be 

 kept intact." 



After the roadways collapsed, the problem was presented of finding 

 a way to work the large number of successive holdings, so as to pre- 

 serve free access to each, and still let no claim-holder encroach or tres- 



