THE GREAT KIMBERLEY MINES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2354, 21 November 1908, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE GREAT KIMBERLEY MINES.

UNDERGROUND IN THE DUTOIT-

SPAN

HOW THE DIAMONDS ARE FOUND.

AN ENTERTAINING NARRATIVE

(By Frank Carpenter, in tlio “New Orlean’s Times-Domo-crat.”)

Kimberly is the Lord’s greatest treasure vault. Stored away hero in five mighty pipes going down, no one knows how deep into the earth, is a blue clay sprinkled with diamonds. Already more than, £100,000,000 worth of precious stones have been taken from them, and there are still hundreds of millions in sight. For many years the sales have amounted to from £4,000,000 to £6,000,000, and. there are today lying out here in open fields, still mixed with this clay, diamonds which would have set Aladdin crazy or made covetous the heart of Sinbad the Sailor. THE DIAMOND CAPITAL.

These mines lie right close to Kimberley. They form a necklace around it, and that, one of the most valuable necklaces on earth. ' The necklace is decorated anew every year - with £5,000,000 worth of brilliants, which are taken from these mines. -They are allowed to blaze away for a few months under African sun, and are then shipped off to dazzle the draw-ing-rooms of all parts of the globe., The town is a strange one to be the capital of such wealth. It has no palaces nor skjVcrapers, and, like the jewels of Portia, its treasures are kept in caskets of lead- The offices of the diamond trust themselves are no better than many a. 6x9 factory in the United States, and a few thousand dollars would equal the cost of any building inside the town. The most of the houses are bungalows of brick, roofed with galvanised iron. They all have wide porches about them, and many have gardens filled with beautiful flowers. The city has wide, streets and amusement grounds. It has a theatre, churches and hotels. Its stores are large and its business is good. The city is lighted by electricity and has all the modern improvements. -The water comes from the Vaal river, which is seventeen miles away. _ A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF THE MINES. All the mines are within rifle 6hot of the centre of Kimberley. If we climb to the top of the higher buildings we may see the skeletons of the washing machines on every side, and between' the the vast weathering floors where the precious earth containing the brilliants is allowed to lie and melt. Moving to them, from the mines, are great lines of what in the distance seem to be ants. They are inarching in single file and are racing with one another as they pass to and fro. Now take your glass and you will see that each ant is a steel car filled with the diamondiferous earth, and that dt is flying along un- | der a wire cable from the mines to I the fields. These fields are called j floors. Every mine lias its own floor, j and in every direction you can see the cars moving. The black pigmies who are handling the cars are the natives, and the white ones on the outside are the- guards to see that the blacks do not steal as thev work. PIPES OF DIAMONDS. Until these Kmber.ley ' mines were discovered all the diamonds found were picked up out of gravel which lay on or near the surface of the earth. The Indian diamonds, among which were the Kohinoor, the Great Mogul, the Regent, and the Orloff, came from alluvial washings composed of a mxture of broken sandstone, quartz, jaspar, flint and granite. The deposit was about twenty feet thick and was covered by a few feet of. black cotton soil. It lay near the bed of a river in India not far from Golconda, which was the chief city to which the diamonds of Brazil were first discovered in 1728. They were found in deposits of clay, quartz, pebbles, and sand, buried under about thirty feet of other earth. They lay along the bank of rivers and in a few cases were imbedded dn sandstone. It was the same with the diamonds of Borneo, of British Gui ana, Australia, and California, and also of those which were first discovered along the Vaal River near here in South Africa.

It is now over forty years since the first African diamond was found. A man named O’Reilly, —not the one who ran the .hotel, but John O’Reilly, the hunter—made the first diamond discovery. It was when ho was stopping overnight with a Boer farmer not far off from Kimberley. During the evening he saw the children playing with some beautiful pebbles. He admired the stones and took some home wth him. To his surprise he found one would cut glass, and upon showing it to a jeweller he was told it was a diamond and worth 2500 dollars.

Two years after that another big stono was discovered by a Hottentot who trailed it to this same Boer farmer lor 2000dol. The Boer sold it to a diamond merchant, and it was sent to England and eventually sold to the Countess of Dudley for-100,OOOdol. These two finds set South Africa crazy. Diamond seekers came at once by the thousands, and the Vaal and Orange Rivers were soon covered with mining camps. Men went about everywhere digging up the gravel and searching for stones. As the riverbeds became exhausted the miners spread out over the country, and finally got here to Kimberley, which is fifteen miles from the Yaal. One day a Boer discovered some diamonds in a clay bed out of which he was taking material to build a mud hut. He kept on digging, and the result was the Dutoitspan mine, which has proved to be one of the richest diamond pipes ever found. About the same time other claims were taken up and developed, and as a result came the five great mines which now form the basis of the De Beers syndicate.

As the miners went down into the earth the area in which the precious stones were discovered became narrower and narrower, until at last it was, in each case, found to consist entirely of a sort of blue rock or clay inside great walls of other and harder rock. These walls were in the shape of a pipe, and the pipes were found to extend down, down, into the earth, and each was filled with this blue ground. As the miners' wept down the diamonds did not diminish. TJiey were found eyerywhere plentifully

scattered through tho blue clay, and this is so at tho depths where they .are mining to-day, although in" tho Kimberley pipe the lower .levels are more than 0110-half mile .from the surface. THE KIMBERLEY MINE.

The Kimberley mine gives one an excellent idea of how the diamonds lie in these pipes in the earth. The pipe begins with a great tunnel which at the top has a mouth covering thirty-five acres and which elopes down to the pipe piroper, the inside of -which is about eight acres. The Kimberley mouth is, I judge, about 300 feet wide, and it slopes evenly > down on all sides. The pipe itself is almost round. Its walls are of black rock; they are almost as regularly shaped as though cut out by a chisel, and they narrow only slightly as they go down for more than 2500 feet. For that distance this area of eight acres was all composed of blue rock carrying diamonds, and the mine is producing millions of dollar’s worth of diamonds still. The first earth was dug up with pick and shovel and washed in a rude way. Then wires wore run down int-o the mine and the blue ground was carried up by means of them. It is now elevated by great engines through shafts outside the mine itself, and a continuous line of steel cars rising all day long. Something like 700,000 cart loads were taken up last year, and there are now more than a million loads lying out on the floors in order that the wind, the rain, and the sun may so weather them than the diamonds can. be taken out. The value per load is only a few dollars, but there must be at least six millon dollar’s worth of diamonds in tlio ground on the Kimberley floors. I walked around itlie Kimberley mine with its manager, Mr. C .M. Henrotin, an American mechanical and mining engineer, who graduated at Cornell in the class of 1897, and the son of the former president of tlio "Woman’s Clubs of the United States. He tells me there are more than a million apd a quarter loads of this precious clay about- the level at which the men are now working. UNDERGROUND IN THE DUTOITSPAN. It was in company with another American mining engineers that I explored the underground working of the Dutiotspan, oue of the largest diamond mines of the world. This was Mr. T. J. Fuller, a graduate of the Lehigh University. In fact, all of the mines here are managed by Americans. They were opened up and developed by Mr. Gardiner "Williams, who is now a resident of Washington, and their present general manager is Mr. Alpheus Williams, his son. In another place I shall speak of the workmen and tell how they are handled outside the mines. An army of over 25,000 is here employed, and of these more than 22,000 are natives, who are kept in guarded compounds and who are not allowed to go outside during the terms of their contracts. But come with me and take a look at the Dutoitspan. This is a mino which was discovered by tlio farmer when he was building a. clay hut. It is the biggest of all the mines of the Do Beers Company and so large that the Kimberley pipe and the De Beers pipe, which together are now producing something like 15,000,000d01. worth of diamonds every twelve months, could bo lost' inside of it. It has thirty-eight miles of tunnels in its underground workings, and that although it is not yet one-third as deep as the Kimberley. Before entering the mine I was shown the maps of the surveyors. The blue ground covers about thirty acres, and this is all drawn- to a scale so that oue can tell the condition of every tunnel from the surface down to the 750-foot- level where the bottom now is. A great shaft has been sunk outside the pipe and tunnels have been run ip at intervals of forty feet to get the diamond earth out. By this shaft this thirty-acre pipe has thus been explored to a depth equal to one and-half times the height of the Washington monument, and tile bine ground has been found peppered with diamonds, throughout. From some of the upper levels much of tlio ground has’" been extracted, but mining is going on at every level, the amount of earth taken out decreasing until at tho bottom there are little, more than tho tracks used to carry the cars of blue clay out of the shaft.

All the ore is taken from the lowest level. Great wells have been sunk through the pipe from top to bottom, and the blue ground of each height is carried through tunnels and dropped into reservoirs at the bottom. There it is loaded by gravity into the cai-s which carry it to the shaft. At present they arc raising 10,000 loads to the surface every day. Four thousand negroes are employed, and in busy seasons the miners work day and night. SCENES IN THE MINES.

It was in company with Mr. Fuller that I went through the Dutoitspan. The mines are dirty and the rock is so sharp that it cuts one’s shoes. For this reason we were given boots of sole leather such as aro used by the miners, and were clad in miners’ clothes.

Entering the shaft, we dropped quickly to the 750-foot level and made our way by foot through the tunnels into the great pipe. Wo went along a car track, passing trains of this blue ground hauled by American locomotives. As the cars reached the shaft they were dumped without stopping. Their contents fall into a great iron skip and a touch of a button sends them to the top. The arrangements l are such that two boys can unload 4000 cars in eight hours, and so that, working all day, they can hoist 12,000 cars to the surface. As we watched the blue ground Hying by I asked Mr, Fuller to give me some idea of the jirofits of the mining. He replied that the Dutoitspan was one of the richest of the De Beers Company’s properties, and that the profits on the ore then going up was something like 37,000d01. a day. This means 1500dol. an hour, day and' night, or 27d01. per minute, week in, and week out,. In addition to this the blue ground) pays the mining exjienses, amouning to 145,000d01. per month, and/ of that more than 100,OOOdol. is for wages alone. Talk of your golden, streams! As for me I would prefer one of these streams of diamonds.

We passed a continuous line of suoli cars on our way into .the mine proper, and then walked for miles through the tunnels made in the pipe to get out the blue ground. Much of the mine i<i unlighted, and we had to pick our way along with candles, jumping to this side and to that to avoid being rmv dowy by the care, The tupgela

are just about as high as one’s head and just wide enough for the cars to run. through them. They are cut hero and there by cross tunnels, and at times wo could sec an electric light at a crossing a mile or so in tho distance.

BLASTING OUT DIAMONDS. Everywhere we went the natives were working. Here they were loading the blue rock upon cars, and there they wore dumping it down through wells to the reservoirs below. In one place they were blasting. The rock is of such a- nature that compressed air cannot be used, and tho men were cutting holes five feet deep by means of long chisels worked by hand. Many holes are made in a chamber and then the blasts are all set off at once. I can, not describe tho terror inspired, by these blasts as they go off down there, five or six. hundred feet below ground. The boom is like that of a big naval gun, and it strikes tho drum of your ear as though it- would break it. The vibration blows out the candles, and the dynamite fills the tunnels with a sickening smoke. Thirty-six thousand blasts are shot off in that mine every week,, and nevertheless the -accidents are few. During tho past year only two men have been killed, and this is a small mortality considering that there are 4000 nativo workmen and that the mines are usually operated both day and night. The amount of explosives used is enormous. In 1906 in all the mines of the De Beers Company there were consumed more than three million pounds of dynamite, and to set this off were, used six hundred coils of fuse each twenty-four inches long. The Do Beers Company hag its own dynamite factory not far from Cape Town. It finds -it cheaper and safer to make its own explosive. A GREAT ORGANISATION.

In going through the mines and works I have been surprised at tlio care and economy everywhere shown. Although tho company pays big dividends, not a cent is allowed to go to waste, and the most careful watch is kept to avoid any extravagance. As we went -through the Dutoitspan we passed a chamber where an electric light was burning, although the work had been stopped for tho time. The man in charge was reproved and the light put out. In another place a white boy who was keeping tally of the cars allowed one to go by which was not quite full. He was warned that he must not credit half cars for full cars, and that ho -would lose his job if lie did not kee-p his eyes open. The same economy is shown in the engine rooms, in the washing machines, in the management of tho blue ground on the floors, and, in fact, in every part of the works. The De Beers Company pays big dividends becaiise it is thoroughly well managed, and it makes one feel proud to know that, although operated almost entirely by British capital, the managers are Americans.