Their
numbers were greatly reduced by the famine of 1866 ; without exception
they are all in the power of the money-lenders, for whom they work at a
low rate, and are never able to free themselves of the claims which the
latter make on account of advances.
The
daily earnings of the gold-washers are small, but might, no doubt, be
increased, if it were not that they are always satisfied when enough
gold has been found for procuring the day's subsistence.
Colonel
Haughton says:—"The Ghasis can always reckon on earning three or four
pice per day, and I am assured that a vigorous man often gels as much
as twelve annas, which, as the ordinary rate of field labour is about
one pice, must be considered a very large sum."* Mr. Robinson found, in
a trial which he made at Raobbk, in Oodipur, that men to whom he paid
one anna could produce for him from three to four annas worth of gold.
Colonel Dalton states that the washers themselves regard it as a very
poor trade, simply yielding they say, pet bur (bellyful). Dr.
Stoehr, in his Paper on Singhbhum, states that he found the average
daily earning to be about 25 centimes (rather more than an anna and a
half). The men I met with stated that they could earn about an anna a
day, and occasionally three or four annas.
The
simplest idea of the process of hydraulic mining which seems so nearly
to approach to perfection in California, is not altogether unknown to
the natives. Mr. Robinson says:f—" Another plan, and a very remarkable
one, in which the people collect the gold, is by drawing up small
watercourses before the rains, so as to make places for a deposit of
soil carried down by the water; this soil is cleared out several times
and in it is found a large deposit of gold."
In the shallow diggings the hydraulic system would not, of course, be applicable ; but even in them an in-
* "Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal," vol. xxiii. 1854, p. 109. t Ibid., p. 108.
