conditions
and races. Theft and illicit trading in diamonds was common. Rumor has
since told of fortunes founded on the purchase of diamonds from
thieving natives for small prices, by rascally whites who encouraged
them to rob their employers. These blacks used every aperture of the
body to conceal their spoils. It was a common practice to swallow them,
until powerful drugs made that method of concealing them unpopular.
White men often obtained from native women, for little or nothing, gems
which they in turn had procured from the blacks working in the mines.
It was a time of sordid avarice and unrecognized crime. Conditions
assisted the criminals. The Orange Free State border was but a short
distance off. There was no extradition law. The buyer of stolen
diamonds had but to carry them across that line and the Cape Colony
authorities were powerless.
This
state of things continued until 1881, when the De Beers Company
inaugurated a system to cope with it. Up to that time it was estimated
that diamonds to the value of one million pounds sterling had been
stolen annually. A law against illicit diamond-buying was passed which
provided a penalty, on conviction, of eight to fifteen years hard labor
on the breakwater at Cape Town. Rogues began to be more cautious. The
clumsy ones were caught or driven out of business. Shrewd ones had to
resort to extraordinary methods, and use great precaution. It is told
of one, that he invited the chief of the detectives to join him in a
shooting expedition. The detective carried his diamonds over the line
for the man he was watching, concealed in cartridges with which his
crafty host had provided him,
