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PRINCIPAL SOUTH AFRICAN MINES 285
from
500,000 to 700,000 carats per annum, about the same as that of the De
Beers and of the Bultfontein, and two-thirds that of the Kimberley, the
value being greater than either. Until the limit of open-working was
reached, it was a great producer of valuable material, nevertheless
Barnato at the first meeting of the De Beers Consolidated, stated that
hardly one company had paid a dividend in the seventeen years they had
been working it. That two companies on the mine, the Griqualand West,
and the Anglo-African Company, had paid very small dividends, he
attributed to the extraordinary financial ability of their respective
managers.
The Bultfontein.
Rumors
had come to the ear of Cornells du Plooy on his farm, the Bultfontein,
that north of him toward the Vaal river, men were picking stones out of
the earth and selling them for money, sometimes getting more for one
stone than a man would have to pay for a tract of land larger than his
own wide stretch of brush and gravel. He had heard too that a lot of
those restless Englishmen from the Cape Colony were already scratching
and digging the earth in every direction in search of these stones that
could be sold. If stones could be sold for money, it behooved him to
look into the matter, for there were plenty of them scattered all over
his own morgen, where the goats and sheep picked a living. It would be
easier to pick up stones than to raise hides and wool for the
semi-annual trading trip to Grahamstown. So after some days of
cogitation, he gathered a pocketful of pebbles, and on November, 1869,
carried them to the store of a Mr. Hurley to see if he
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