Beet
and there, too, that he sat with me for hours, recounting the early
history of Kimberley as he gazed steadily at me with his milky-blue
eyes. Gradually, with the aid of Mr. Beet and a multitude of books and
documents, I pieced together something of the confused story of the
rush and of the chaotic, exuberant infancy of the world's most
celebrated diamond-mining town.
Before the first diamonds were discovered in the veld—nobody knows for sure whether it was in 1866 or 1867—the region was
agricultural and, in the eyes of the world, unimportant. Back in the
seventeenth century, when the Dutch and the British were disputing
about who ruled the waves, the Dutch East India Company planted a
colony at the Cape of Good Hope, where its ships could provision, and
before long a good many people settled there—mostly Dutch but also
quite a few British, Huguenots, Swedes, and Germans. Some founded the
city of Cape Town, and some fanned out into the surrounding
countryside, where they grew wheat and vines or raised sheep and
cattle. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Dutch were, however
unwillingly, allies of the French, and in 1806 the British took over the territory and set up two crown colonies—the Cape Colony and, along the coast to the northeast, Natal. Not long afterward, the Boers, or Dutch farmers (boer is Dutch for "farmer"), began their famous treks, to get away from the enemy and to avoid crowding. A Boer considered himself crowded if
his farm was smaller than six thousand acres. The Voor-trekkers, as the
emigrants were called, pushed into the veld, fighting off and driving
out native tribes, until they had got beyond the Orange River, the
northern boundary of the British territory, and there they established
an independent republic
