—the
Orange Free State. Some of the Voortrekkers went even farther north,
beyond the Vaal River, and these established another republic—the
Transvaal. As it happened, the boundaries proclaimed by both republics
took in slivers of land occupied by the Griquas, a people of mixed
Dutch and Hottentot blood, who lived more or less nomadically on the
veld around what is now Kimberley. The Griquas were bound by treaty to
the British, and the Voortrekkers let them stay where they were; there
were only four or five thousand Griquas, anyway, and there was plenty
of room for everybody. The real territorial arguments started
later—once the rush was on.
For
about a hundred years before the South African rush began, the world's
chief source of diamonds had been Brazil; before that, it had been
India. In 1866 diamonds were still coming out of India in a small,
unsteady trickle; Brazil had produced a gush, but her mines were nearly
worked out; and other sources, like Borneo, had never yielded much. Our
grandparents probably thought that the world's supply of diamonds was just about exhausted, and were dazzled when they heard of
the discoveries on the veld. The news didn't quite explode like a
bombshell, though; in fact, it was slow-moving, retarded at the outset
by people like Mr. J. R. Gregory, a geologist who scouted the area in
1868 for a London diamond firm. Gregory concluded dogmatically that the
veld was not diamondiferous; the few stones that had been picked up
there, he reported, were brought to the locality in the crops of
ostriches. He didn't pursue the matter to the point of investigating
where the ostriches had found the diamonds in the first place, and, on
his recommendation, his firm dropped all interest in the veld. Nobody
seems to know what happened to Mr. Gregory when the rush
