started, only a year later; presumably, he didn't remain on the company's payroll long.
The
circumstances of the first diamond find are still hotly argued in
Kimberley and other places where people are engaged in the diamond
trade—New York, Amsterdam, Antwerp, London, and, for that matter,
Johannesburg. Did the Boer child find the first diamond in 1866 or
1867? Was it Schalk van Niekerk who first recognized it as a diamond or
was it Jack O'Reilly? What started Van Niekerk and/or O'Reilly thinking
about diamonds, anyway? If you ask these questions in Kimberley, you
get a variety of answers. Diamonds must have been lying around the veld
in full sight of the Boers and the Griquas for many years—kicked by
children, trampled into the mud by livestock, outshone by colored
pebbles, perhaps even actually swallowed by ostriches—and certainly
diamonds as big as eggs were used by witch doctors as part of their
professional equipment. But unless you have a trained eye you are not
likely to spot a diamond in a heap of gravel, although, to be sure,
there is something special about some rough diamonds— the comparatively
few that are formed in sharp crystals and are unfrosted. The light
seems to have been caught in them and to have remained there, in a
peculiarly vivid, cold, silvery gleam.
In
1932 Mr. Beet looked up the man who, as a boy, found the first South
African diamond, Erasmus Stephanus Jacobs, and persuaded him to dictate
an account of the event, which Jacobs did in Afrikaans, the Boer
language and the only language he knew well. Until recently, people of
British descent in South African industrial centers seldom went to the
trouble of learning Afrikaans—a language based on seventeenth-century
Dutch that over the years has borrowed words from Portu-
