the
bishop next tried some jewelers' files on it, and the files were
blunted while the stone remained unscratched. It looked very much as if
O'Reilly had himself a diamond, and they told him so. In the end,
O'Reilly sold it to the governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Philip
Wodehouse, who seems to have paid him what Dr. Atherstone had said it
was worth—five hundred pounds. Sir Philip had it shown at the Paris
Exhibition of 1867. O'Reilly's luck was noised about, of course, and
people all over the veld, from the Transvaal to the Cape Colony, began
going around looking at the ground. In time, more finds were made, and
by 1869 the rush was on.
The klip that
started it all, which is still known in Kimberley as the O'Reilly
diamond, was a clear blue-white stone of twenty-one and a quarter
carats. Mr. Beet doesn't know what happened to it after Sir Philip's
death, which means, I daresay, that nobody knows. O'Reilly's family
later asked De Beers Consolidated for a reward for having initiated the
whole diamond rush, but nothing came of the request, and Jacobs, in
his statement, complained bitterly that his family had not received a
shilling for their contribution to South Africa's development. As an
adult, he tried his hand at digging, but he never had much luck; Mr.
Beet collected thirty pounds from Kimberley residents for him in his
old age, and that appears to be all he ever got for his find.
Many
professional diggers were floating about the world in the late
1860s—men who had learned their trade among the forty-niners in
California, in the Australian gold diggings, in the New Zealand gold
fields, or in all three places. It is true that their specialty was
gold, but they were, first and foremost, treasure hunters, not
specialists, and, anyway, as far as they
